As the sun went behind Albo, the tallest hill in town, everything grew suddenly colder and quite.
Narda had been moping through the weekend. Clouds, chill in the wind and the forlorn and thin on people streets were adding on to his moroseness. He had been drinking, tea, coffee, green tea, beer, whiskey in that order as the eight in the morning had turned to five in the evening. Pulling a chair on to the small portico on the top of the short flight of stairs that led to his apartment, from the edge of the rolling hill, he sat staring far into the green forest of pine that covers Albo.
The stench of a broken heart hung heavy in the evening air, he knew about life and its habit of stomping over dreams intimately. It had been some time since he had talked with anyone. In his younger years he told everything to everyone, dreams, despair, hurts, ego trips, everything got spoken out. Now it had been some years since he had truly spoken to anyone, conversations had become mostly superficial, getting something done, talking about things, but never about things that went on inside. Somewhere along the way of life, he had failed to find a person he could truly talk to. Also, a person who would want to listen.
Not talking, it eventually creates a sort of void within, you disassociate, slowly but surely, with the superficial relationships around and begin to wonder, if the eventual loneliness that is the fate of humans, would actually be difficult because, at a truly emotional level, you are already alone.
Amidst all these thoughts, he spent the night awake and as the dawn broke, he brewed some tea and came out to sit again on his balcony, to view the mist-laden morning grow slowly across the hills.
As he sat there contemplating the nothingness, he saw a distant moving silhouette of a person, making their way through the trail that cuts through the pines towards the top of Albo, as the trail curves and bends there are a few rocky patches that are visible through the sea of tree canopies from where he sat. Even from the distance, he instantly knew that purposeful gait.
She had moved to Tolu only a few months back with her husband and a dog and had struck an unlikely friendship with Narda one Sunday morning in the small market down in the center of the small hill town. Nobody moved to Tolu, people moved from Tolu. So if you were not a passing traveler, you had no business being in Tolu. This had prompted Narda, an unusually reticent proponent of small talk, to mutter a surprised hello to her, while picking groceries in the store he went to once a week. To avoid meeting people, Narda would show up in front of the store, usually ten minutes ahead of its opening in the morning. People avoided the cold of the morning and he would be the only person around. But this stranger was there ahead of him.
They spoke for a few minutes, her dog and Narda, quickly developed a mutual dislike, and then they moved along. He didn't expect to see her again, but the next morning as he was waiting for the sun to show on his portico, she showed up on the gravel dirt road ahead of his small apartment, on her way back from an early morning run. Recognizing him she waved a hi and he raised the piping hot cup of tea in response, and she asked you got more of that and that was pretty much how an unlikely acquaintance began.
The purposeful gait was below his stairs and flashed that momentary large grin, the one which showed her two slightly crooked incisors at the edges of her lips. The sun showed up, its first rays cut through the sleepy heaviness that hung over the hills. The morning tea stop bad become a fixture, she said she was not a regular tea drinker, but the days that she did want a warm cup, she was too lazy to make one for herself. So once a week or sometimes more, after her morning run through the woods, she would invite herself for a cup. Her dog had to stay at the bottom of the stairs, Narda wasn't fond of him, after a few days of whining, the dog had reconciled to this as well.
Chapter 1
That morning, her usual banter of the morning was flowing slowly, her mind as if too heavy to galivant from one thought to another. Narda was the listener between the two of them, and would generally just lounge in the chair on the right with his left ear towards her and listen to her talk for as long as it would take her to drink a cup of tea in the cold mountain mornings. Her awkward attempts at conversation this morning prompted him to ask, 'what's on your mind?'. 'Heaviness' she replied after a substantial pause.
He wasn't really able to make up his mind if that one-word reply indicated she didn't want to talk about it or did it mean he could ask a follow-up. But without much thought, he asked 'care to expand?'. She glanced towards him, momentarily, but by the time he reciprocated she had turned back her stare towards Tolu. So he didn't really know if she had glared or not.
After a longish silence, she said 'some other time' and they again fell into silence and contemplated the meekly rising sun and the oppressive morning cold and how beautiful the Tolu looked through the morning mist, the sparkling jagged sunrays that bounced from the dew on the trees and the dark green all around. The tea had long run out and like every other morning, she hadn't left with the last sip, so he said 'I am headed to Jima, that small brook that flows below the bridge in the market'. She said 'sure', slamming the door of his apartment shut they walked rapidly down the short flight of stairs. The twenty-odd minutes it took to reach Jima from his place were passed in silence and they reached the small meadow through which Jima flowed leisurely before gaining some speed on the rapids that brought it down to the market. They both sat by the Jima, the sun was more up and the shimmering waters of Jima were magical. Narda would come here to just sit, on those mornings when the sun would show up, which were not many, as clouds were a fixture in Tolu.
