By Amish Raj Mulmi
It snowed on Dashain that year, a most unusual dance of sleet and ice that killed off half of the crops in our fields. My mother ran out of the house as soon as the first white flake landed on our veranda, and upon her discovery, ran back inside to awaken her husband, fast asleep after another day of farming, liquor and fucking. She seemed terribly worried, but as I cowered in the smoky kitchen under the stairs leading upstairs, my father woke up with a grunt, and I realized this was no ordinary matter. Soon, others had come out of their houses, their dark shawls rapidly turning white in the blackness of the night, and everybody seemed to be talking about the paddy crop. A few women had begun wailing their misfortune, until their husbands slapped them into silence. It seemed a terrible night to live through, but that was the only choice everyone had.
The next morning, while everyone rushed to the fields, my sister and I ran to the hill overlooking the river and its valley, where everybody’s fields were. They were running hither-thither, confused, like the ants living in the big banyan tree in the middle of the village when we disturbed their colony. The crops were no longer green; they were a dirty white of snow and mud, disturbed before they could ripen. Soon after, everybody huddled around the rock whose shade was used in the summers to eat meals, a behemoth the size of a house. My sister had got bored by now, and she kept tugging at me to go back. I pushed her away once, but she persisted, and finally I had to acquiesce. I dropped her home, where mother was anxiously waiting for father to return, then ran to the kirana shop where I knew the other boys would be. I ran so hard that my left slipper broke, so I took it off and ran barefoot.
It was only at night, when I heard my parents talk in hushed whispers, my mother’s voice almost a sob, that I found out our harvest wouldn’t last us the year. We would have to borrow, as would the rest of the village, but even Sahuji didn’t have enough rice to feed the entire village. They had decided they would go to the district headquarter, a day’s walk away, and petition the sarkaar. I suspected that gave mother some relief, and she stopped crying. Soon their bed began to creak.
XXX
The mountain towered over our lands like a heavenly sentry, a lone snow-covered peak amid the green and brown hills alongside it. There were more peaks behind the mountain, but to reach them one had to walk even more. Even though if one looked at the peaks from the district headquarter, it seemed as if all of them stood in a file, one after another, rising above the clouds that brought us rain. We had many names for the peak — the Gurungs called it the mountain of cranes in their language, believing it to be the nesting ground of the white-feathered birds that would swoop down to the rice fields and hunt for frogs and fish; we were Chhetris, so we didn’t believe in that hogwash. Instead, the children stuck to calling it budhi himal, the old mountain, because the thumb is the eldest of all our appendages.
Budhi Himal towered over our village. Its shadow loomed large and sometimes pierced the white clouds that gathered around it. After every rain, the clouds would dissipate, and the sun would begin to paint them in the colours of its own light. The yellow would become a deep red, at times almost blood-like, the silver linings would glow like a golden sword, flaming and penetrating the heart of the clouds with every stab. The clouds would realize their futile attempts at escape, and scatter – a fluff self-destructing into smaller wisps.
Down below, the river was the lord of all that it purveyed. Snaking amid boulders the size of houses, its white rage was gently channeled into narrow streams that led to the rice fields scattered on its banks. Much later, I would see a photograph of another village, which I mistook for my own. It was a clever daguerreotype, marketing itself as the rural idyll which everyone tried to visualize when they thought of us. The river snaked through it too, irrigating the rice fields on its banks. Then, like a stairway that crisscrossed the hills, began more fields – thousands and thousands of them. And like our village, folks working on them, running their ploughs pulled by two oxen, rows of women bending down to plant the paddy in the muddy swamp.
But paddy is a sensitive plant, and requires an almost emotional smothering to give out its grain willingly. Every year, father would wake just before dawn – when shapes just began to assume their outlines and trundle his way down the only street of the village, crossing Jange’s, Sita’s, Rame’s, and Parvati’s houses before turning right and reaching the tap that had only been installed the year Rame’s elder brother drowned in the river. Next to it was the sahuji’s shop and the stone-capped path that led down to the fields, onwards to the river, and then finally to the headquarters. By the time Father reached our fields, the clouds began to break up and a tiny sliver of sunlight screamed through them. He would walk around our biggest field to the makeshift of a canal all the farmers had dug, and remove the stone that had been placed at a side-stream that prevented the water from coming into our fields. He would then place a stone on another side-stream, stopping the water to Jange’s father’s fields – a crude implementation of irrigation rules and regulations.
