XXX
Humans are curious creatures, scared by death, attempting to deter the inevitability of finality by all means possible, either in this life or the next. Our morality is attuned to what will happen to us in the next life, reborn as an insect or condemned to fiery pits. We are guided by death, and we live to seek out ways by which we can delay, if not discourage, the scythe that looms over us all. It is only when death is made an acquaintance of, when death wanders on the edge of your eye, when death is all but certain, that one struggles the hardest to let go its grasp. And so, generals find it easy to send the sheep into a slaughter willingly, because they know cattle fights the hardest when it approaches the butcher’s block. And we, like cattle, obediently traced the mountain paths and dug the soil diligently, taking care that not one worm was cleaved or left behind, all to let someone living in a distant part of the world assuage death that lingers just outside his door. And all this, curiously, for a carcass of a worm, infected by spores that ate it from the inside out and left it hollow, only for the spore’s root to emerge.
We knew why we left our villages in droves every year: the worm-plant is thought to cure all ailments, a fabled wonder-drug. Every year, sahuji sold our collections to a man who was said to have come from Kathmandu itself, so precious was the worm. It seemed unlikely that the man walked all the way from headquarters to all the villages, but that is what sahuji said he did. He seemed obese by our standards, two rings of flab eternally hanging beneath his neck, which was itself thicker than a buffalo calf’s. The gold rings that shone on his fingers were proof enough that here was a man to whom even sahuji must defer. His deep laugh rang loudly whenever their business was conducted and the customary raksi opened; sahuji insisted he was a fair man, always paying more than less – as most buyers of yarsagumba did.
Thousands of villages like ours saw similar scenes enacted every summer when the yarsagumba collection ended, each hoping the year’s catch would be enough to allow them to buy a new buffalo, or repair the roof, or get their children married, or pay back the loan they’d taken to repair the dam and canal in their fields – or an earlier loan, who knows. We didn’t care what the fat man or his ilk did after they bought the worm-plant. It was Carl who told me they sent it to countries like his where it was sold as medicine, really expensive medicine.
Every yarsagumba collection, though, saw the worst in us reveal itself to the world. Drunk on the power that only money can provide, blinded by the greed that is peculiar to wealth, we pounced on each other, scheming, manipulating, conniving to get a greater share. We resorted to thievery, to robbery, extortion, to murder. Even the gods turned on us at this time, sometimes sending a thunderous wall of snow that buried families alive, sometimes a cold sleet that froze our very souls and ate away our fingers and toes, turning the pink of life into a mottle of black death.
XXX
Lakshmi woke up with a headache; her chest continued to hurt. She didn’t want to go forward, but my mother would have none of it – a husband’s rage at being one hand short maybe countering her maternal instincts. She hoisted Lakshmi onto her back, while I held her load. There weren’t too many steps to climb now, and Mother became slower in her climbing, but Lakshmi didn’t complain after a while. She seemed vindicated.
We reached the meadow just after the sun had climbed overhead. Some had already reached before us, and I could see dots of red and yellow crawling about on all fours peering into the soil as if they were extracting all manners of secrets. Little flaps of blue flapped about in the wind, pitched in the shade of the two mountains whose little pass we were in. Soon this patch of green and brown, big enough that five villages our size could work it without any ill will between them, would fill up with the chatter of acquaintances, relatives, in-laws, suitors – maybe even elopers.
We knew what we had to do: set up camp, eat a little bit of chiura, then get down to work. Dig, dig, pluck, blow, throw, dig, pluck, keep, dig… Yarsagumba awoke the automaton in us, a long line of factory workers in motion. Soon the green of the meadow slowly changed to a dull brown wherever a spade had pierced the soil and dug it out.
When the headmaster whistled to signal the end of the day, we walked back wearily to our tents, Father particularly pleased that the day had been better than expected. ‘The gods have smiled on us this year, boy,’ he told me. I knew it would lead to another night of raucous drinking, perhaps even asking Jange’s father for a drink. And then he would begin his visions, fluid dreams that were awoken only in the cold mountain air of those heights: old men of the mountain, demons who beckoned him to look beyond the veil of reality and into the silence of the peaks, where serpents and eagles fought each other till the end of time and the gods with their many hands came alive to rain hail and brimstone on those who did not sacrifice to them — black goats, black roosters, buffaloes black as the night. My mother had learnt long ago that he was not to be approached during such an episode; it took the headmaster, Jange’s father and Parvati’s father together to restrain him once, when the visions became so strong that he started shaking and he bit his tongue hard enough to make him seem like Mahakali, the goddess who gorges on the blood of sacrifice.
That night, he had a vision about us: Lakshmi and me. He spoke of a blue demon that had coiled itself around my sister, and how that demon was now approaching me too. He engaged the demon in a one-sided conversation, slowly becoming livid and frothing from the corners of his mouth. Mother begged him to stop, but he refused to heed her, and continued to mutter under his breath at the demon emanating from my soul, creeping towards him now. ‘Boy, you are out to kill me,’ he frothed. I let out a whimper; he was frightening me. What demon had taken hold of my soul? There were too many deaths out here in the mountains, on the meadows, frost-bitten limbs trying to climb their way out of icy graves.
Mother, now unable to control him, shouted out for Jange’s mother, who sent her husband duly. As soon as he saw my father’s condition, he dragged him out of the tent by his arm. My father attempted to shake him off, but Jange’s father possessed the strength of someone who ate a whole goat at his wedding. There, outside the tent, he forced father down on the icy meadow and slapped him – which sometimes brought him back to his senses. Mother began crying, and I could hear Lakshmi wheezing behind her. I attempted to go out and help him, but she pushed me down and said, ‘Stay here. If you step one foot outside I shall break your legs.’
Then, almost like a dream that slips out of your grasp, father woke up. He wiped his spittle using his dusty sleeve, and told Jange’s father he was fine. He stood up, groggy from all the alcohol, and began stumbling back to our tent as if nothing had happened.
XXX
I have never understood dreams. What are they? There’s a Western idea that our sub-conscious mind attempts to speak to us through them, revealing to us our deepest desires and fears. Maybe they do, but what of the dreams that take you on a different plane, wherein you merge with the atom to become a part of nothing, and yet a part of everything? Or the dream in which you find yourself at the centre of the universe, millions and billions of galaxies circling around you in their primordial state, the music of the planets your constant chant.
And what of the nightmares, dark agents of the dream realm, picking out their prey night after night – what do they represent?
Lakshmi appeared weightless, floating against an azure sky, on the summit of Budhi Himal. She beckoned to me, her little fingers moving about in the same wiggly way I used to tease her about, and I stretched out to grab them with all my might, but couldn’t. The yarsagumba meadow shone under her, and the mountain disappeared to give way to an ancient fort with crumbling towers. Then a roaring river, villages and houses, and finally, the screams of dying people. I couldn’t see them – not the river, or the village, or the people – but I knew they were there, the way one just knows in a dream. I found myself falling down the gorge that the river cut through before it came to our valley, and I woke up. I immediately knew Lakshmi had passed, and woke up Mother. She appeared to not hear me first, so I shook her and said, ‘Lakshmi’s not breathing.’ She shook out of her reverie and rushed to my sister’s side – and then I saw her face: it had turned blue, not the dark purple of frostbite, but the lighter hue of moonlight.
Amish Raj Mulmi is a Nepali writer currently based in New Delhi. He has worked with The Kathmandu Post and his nonfiction writing has been published in Himal Southasia, Mint and New Indian Express among others. This story is an excerpt from a work in progress.
