Pleading Sanity...

We should have been tired. We should have been sleeping like logs. We were not. The six of us had traveled 300kms – by road, walked a longer distance than we would normally cover in a month, we had pedaled those tourist boats for what seemed like eternity. We should have been tired, but we were not. We were in Lansdowne: a sleepy retreat set in the Himalayan foothills. Whether it was the fresh mountain air that energized us, or our excitement over escaping from our mundane lives for a couple of days; we did not know. That evening as we sat down by the fire, under the starry night sky we did know this – it was going to be a long night.

And a long night it was. We were joined by our driver, Ajeet and the driver of another party, Ashish. As the whiskey and cigarettes did the rounds the conversation ran berserk, jumping from stock markets to politics, pausing now and then to acknowledge the tranquil beauty of the mountains until we learnt that Ashish was brought up in Garhwal. We started enquiring about places to visit… the usual tourist queries. I do not know how it happened but almost suddenly I found myself listening to the legends of Garhwal.

Ashish told us about the bleeding trees near the Tarakeshwar temple, a few kilometers away. “If you snap a branch of one of these trees, they’ll bleed.” he said with in a tone only genuine awe can fabricate. “Not just some red colored liquid,” he continued “but real blood.” Without waiting for us to enquire in to the causative aspects of the phenomenon he began “Long ago, there was a man who promised to visit a nearby shrine with his bride once he got married. He did not keep his promise. As the bridal party visited Tarakeshwar and began walking back ignoring the smaller shrine, there was a blinding flash of light that turned each member of the group into a tree.” He looked at our faces searching for something. Some of us were skeptical some of us amused. While my usual self was silently laughing in mockery of the ignoramus’ stories, another part of me wanted to be spell bound by the narrative.

Ashish however, did not seem to notice the raised eyebrows or the smirks. He seemed to have found what he was searching for – an interested audience. And so he told us of the river with warm currents during the winters and cold currents during the summers. He told us of the tree near Doggadda where Sardar Vallabhai Patel and Bhagat Singh practiced their shooting – “once you are in its shade you cannot hear a single thing from the outside,” he told us. Finally he told us about Sepoy Jaswant Singh. It was an impressive narration which this author is incapable of reproducing in English. But here is the gist of the sepoy’s story.

One morning when Sepoy Jaswant Singh saw the enemy troops advancing, he decided to do everything he could to stop them. He dug out a long trench and aimed a good number of guns towards the enemy and then proceeded to connect the triggers of all the rifles with a rope. Whenever he tugged the rope all the guns would fire in unison. And so the sepoy fooled the enemy in to believing that it was up against a huge force for one-and-a-half days. He radioed base while he held the line – alone. But his ploy was to be discovered before back up arrived. The sepoy was massacred.

The sepoy’s spirit however, is still alive. It slaps the lazy soldier into wakefulness when he ignores the wake up bugle and chides the soldier wearing a shabby uniform. The sepoy’s room in the Lansdowne cantonment has been left untouched. Every morning his uniform is found washed and pressed and his shoes polished to a glitter. As evening approaches they get worn out only to be restored to a prim condition by the sepoy’s ghost for the next morning’s duty. He even receives promotions from the army. He is now Brigadier Jaswant Singh.

As the narrator's voice enveloped his unsuspecting audience, the shadowy silhouettes of the oaks and blue pines seemed to grow larger. The looming mountains in the distant darkness began to close in towards the fire. Sitting there and this time, trying to break the spell of Ashish’s tales I found it easy and I must admit, comforting to believe in what he said. His simplistic world view with Gods, devils and spirits seemed befitting to the time and place.

We had dinner by the campfire. Ashish and Ajeet retired for the night. They had a job to do next morning. After choosing to deliberate on the supernatural for a while our conversation decided to veer towards things we knew little about – superconductivity, teleportation and taxes. We spotted a few constellations in the night sky, a pastime few city dwellers can afford and we retired as well.

The next morning our snobbish perception of villages as honest places free of malice was rudely shaken. There was a theft. A mobile phone was stolen in the guest house. Urban amenities did not leave their immediate cousins – urban evils on their way to the villages or so we learnt. Fingers were raised towards Ajeet and Ashish, the only outsiders who shared the room with the owner of the phone. They both preferred paying compensation to being taken to the local police. Ashish had a resigned look on his face. He did not protest nor did he show any signs of anger or irritation. He just resigned and paid up. May be he was thinking of the mouths to feed at home. May be all his life’s worries became twice as larger or may be he was regretting driving past one of those road side shrines that dot the Himalayas without paying obeisance to the deity there.

Some of us strongly felt that his punishment was inappropriate, and so Ashish was compensated for the amount he paid – five hundred rupees. There seemed to be no one to compensate him for the infernal burden of blame that he is now ordained to carry forever.