He poured a tea from the flask and as he handed it to her, said ' you know if you sit by the Jima long enough, its waters take away all the heaviness with them'. She smiled at that, 'yeah, I can sense that'. 'Why do you live here alone?' in the many months they had now known each other, she had asked him nothing about his life, which worked well, as he felt vulnerable talking about himself and vulnerability made him miserable. 'To find me', he said. 'I grew up in the mountains and then left, only to come back twenty years later, those twenty years I did everything I was supposed to do, study, make something of myself, be ambitious. But the hills never stopped calling me, so I came back to this another mountain, in search of something. Something I don't even know about.'
As they sat by the Jima, that morning, the trickly waters of the small river did slowly take away the heaviness of their hearts. The minutes spent mostly in silence, as if, built a silent shared bond of two people desperate to know a better way of living but still looking for that elusive starting point.
Chapter 2
Sometimes our happiness is only a camouflage for the fears, and the pain that we carry hidden behind the smiles and normality of our life. Narda had lived that life for the longest, apparently successful by many measures, he had burned away slowly from within, until that day of reckoning, a year back. Keeping busy was his way of coping back then, afraid that any moments spent not being busy, would bring him to stare into the darkness that had slowly expanded and taken away all the space inside him. But eventually, life caught up with him, and one early morning he woke up and burst into inconsolable tears. Later in the day as he went to work, he could no longer bear to do the things that he had spent his life doing. Courage wasn't his strong suit, fears, so many of them, always held back any momentary bursts of courage.
Fears, some rational and some just legacy of the life he had lived, clung to him, as if deeply programmed into the mind, fear of rejection, fear of decisions turning out all wrong, fear of nobody being out there to look out for him, fear of losing loved ones, fear of some karma from a past life that denied him any peace in this life, his list of fears was long and had always determined his choices in life. In his youth, he chose to brave the fears out, with anger, he still remembered the notes he kept posted by his bedside during college, 'mediocrity sucks', and the more recent one 'I will fuck you destiny', but eventually anger outlived its utility, all the fears kept coming true, one after another, as if the world was out to get him. Anger gave way to an all-encompassing sense of surrender, loss of power, it was a difficult transition for Narda. It was as if somebody had sucked life energy out of him, without the anger to fuel him, he began to flounder for a purpose. In the years leading up to the meltdown, he desperately tried to stave off the inevitable, to fill the dark spaces within, with alcohol-driven numbness, and sex.
He pursued women, with the single-minded objective of using sex as a way out of his darkness, initially it worked and kept him busy. The process involved enough mindless activities, to wile away hours and days and weeks. Eventually, though the act of sex with every woman he met, came out to be bereft of any connection beyond the physical. Most people, he met, were too busy to make anything meaningful, or maybe carried their own fears, or maybe it was Narda's own fear of eventual rejection and loss, that was mirrored by everyone he slept with. So beyond the few minutes of urgency and the smell of an alien skin, all the hours spent building up to the act, the pretenses, the fake conversations, the empty laughs, as if began to overflow his already full cup of hate. It had been more than two years since Narda, had touched a woman, and slowly, he was surprised, that his sexual needs had begun to subside. He could only laugh about that to himself, it wasn't something anyone would understand he had reasoned to himself. That was partly also because he had slowly drifted apart from his friends, they had families, kids, and lived in far off countries, the connection despite their best efforts, began to fade. The interactions were mostly about some tired forwards, a few likes, and those yearly birthday wishes. The Internet kept everyone in touch, but still, the touch was all but lost. The few friends who he could still talk to always told him how he had it lucky, not to be tethered down by relationships and how they would be happy to swap places with him. The superficiality of this response made him never to talk about his life to anyone.
But life had a strange way of sneaking up from behind, Narda's purposelessness, his inability to look inside him, and his constant endeavor of apportioning blame to circumstances or people, had made him a toxic person, not many wanted to associate with. Ironically though, the love he carried within his soul, refused to accept the life he had been living.
