Do Mountains Ever Listen to Man’s Murmurings?*
By
R.Paul Mohan Roy
[* Based on a short Story in Tamil published in Ananda Vikatan, August 4, 2010]
Last month one Sunday evening, I was walking on the sands of Marina and I stumbled upon my childhood friend Raman. Early in our youth we were neighbors in a small village abetting the Southern Ghats. We studied in a school known for its nineteenth century discipline.
Raman was the last of a large orthodox family of six children with parents and grandparents. Unlike his elder brothers, who sported tuft on their half-shaven heads, Raman’s hair style—-his hair being combed back neatly with no central or side parting—-was the envy of the boys. For a boy he was tall and handsome.
We spent a couple of hours swapping notes on our life and work after the school. Raman, after graduation from St. Joseph’s, I learnt, had spent larger part of his life as an academic in universities in the North, in places like Shillong and Kashmir. Strangely enough, he had not mentioned anything about his family (if he had one) or his present retired life in Chennai. But he was keen on enquiring about me and my mother and father.
My professor friend Raman now suggested that we go on a holiday to a tourist destination in the midst of lush green forests of South India. It was almost an invitation I can’t decline. Another common bond that united us was our love of trekking in the forest roads near our village. His was deeper in the sense that he found forests offering him endless opportunities to interpret nature. He told me about his strange fascination for waterfalls in forests. His sensibilities, I understood, were so attuned to hear music in wind or see tragedies in waterfronts.
The story-tellers, professor Raman was one among this tribe, have a way of keeping company alive for hours. From the moment we boarded the Pothigai Express, he spoke of our days in the village, the friends we had had and their rural hospitality, the day Dr. K.S. Krishnan of Babah Atomic Research Centre visited our school, The Hindu High School, his alumni. Raman made an intimate recollection of our teachers and those foreign missionaries who sipped cream less filter coffee in his brother’s roadside hotel. He reminisced with gusto our first school excursion to Mahalingam Hills by walk, where Jaganathan broke his leg. Raman believed that Jeganathan, later his classmate in St. Joseph’s, Trichi, now settled in the US would have narrated this event to his American wife to the point of boredom.
I, on my own, began recollecting those days of calf-love I dated in reverie and the little errands I did to the senior girls. Raman understood the meaning of the mild rays of joy reflected on my face.
“Now you are thinking of those Gokulashtami days and our visit to all neighborhoods around our house”, Raman hissed into my ears with a boyish smile. The pranks I played on the girls, he did not mention. Thank you, Raman.
Seventy is the right age to replay one’s youth, I was thinking.
Raman skipped the topic, for we might trespass into each other’s sacred territory, held secret or hidden.
After a night’s journey from Chennai to Tenkasi and an hour’s pleasant drive on a newly laid road snaking through tall green coconut groves, we reached the place. We checked into a lodge where Raman used to stay. He said he had a room reserved, in the top floor, his regular preference in all his previous visits, having a window through which one could see a picture-perfect-post-card view of the white waterfalls in wide angle. Yes, it was true.
“An August evening is the right time to be here”, said Raman, climbing to the terrace through a narrow staircase, littered with damp mass of dead leaves. He was silent for a while, watching the sunset. We saw the Red Crescent dip into the mountain cleaves, throwing its last golden rays to light up the clouds yellow. I looked at my friend and the clouds alternatively. The sight filled me with peace. But behind Raman’s exterior happiness, I could see a sheaf of sadness stacked one over the other, lurking under his heart. The milk-white water falls was seen coursing down with a strange but rhythmic sound of different drums.
“Memories have weight”, Raman said throwing his glances skyward. “Even they have color and smell. They are always fresh and alive, however old they are. They have the buoyancy to emerge from the deep, as they never allow you to disown them”, said Raman. What kind of memories he would unleash to a passive listener, I was wondering.
“This place, these tall mountains and green forests, with a smell of new rain and the constant noise of the waterfalls remind me that they offer a mystery to the visitors. They even signal danger”, the story teller suddenly became serious.
I wanted to bring him to the reality of the evening and the dinner waiting for us downstairs. “I always find beauty in nature”, I side tracked his thoughts. “Look, how the white clouds change colours and sail past the green mountain. We’re on a tour to relax. Don’t you agree with me?”
“Do these clouds and their interplay offer us any message from nature?” asked Raman. I had no answer. I found the story teller in Raman, had a way of describing events and situations in his own inimical style.
“Do you find any meaning in their grandeur”, he continued. “If you could sit on these clouds, what would you see below? Won’t we feel insignificant at seeing our own clan down in miniature? We would see meaningless movements signifying nothing but sorrow and uselessness”.
“I’ve seen innocent bystanders looking intently on the falls and slipping into the water only to court death. Was it a suicide or an accident, would be debated for days on end. Some lovers and newly married couples, after visiting this falls fall apart and break their bond for no ulterior reason. Why? I find no answer. The more I reason, the more I feel emptiness in our life”.
“Watch these mountains at the dead of a night. You’ll hear the wind making an eerie sound raising its pitch that would pierce through the insides of your bones and make them chill. It’s a warning—-nature’s warning—-pleading us to leave it to its own roar”. Raman became serious.
A bearer from the restaurant sneaked in and said, “Sir, Dinner?”
“Oh, I forgot to leave an order for our dinner”. Turning to the man Raman said, “Beer. Chilled beer. Make it two large glass. Dry Chapattis and Chicken Masala. That’s all. We prefer a light dinner”.
When did Raman become a Boston Brahmin to take drinks and meat?