Behind Sahuji’s house was another path, which led to the big fig tree under which a chautara had been constructed. The headmaster’s house stood proud across it in its distinctive pink and white, marked against a backdrop of mud-orange and slate-roofed houses. One Dashain, the headmaster decided to repair his rapidly crumbling house, and the very next day he accompanied donkeys carrying yellow sacks of cement and sand to his house. As usual, my father was employed to repair the house’s façade, being the only man with a decent knowledge of stonemasonry. Two weeks later, with a liberal application of the concrete, the cracks had been filled in, and the headmaster was content that he didn’t even have to spend his Dashain budget. Then his son came from the city – Kathmandu, some said; others Dilli – and decided the house now looked ugly. My father was delighted. Once again he was employed to paint the house. Not as fit to be a painter as a stonemason, the visibly poor job he had done was enough to begin a slanging match with the headmaster’s son, until my father threatened to tie him to his ox’s tail and send him to the city like that.
The house remained like that, an incomplete job, until the rains did their bit the next year by washing off the colour from the rest of the walls anyway.
XXX
When I told Mother about some men who wanted to climb the peak, she let out a derisive snort. ‘Baah. When I was a child, some white men came to my village to climb the mountain. We warned them no good would come out of disturbing the gods’ sleep, and soon enough, we heard that all but one of them had died. Then one day, the river carried down a frozen corpse while we were all filling water. Soon some government people came with more foreigners, and Ba and other villagers had to convince them to not try climbing the mountain anymore.’
Mother was like that; she didn’t question the whys of how we lived. For her, life in the village was an eternal circle that went round and round, with a set of rules that were unchanged for hundreds of years – the rules continued to exist, she reasoned, because they were correct. She couldn’t be bothered with curiosity. All that mattered was that it was the way it had been. When I asked her whether she missed her village after she married Father at the age of nine, she said, ‘Who has time for missing one’s family? As soon as I entered this house, your grandmother put me to work. The witch that she was, she would always taunt me by saying she did my father a favor by getting a child without a mother to marry her son.’
XXX
My sister was born on a night of a moonless sky. The village instead glowed in the flickering shadows of a candle-lit night – the night we Bahuns and Chhetris said Lakshmi would enter our homes. The candles helped her way inside our mud huts. My father held this grudge against her forever, a primordial rage that stemmed from the inescapability of having to name his daughter after the goddess of wealth, and knowing all the while that he himself could not escape the matrimonial debt she had brought upon his family. He would never be sour about it, but you could hear it in the admonishments and the infinite comparisons he drew with Lakshmi’s friends – Sita could cook by the time she was five, Parvati had already helped her mother collect firewood and bring water when she was seven. My sister would turn out to be like our mother, eternally quiet, and forever alone. Maybe she understood that in silence lay her best defense, afraid to face the uncontrollable fury of a man who believed himself to be scorned by destiny and stymied by his family. Maybe that was also why she sought in me an undesired protector, hoping that our filial bonds would help abide the angry tide that was my father.
I did not choose the role willingly, though, I must admit. A three-year-old child is met with an impossible dilemma when faced with a sibling he has been asked to love, when he knows that he will not be loved as before. My first thought, in hindsight, must have been one of utter selfishness – what is this pink object who threatens to take my mother away from me? – but even then I could not escape the fact that my sister would now be an inalienable part of my life. I realized this much later, when Lakshmi had already turned five, and I beat up Jange for pulling her hair and calling her a dirty cow. Till then, I had found her to be an irritant, especially as she had begun following me around whenever I asked my mother if I could go play with the other boys on the river bank.
XXX
Growing up in the hills, one could not be faulted for living with a limited worldview. The furthest my father had ever seen was the district headquarter, and that too when he was told by the headmaster that everyone in the village had to register themselves for an election. This was much before I was born. The elections were explained as the people choosing their own sarkaar, and it seemed my father took on that responsibility a little too seriously. When the headmaster told my father, he’d immediately rounded up all the men in the village. I don’t think he understood how exactly he would choose his government, and what his government would do even if it were elected. Maybe it just wasn’t in his larger scheme of things.
Still, off he trundled, along with all the other men and their wives – all the children had been left behind with their grandparents or other elders – the headmaster leading them from front. They reached the town, where my father almost met an inglorious end by coming under the wheels of a bus that he could not comprehend was a moving vehicle, but not before they were told they would all be voting for the king. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable affirmation of a fact they knew to be true. After all, we had been a kingdom for years now, even though we hadn’t seen our king yet. In the district headquarter, they were told that the old king had died of a heart attack – a king’s disease, the headmaster called it – and the young king would now take us into a new age, where everyone would be rich and no one would need to work for food. I think my fool of a father held that utopian hope till the day he died.