In the next month, Narda winded up everything he thought was his life and began a trip back to those mountains in his head. After a few months of going from one place to another, he just happened to reach Tolu. It was a quaint town of probably only a few thousand, not much happened there, it wasn't beautiful enough for people to come as tourists and was remote enough for not many to pass through. But the town just grew on Narda, the silence of its mornings and the darkness of its nights, seemed to put balm on the emptiness he was carrying around. So he found a place to live in the remotest corner of Tolu. The place was basic but mostly served his needs. A large covered balcony, that faced the mountains, was a key part of his need. He had placed a big chair on that balcony, to spend all his morning and evenings, with either a cup of tea or a glass of whiskey. So had the life gone by in the last year, he did some work during the days, mostly on the internet, enough to keep some money coming in, Tolu wasn't an expensive place. The few people who loved him had reconciled to this change, they weren't happy, just reconciled.
Chapter 3
The day was turning into a big sulk, the clouds had started gathering the evening before, as Narda had pulled his car into the gravel dirt road beneath his house, back from an errand. As a matter of habit, he woke up with a start in the early morning hours, and realized that the clouds were busy pelting down. The rains continued into the morning and the dampness of the day made Narda morose. He wasn't a big fan of rains, the clouds, the mud, the heavy humidity, had always made him long for the sun. Contemplating how he would spend such a day, he suddenly longed to smoke a cigarette, it was a strange longing as he hadn't had one for the last six years and he remembered well, how it was not something that went too well with his body. As he sat on his favorite chair on the balcony, looking towards Tolu, all covered in grey with low hanging rain clouds, the few green treetops that were still visible, he decided that this was not a day he could work or sit idle. With a sudden determination, he hastily put on his rain jacket and put on the boots that could wade through water and without a thought ran down the stairs into the rain. In a few minutes, he realized that it was rather cold for a summer day. But retracing steps had never been his thing, so he headed straight towards the forest at the base of Tolu. He knew that the heavy rains would have swelled the many small brooks that trickled down from Tolu and there was a mad wish in him to drown into one of those, not that it wouldn't be too difficult as he didn't know how to swim.
The rains had loosened the soil and as he trudged through the trail, red water flowed in the opposite direction of his steps, with an urgency to get somewhere as if. The thirty off minutes of walking got him to the base of Tolu, from where it rose rather abruptly straight into the sky. Today, it was as if someone has sliced it like a cake, as the white mist covered the mountain completely beyond the ring up to which his eye could still see the mountain. The brisk walk had managed to uplift his spirits a little, and he rapidly jumped the wet boulders towards one of the many streams that fed Jima. Slipping a few times, but not hurting anything seriously, he reached to the waterside. Pulling his clothes off rapidly in a few seconds, he waded into the fairly furious flow of the water and found a half-submerged rock to sit on and then slid flat into the water, firmly holding a couple of rocks with his hand, so as to not flow away with the waters. He remained submerged in the water for as long as he could hold his breath and then wildly twisted and jerked to somehow pull himself enough to be able to sit with his shoulders out of the water. He kept repeating this for the next many minutes until his body went numb and he knew he could take it any more. After dredging himself out of the water, he quickly wrapped himself in the clothes, he had wrapped inside his rain jacket, even being partially wet, the clothes felt warm on his cold skin.
The theatrics in the water had managed to clear his head, as he sat contemplating the water from far, he knew about his continued love for life, the way his hands clung on to the rocks and the way his mind forced him out of the water to gasp for breath, were not signs of a man who had given up on life. He was just purposeless and these mountains and this singular aloofness of the last year had not done much to give him a sense of purpose. He no longer had that sinking feeling in his heart or the anxiety that used to wash him over, when he was back in the city, he was now calmer, more in sync with his self, and a little disassociated with the pangs of his body, but he still hadn't found a purpose that would give him a direction to live his life. He had these wild ideas about meaningful things, but on exploration, they never really held his attention for long.
Sitting there in the wilderness, with probably no one for many miles, he wondered if all the masters and all their guidance on connecting with one's inner self to find the purpose truly made any sense. He had read so many of them, but nobody seemed to offer a path he could take. His journey had become his own and he now knew that the day he found his purpose, he would know, the year in Tolu had brought him that much in sync with his soul.
Chapter 4
On another corner of Tolu, Jugnu peered out of the window of her well-appointed living room to gauge the intensity of the rain, she was ready for her morning run and her dog was already whimpering to get out.
