Previously published in The Best Asian Short Stories (2021), Kitaab, Singapore.

The hills are dipped in pastel shades of gold and indigo. The wind surrounds me in playful whistles, beating my clothes in sudden outbursts and drying off the sweat on my neck. Joint-aches had troubled me a bit when I climbed up this rock, but they vanished as I sauntered on the plateau and found this spot. The fragrance of jasmine garlands that wafts in from the flower stall reminds me that it’s no more the deserted place I knew in my childhood. Standing here on the summit, I can spy on the whole village and figure out the way things have changed.

Right below in the valley, the natural garden around the pond is undergoing a transformation. Except for a few nutmeg trees and a line of green palms, all the big trees are uprooted, the ground is cleared for geometrical flowerbeds, and the corners are filled with flowering plants and creepers on frames to create alluring alcoves. The streams are being redirected, with several artificial fountains sprouting at regular distances. This gives a Mughal touch to the garden. Swimming pools and artificial lakes are in the making too, next to the new hotels. Walls of extraordinary height enclose all these, as if even a glimpse of this world is prohibited to those who can’t afford to pay an entry fee.

The temple on the top here has been constructed recently. It’s a strategic addition, aimed at the pilgrimage segment that goes with most of the tourist packages in Kerala. A lot of work seems to have gone into modeling the mighty pillars from rock and the detailed carvings, crevices, and hallways that lead to the sanctum sanctorum. I must confess that the whole aesthetic concept looks compelling from certain angles. But I won’t consider that a good enough excuse for ruining a natural phenomenon for the sake of a spirituality-business spot.

Thirty years ago, when there were no man-made monstrosities or crowds seeking the expensive kind of spiritual fulfillment, I used to spend whole afternoons here arguing with my best friend Venu. The occasional gush of wind kept us company. We were high school students who liked to bunk the last couple of classes on certain days, when boredom defeated us. We would burn our student-life miseries hiking aimlessly, chasing birds and little animals, and then gasping for breath, once we reached here. We would raise our hands and bend forwards to touch our knees and ankles, and then turn to the other rocks to shout our own names a few times, testing which one echoed more. 

We would feed the monkeys that kept jumping to the rock from the tall trees lining the hill. They seemed to be looking for friendship at first, but then a ritual of sorts started, from the day we decided to feed them our packed lunch. We were left with no choice after that, as we had to carry something with us each time – peanuts, fruit, or a proper lunch. Otherwise, they would threaten us with angry shrieks and weird gestures. But once they made sure that the last bits of food that we had were offered to them, they would retreat to the tree tops and stay engrossed in the daily activities of feeding the young ones or picking lice from one another’s bodies to put them in their mouths, and chew on with no second thoughts. As their mischief died out in due course, a sleepy peace would descend to their eyes. We too must have enjoyed their company and the calming effect their silly acts had on our agitated neurons. We would end up stretching our backs on the rock’s plateau, letting the breeze absorb our fears and frustrations about unending school work that awaited us once we descended to the banal world below.

We would take the longer route here and navigate through the dense vegetation if we wanted to explore the valley and the pond as well. We were drawn to the greenery around the streams and a natural fountain that gurgled nonstop. Birdsongs and calls of animals would fill the background as we walked along. I wasn’t surprised if we came across an alarmed mongoose or a nonchalant squirrel. There were water snakes too. We carried sturdy sticks for self-protection and to support ourselves as we hiked up the path. On a few occasions, we would find the poisonous kind of snakes in the thickets. Venu would run off screaming when he saw one, foolishly throwing away his stick in a reflex action. I would have to find it as I walked to him, after guiding away the snake by tapping with my stick on the shrubs and the ground. I wouldn’t miss a chance to make fun of him when he began searching for me, once he felt he was at a safe distance from the snake.

“We can’t take chances with them,” he would say. “You know how dangerous they are. Just one bite, and you are gone!”

“Oh well, then throw away your stick, run with your eyes closed, mouth open, and step on another snake,” I would say.  “And tell me, wise old man, whose idea was this anyway? It was you who wanted to take this trail. And who do you think I am – your bodyguard?”

He would give me one of those helpless smiles.

On the days when we reached the pond without encountering any such danger, Venu would roll up his trouser legs and walk to its shallow portions and touch the waterlilies. Small fish would swim around his ankles, tickling him at times as they brushed past the skin. I found the flowers irresistible and would end up breaking off a couple of them despite his mild protest.

“It’s better to let them stay alive in the water. See how they fit in there one next to the other in a perfect pattern! Why take them with us and leave them to a premature death on the rock? I hate to see them wilt.”