Our village carried a curious name to it: Sunpokhari – the golden pond. Why a village that did not possess a single pond came to be called that, we didn’t know. It was a name that had stuck, unfazed by the ludicrousness of a label that wasn’t. Yet the elders attempted to explain this misnomer by telling us how fortunate we were that we could collect a mysterious herb that brought us more money than they had seen in their lives.
But yarsagumba isn’t an herb; it’s neither plant, nor animal – it’s both. It’s a tiny sliver of brown that is worth its weight in gold, a thin mud-crusted caterpillar from whose head shot out a root thinner than a matchstick. Summer herb-winter worm, we called it. In the summer months, just when the snow would begin receding to higher grounds, our villages would empty themselves – men, women, children, all of us, even the headmaster and the sahuji. We would walk across the mountains to the sunnier side, where the new meadows would beckon us to pitch our makeshift tents on their pastures. There would be thousands and thousands of us on a single meadow, each family bringing along even the baby, for in these parts you must learn early. We would use blue plastic sheets as roofing, bought in bulk from the sahuji who would begin stocking them once the rains were over and the cold came in. Armed with a small spade and a toothbrush, we would begin our search, crawling on all fours on the cold ground, digging out anything that looked like our yarsagumba, slowly brushing away the mud using the bristles of the toothbrush. Every successful pick would be put in a sack and taken to the sahuji, who would weigh the sack and pay our fathers accordingly; the record currently belonged to Jange’s father, who had collected two sackfuls three years ago, and he had been able to buy his daughter a gold potey as her dowry – that is, until she ran away with the potey and Jange’s father’s hopes.
XXX
It rained that night, and it still hadn’t stopped when we woke up the next morning. The headmaster had to switch into his role as a priest, beseeching the gods at Ganesh’s temple under the chautara for a bounty this year, as he did at births, deaths, weddings, anniversaries, harvests, sowings, floods, droughts, travel and moments of good fortune.
We began walking when the rain became a drizzle, a thin curtain of shimmering light. It was a routine I’d memorized by now; this would be my third time, but Lakshmi’s first. I teased her about how the yarsagumba was sometimes alive when you pulled it out and it could easily go under your skin and settle there, then the yarsagumba would begin growing out of her skin. She seemed genuinely scared, but Mother censured me for filling my sister’s head with nonsense and assured my sister nothing of that sort would happen.
We began climbing the steps carved behind the headmaster’s house towards the mountain. I counted up to hundred thirteen times until we reached the top. Aquifers had burst after last night’s rain, and a few of them ran down the slopes of the hill across us in little waterfalls with the urgency of a cow separated from its calf.
Mother took out the bag of chiura she had kept as rations and gave us fistfuls of the beaten rice. We munched on them languidly until the headmaster called out to us. The path ahead was now downhill. No longer steps, but a beaten path cut out through a jungle for passage and whittled down under hooves and feet. It went on and on until it opened out onto a meadow, which was but the first of the three we had to cross, for years of picking yarsagumba had shorn the meadow of the worm-plant. A rocky stream was negotiated tip-toeing on a bamboo bridge, more jungle – thick, overgrown with moss and fern, then the meadow where we always slept the night, and awaited the people of two villages on the other side of the hill.
A Himalayan meadow isn’t always verdant green; islands of brown sometimes littered the new grass’s golden stalks. The best yarsagumba is to be found on a more even plain, where the grass doesn’t grow too high and the soil isn’t rocky enough for the tender stalk to pierce the ground. The meadow where we stayed the night stood just beside a rocky outcrop that looked out onto the river below, and at night the howling wind battered our clumsy tents stood on bamboo. It was cold that night, a cold I had never known, a primal cold that stripped away all our layers of clothing and exposed the skin to a sharp sting.
As we sat shivering in the tent, we heard the other villages arrive much before they actually did, their chatter carried over by the wind. Slowly orange shapes began to appear, the lamps that the villagers carried to light the way, and our fathers walked out to greet them. Mother shushed Lakshmi as she began to complain of her chest hurting, telling her she should go to sleep. I peeked out of a hole in the tent to see if Dhane and his sister from the village across our hill had also come, but Mother’s searing poke put an end to that.
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.