“Nothing dies for no reason, Venu. Everything returns to Nature,” I would imitate the philosophical tone of one of our teachers. “It doesn’t matter whether they cease to exist half-way or full-way, in one form or the other. They, we, everything around us, become something else once dead.”

“Thank you, but no biology lessons please,” he would say. “I thought we were running away from them in search of some blissful ignorance. Give me some peace, you idiot!”

I knew he was right, at least about one thing. The place kept us calm, away from the disturbing noises of the world outside.

A coolness falls on me like a drizzle as I walk inside the temple area that was once the rock’s plateau. I let my eyes adjust to the dim lights and shadows before treading on the narrow paths circling enigmatic contours. I stop beside a bunch of teenage school kids and a teacher talking to them in her laboured Queen’s English about slaty and schistose rocks. Boys take notes and jeer at the girls who can’t do anything else while struggling with their skirts that flutter in the harsh wind. A young man next to me fumbles with his rucksack. He scratches his beard as he argues with a middle-aged man in charge of the temple property. His face reddens when he’s reminded, in a threatening voice by the older man, that he can’t use a camcorder or mobile phone inside the temple.

“Get out of here if you can’t follow our rules,” The man says. “If you make a scene, you won’t get back home on those two legs.”

This violence from a sagelike face jolts everyone, but after an uncomfortable moment of silence, they act as if they haven’t heard anything.

“Your rules?” the young man says, as he slides his phone into his pocket. “See, I haven’t even clicked once. The camera just happened to be in my hand as I walked in, and I’m switching it off as well. Why do you have to be so rude?”

“So, this kid thinks I’m the one who is rude. Get out of the temple now! Or shall I call them in?” He turns his eyes to the group of young men in white-and-khaki uniforms practicing martial arts outside the temple. I move a little towards the young man, worried that he’s going to get in some trouble.

“Come on, you think I’m here for a fight with them?” he says, pointing his thumbs at his skinny ribs. “Me, against the twenty of them! You said there’s a rule that I can’t record anything here, and I was just asking why it’s not written anywhere near the entrance. Anyway, you know that I didn’t break your rules. But what sense does it make when you say that I can’t stay here and see what’s in the temple, like these people?”

“Get out, I say! I know your types. Long hair, beards, backpacks, and those bloody cameras. Heads filled with your ganja dreams of revolution. Only those who worship our deity can stay here.”

“See, how many false notions you spit out in ten seconds,” the young man says. “And you people act as if the whole Nature belongs to you… only you. That’s how secular places end up being private properties. Fascism rules, eh?”

He raises his thick eyebrows in search of someone to side with him. No one makes eye-contact, except me. The angry old man looks around, senses the discontent in my eyes, and then turns his face away, unable to carry on speaking the way he did earlier. I am intrigued by the young man’s vocabulary. Any other person his age would have lost their cool and shouted something more provocative.

His hands shake as he puts his camcorder back in his rucksack. His mumbling seems an attempt to hide the quivering lips. I see a bit of my younger self in him. I know how you feel defeated when everyone around acts as if you, and your thoughts, don’t even exist. He walks away quietly, trying his best to not disturb the schoolkids.

I find my way across and catch up with the young man. He’s in the open space outside the temple, still fidgeting with his rucksack, taking out his video camera and then putting it back. My faint smile and pat on his shoulder seem to calm him down. I make some senseless remark about the weather to distract him and then ask him about his work.

“I’m a vlogger,” he says. “I don’t know if vlogging can be considered a job, but it lets me do what I like. I earn from it all the money I need as well.”

We sit in an elevated part of the rock, away from the noise of the crowds. There are several maps and signboards, all with a logo which reveals that this place is now owned by a communal outfit that smuggles divisionary politics and violence against minorities. The indisputable nature of religious faith has always been used as an effective camouflage for these foul intentions.

He talks passionately about his solo trips to distant places on public transport or on his motorcycle. It surprises me that he had been on the move the whole year during the pandemic, whenever there was no lockdown or curfews. He stresses the fact that he followed proper social distancing, and took all the safety measures. He even produced some awareness videos and joined an organization that supplied food and water to the migrant workers who had to walk back to their villages, hundreds of miles from the unkind cities, in the height of Indian summer.

I tell him that the whole year I had spent in isolation was filled with hopes for a better world, but my decision to visit this dream of a place from my past seems like a mistake now. We agree with each other that even though the masks and the visible fear of proximity with our own species are gradually disappearing, it doesn’t seem to be enough to erase the boundaries which were in place before the virus-induced toppling of the world order. People like us, who weren’t happy with the old normal and were keen to see some positive changes are in for a major disappointment.

Then he tells me what it means to be a travel vlogger. It’s a compromise of sorts to see scenes that matter through a camera when your eyes long to indulge eternally in them. There’s a creative side to imagining what his viewers might be interested in, but those are seldom his own interests.

“They are concerned with the practical aspects. Reachability, hotels nearby, food choices, weather conditions, facilities on the spot, demographics, safety issues, and so on. For them, the whole experience is something they plan to purchase at some point. Value for money, you see.”

“Oh, that sounds so dull! But I’ve never understood the whole idea of impressing others with things that can be bought.”

He says he values his memories more than what he records and releases for others.

“Our most valuable experiences don’t ever pass beyond the moments in which they take place,” he says. “These documents just end up being unsuccessful alternatives.”

I tell him a bit about my technophobia. He lets out a sigh, and says that the fascinating world all this technology provides is designed to delude us after a certain point. Then he tells me that he’s content anyway, that he is his own boss.

“At times, this digital documenting I do gives me a sense of purpose as well,” he says. “There was a time when I was desperate to get a day job. But now I’ve figured out that I don’t fit in the scheme of other people’s visions.”

“Oh, that sounds good,” I say. “But forgive me if I sound too naïve. Are you able to support yourself with your vlogging alone?”

“Yes, I guess. It’s not all that easy, but I get enough to feed myself and to find a roof over my head, on most days.”

“Aha! What about the other days, when you fail?”

“I don’t mind going to sleep with an empty stomach, and having just the sky above me for a roof, if that’s how things turn out.”

His chuckle relieves me. I know he’s exaggerating it. A few minutes ago, he was a troubled being with too much ideological burden on his frail shoulders. Now he’s a regular youth, breathing normally and letting the breeze and the panoramic vision work their magic on him.

He takes out his visual journal from his rucksack and shows me a more valuable way of recording his experiences. The thick book contains poems, sketches, hyper realistic drawings in coloured pencils, and some watercolours and pastels too.

“This is where I try to be original,” he says. “I refuse to go digital with my art. The brain remembers what the hand does with real pencils and brushes on paper or canvas. It’s not the result, but the process that transforms an artist’s life.”

“You sound like a philosopher. Art teacher stuff, I would say!”

“The funny thing is that I got into all this after I learned digital art and designing…some kind of a reverse process. Upskill gone awry, and see how doomed I am now!”

He says he had to quit his job in marketing when he fell so much in love with coloured pencils that he found it difficult to squeeze in office hours on the days in which he was working on some art project. He thinks each pencil has a soul within, waiting for the right hands to gift it the right physical forms to spread on, to reside in.

His sketches feature glimpses from his daily experiences. They are unique creations focusing on realistic human figures standing in stark contrast with landscapes or monuments that acquire a hazy, dreamlike quality in crosshatches and blurred edges. A lot of white space encircle the figures. The focal points are strong in each of them, in that they draw you in quickly to intriguing stories. The buildings in some of the works fade and merge to the trees or other natural objects in the background. I notice how good he’s with his craft, particularly with the unique postures of humans and animals he achieves in minimal lines and strokes. At the same time, he captures facial expressions in minute details too.

“These look so professional. You haven’t thought of selling some?”

“No way!” he says. “This is for my soul. I have gifted a couple of the finished works, oil on canvas, to friends. This is something that keeps shaping me, even as I float. Perhaps a good way to pickle my memories, as the historiographers say.”

“No wonder my memories are so badly pickled! I wish I were half as talented.”

He laughs again.

I point out the other rocks and areas that aren’t part of the temple property and tell him about the views from there, hinting that he should try them and see what his camera can capture there for his viewers.

“You may get lucky with something for your soul too,” I say. “I wish I had enough energy to go with you, but I have to restrict myself to this rock today. I’ll take a walk around the temple and see how much of it still belongs to the old times.”

“I keep coming back to places,” he says. “The first visit is for testing the waters. It’s when I go back again that I see how I’d missed what was meant for me. Most of my sketches happen then.”

“I’m afraid this is going to be my last visit to this place,” I say.

He looks puzzled, but doesn’t ask anything and leaves reluctantly, saying how all the best spots on earth are taken over by brainless tyrants.

He’s right. Entry to the temple isn’t restricted for people from other religions yet, but that could happen in the foreseeable future. There’s already a metal fencing that marks out the tourism counter, another recent addition, from the temple. Anything in the coming years would depend on what the priests think their gods are capable of fancying. There’s a lot of trouble involved in installing a deity in a place like this, and then convincing the local people of its power. But once it’s done, those who are in control of the whole project are apt to act like difficult parents. That leads to myths upon myths which misrepresent the truth, and an inevitable abuse of power. Gods end up being mere playthings in the hands of their creators.

A bunch of devotees are already in line. Bells clang in what sounds at first like a musical note, but their cacophonous echoes interfere and spoil the effect in no time. One of the devotees recognizes me from my previous life here and comes to me for a quick chat. Seeing how fascinated I am with the monkeys moving around freely, he says they had split into two groups after the temple came up.

“These are the temple-monkeys. They stay near the rock on the few trees that are left, and rely on the food offered by the devotees. They even get feasts on special occasions.”

“Are they a manageable lot these days?” I’ve noticed a change in their behavior.

“Yes, these are the relatively peaceful ones. They are well fed, as you can see. But they turn violent if members of the other unruly group, the ‘market-monkeys,’ enter their territory.”

“Market-monkeys? What the…”

“Yes, they live downhill, near the market. They fight among themselves to get their share of rotten vegetables and fruit.”

Oh, dear. That’s how the gods divide us!

I bite my tongue and maintain my serene smile, as the man walks back to the temple.

I see the vlogger climbing up the next rock. He hasn’t taken out his camera yet, but I’m sure that he’ll be tempted to shoot something once he sees how beautiful the sight from the top is.

Venu was a strong believer. Well, I can say that he was so thirty years ago. I guess there’s a chip in certain people that makes them remain believers forever, and Venu must have had one of those installed at birth.

During one of our visits, he told me – “People say that the cave beneath has a tiger-couple living there, with their cubs.”

“One day, we should go to the cave and kill that myth,” I said.

I loved to watch the painful expression on his face when I made fun of such hearsay.

“Or kill ourselves,” he responded with his lips spread in an effort to smile. He stood up and tried in vain to straighten the creases of his uniform. “When the tigers see us, they’re going to think of nothing but ‘lunch’!”

He walked away from me.

“It doesn’t take a tiger to finish you off,” I shouted in one of those moments when words came in a torrent from nowhere. “A breeze turned harsh could uproot you if you walk so close to the edges. Better still, a monkey could jump on you and you could go rolling sixty feet down from the sheer shock of it, sliding through the smooth, steep rock, and split your skull open when your head hits that blade-like protrusion.”

“We shouldn’t joke about such things,” he said.

He walked downwards, hiding his face from me. He was pious to the extent that he believed in the spell words can cast on our lives. I knew that words cast no such spell, though I had strong faith in their power to fight ignorance.

What took his life was his bloody car, twelve years later. He would have slid from the edges of his consciousness to the hands of an all-powerful sleep in the early hours. Or a deeply disturbing memory would have gashed his senses. Or he would have been numbed by the fear of what was to come to him when it was the least bit expected, demanding something he couldn’t afford to give. The magnetic fields of fate he believed in would have sucked him, his car, and the tree on which it crashed, to a vortex of oblivion.

He had called me a week before that accident to say that his parents were about to arrange a marriage for him. Like in everything else, he would have trusted their selection of a bride for him, relying more on astrology and horoscope-matching than seeing if he was going to be compatible with his future partner. What would he have made of it, if it were to fail? Life was kind enough to spare him of any such tests.

Did he know about the pleasure I derived from popping his faith bubbles one by one? I know I didn’t really have to be so cynical about his belief in the physical existence of tigers in the cave. I could have stretched my imagination to accommodate a bit more of his world.

He was my only friend in those days when everyone else kept a distance from me. My parents were from two different religions and became atheists in the years before they got married. That was an unthinkable crime those days, and though there were no laws in the region to punish them, the people around us made sure that their judgmental gazes and words compensated for it.

I was raised in a way that others found it hard to make sense of my thoughts. I used that to good effect, as my self-defense. Venu knew that I didn’t care two straws for the beliefs and traditions that defined his life, but that was never a reason to cut me off from his world, like all the others did. And he never got tired of arguing with me. We knew that we weren’t going to change, but we enjoyed our differences as much as the things we enjoyed doing together, the way children could.

If he were me, he would have blamed himself for the careless words that had cast a spell. Such small lives we have, with beliefs and fears of something or the other. Why do I keep ruffling them? It’s hard for me to keep my mouth shut and give the impression that I’m amused by everything. I know I am the same person even now, and wouldn’t change for any reward in this world. But it seems this long period I had spent looking inwards has taught me to not use words to hurt others, where they can heal.

I doubt whether my friendship with him would have survived in this noisy world. Would he also have bought the arguments of these bullies who misappropriate religious faith to attack anyone they hate for no reason? I like to believe that his faith knew better. But that doesn’t matter anymore. Death, after all, had put a full-stop to our debates, defeating the purpose of them all too soon.

I know it’s impossible, but at times I wish I were like Venu: looking for simple answers to the biggest mysteries of life even in blind faith.

A monkey jumps to the rock and stares at me as it climbs over the metal fence. It shows off its ability to walk, spine up, on the narrow top and then jumps to the edges of the rock that extend a little beyond it. The scary sixty-foot drop is a blur to my middle-aged eyes now.

There is a signboard on the fence that warns visitors against going near the Tiger Cave, because it’s home to venomous snakes now. It also mentions how a tourist from the West, who had gone inside the cave a hundred years ago to explore a secret tunnel leading to a jungle, was never found again. That’s the story Venu was fond of, with more details about folks coming across the skeleton of someone, who they assumed to be the explorer, on the other end of the tunnel from the cave. At last, his story is immortalized on a signboard in which the foggy realms of folklore and myth are claimed by half-cooked touristy history. There’s no mention of what happened to the tigers, when in the past seventy or so years there was no threat from or damage caused by them at all, to people or livestock. For Venu, a tiger was not just a tiger but a metaphor from the myths associated with the gods he worshipped. The stories I didn’t allow him to tell me must have mattered a lot to him.

The name of a god must have lingered on Venu’s lips, I like to believe, as he fell out of consciousness. He must have seen, in a split-second, what was coming to him. There was no way he could walk away from it. He must have loosened his grip on life in full submission to the power that controls everything. He’s sure to have seen it as the inevitable completion of a phase in the unending circle of existence that he always believed in.

I have no idea why I keep drawing, erasing, and redrawing the images in my mind, in a desperate attempt to convince myself that his was a peaceful departure from this world, at least in his own terms. I wish I had the talent to draw a picture with lines that are confident and sure of themselves. I make a decision to buy a writer’s journal. It’s never too late to invest in words, as I retreat to my much-cherished quietude.

Dusk spreads its wings around me as I leave the place. I slip and jerk my ankle on my descent, and the vlogger runs to my side. It was just an absent-minded misstep and it’s in fact easier now to climb down, with the carved rock steps and proper lighting. But I allow him to hold my hand and guide me.

“My vision is blurred these days, and it’s harder for me once it gets dark,” I say.

 The breeze dries my moist eyes.

“My father had the same problem,” he says. “And he never ventured out after the sun set.”

He tells me that his father died last year, all alone in his ancestral home in a rural village. He was away on a long-stay trip in Sikkim which he cut short, to travel all the way back to Kerala. Then he tells me about his Instagram posts and YouTube videos featuring that trip.

“I had made a few empty promises to my viewers in those posts. Now I know that journeys that had to be cut short keep haunting you. The journey back home to my father keeps haunting me too. It was perhaps the one that I started too late.”

He says he had to make the biggest compromise in his life to take a journey for a religious reason when he took the ashes of his father to Varanasi, to immerse it in the holy river.

“That was his wish, and I was so bad at fulfilling his wishes when he was alive. But I ended up loving the place and stayed there for another month, recovering slowly from grief and getting back to my vagabond elements!” He tries to smile.

“You must go to Sikkim again. Perhaps you’ll find an old friend there, or a new one for that matter.”

“I don’t know. But I hope it’s destined to happen before my vision blurs and knees begin to ache,” he says.

I laugh, and assure him that I’ll follow him on social media once I access my phone, which I’d left in my car. He saves my number and tears out a whole paper from his journal and jots down his number and Instagram profile, which reads ‘Quester’sDilemma.’ I ask him to have trust in himself and to continue his life’s journey with true conviction. He thanks me for the good conversation.

As I walk towards the well-lit car park, I see that there’s a sketch on the other side of the paper. It’s a view from the adjacent rock to the temple. And it shows me, unmistakable from the attire and posture, bending towards the metal fence and offering a fruit to a monkey that approaches me gingerly, spine up and tale sideways. I wonder how visions come in search of artists. The last time I had fed a monkey was thirty years back, with Venu.

There is a note above the artist’s sign, which reads, ‘Words count, but only when they’re from the heart. Thank you for your words, and the mystical silence that framed them!’

Once I am inside the car, I make it a point to find him on Instagram and follow him. On my way out of the car park and the road circling the banyan tree below the rock, I see a couple of school kids approaching him. He walks to the whole group of them posing under the tree with their teacher, and begins to clicks several group photos on all the cameras and mobile phones they hand him.

I honk the horn once and roll down the car window to shout a ‘Thank you!’, waving the sketch. He’s all smiles, as he looks at me. The schoolkids join him too, when he waves at me.