Raman read my surprised look and answered, “It was only your mother who gave me the first taste of roasted chicken and bread stuffed with eggs. Don’t you remember we took lunch in your house after celebrating India’s third Independence Day in the school. You don’t know how I relished those servings, watching the Last Supper hanging on the hall opposite to your dining room”.
*** *** ***
Now it was ten in the night. After dinner we came to the terrace again, and sat on the same parapet wall, both facing the waterfall. But for the sound of the falling water there was absolute silence, disturbed now and then by the screeching noise of an owl, the ominous bird of night. Moths and tiny insects fluttered around. Years back I had seen fire flies twinkling against the dim white of the falls. Now, as we saw none of them, I presumed that they have joined the list of extinct species.
Raman lit a cigarette and inhaled a long puff, looked at the sky and let the smoke go in rings through the thin hole of his pouted mouth. There was a kind of manliness and a sign of power in the way he held the cigarette and smoked it with a relish. When he made another puff, I noticed his face in the glow of the butt. With his pencil-thin white moustache, Raman, he must be in his early seventies, still looked handsome. But traces of intense sadness were seen playing on his face.
Raman said that this place has a history of sorts-—of religion mythology, power and even untouchability peculiar to our society. The stream up in the mountains, before it gathers momentum, meanders through hundreds of medicinal plants, native to Indian soil. According to Hindu mythology this is one of the five places on earth, which Lord Shiva chose to display his dancing prowess, and hence sacred to Shaivites. Here, there is a temple where Shiva denied Dharsan to a group of our own people, labeled untouchables. They were made to stand at the door and stare at a God who was so near and yet far way. Till 1930 it was the white man’s privilege to bathe in the falls, guarded and protected by the Indian police. That it was pax Britannica went unchallenged and accepted by our forefathers. There was a pit downstream, a 20 by 40 water log where the natives could bathe in the water that had washed the white man’s sweat of the day. No white man or woman was ever washed away in flash floods, whereas every season, till date, it claims a handful of Indians. A choice set of medicinal and flowering plants of this area were taken to England by some British botanists. There they did not take roots. The British rule lasted barely for two centuries. But this waterfall in the Southern Ghats is here for thousands of years, witnessing each passing phase of history.
“To some tourists it is a place reminiscent of sorrow and separation”, Raman Said. “Call it a mysterious power or magical spell, or an intimate call by death, these hills have it. Once I’d seen a bystander looking intently on the waterfall and slipping into the water only to be traced breathless next hour. Last year, I saw a Japanese couple, who had rented a room next to mine, quietly sitting on a rock, far away from the falls and watching the Indians bathe, woman fully dressed and men in their assorted inner garments. They looked neither happy nor sad. But they were there for more than an hour, keeping their Canons and Nikons covered in the pouch. Next day I saw one of them in the train I was travelling back home”.
“This Lodge stands on a piece of land first assigned to a white man, a high ranking police officer of Scottish origin. He had plans to erect a big bungalow with windows overlooking the water falls. When the Indian Independence became certain he regretted to have his home built away from the British Empire. He made preparations to leave India. He wrote to his father explaining his love of this hills and how he was forced to drop his project and sell away the land. The father wrote back: the land, be it in India or Britain, does not belong to us; it’s to the land we all belong for our final rest”.
Raman had more to say about the darker side of the falls. There was a young British man by name Ashe, more precisely Robert W. D. E. Ashe. He was the Collector of this district in the 1910s. He used to frequent this place often. In one of his visits he must have had a premonition of death waiting for him. What else would have made him to cut short his holiday and return, only to receive an assassin’s bullet right on his chest and die on a railway platform? The assassin, one Vanchinathan Iyer, who lived just a kilo meter from this place took himself another bullet to escape arrest. Ashe was buried in the Military Lines Church cemetery followed by a brief funeral service. The conspiracy to its last detail was hatched here in this forest.
The assassinated and his assassin became martyrs in their own way. To the rulers Ashe’s death was proclaimed as supreme sacrifice for the cause of British rule in India. To the extremists in the freedom movement it was the first act in the bloodiest drama of the colonial history. The white man’s widow, who bore the loss silently, was promptly shipped back to England, where she committed suicide in the fond hope of joining her husband in the world of spirits. People say the Ashe couple still roam these jungles and frighten the descendants of Vanchinathan.
During his last visit, Raman had seen a little girl standing alone and crying near the main falls. There were tell-tale-things of a mother—-a dirty sari and a small bag nearby—-having gone for a quick bath. As the hours wore on, no one turned to pick her up. The girl started crying. She was not crying for her mother. It was due to hunger and thirst, for she was not fed the previous day and night. The fault of being a girl caused her to be abandoned and made to fend her way for herself. The mother must have believed that someone would care for her daughter, if left alone in a crowded tourist centre. Police took her, fed her and gave her away to an orphanage, the Parker Home on the plains. The hills were silent, witnessing our collective joy and sorrow. Though placed in a silent mode, willingly, I could feel the emotional debris in Raman.
“Have you heard of the famous Indian playwright, Harindranath Chattopadhyaya, brother of Sarojini Naidu?” asked Raman. I least expected a question like this in the middle of a night on a holiday in a forest lodge.
“I haven’t read his works. Has he written about this waterfall”? I asked.
“He has not written anything about this place, but it had a strange connection to his life and marriage. He is known for his plays. They are subtle commentaries on Indian life, some even bordering Shakespearian grandeur. How the Indian society offers a golden gage to our women folk is the one underlying theme in most of his plays. We revere our women in private. But their place is always a cage. Their wings clipped and movements curtailed they are chained to traditions. Our national leaders used to quote Harindranath whenever they speak about women liberation”.
Raman waxed into an eloquent display of his acquaintance with literature and Harindranath’s portrayal of Indian women
Why Raman was speaking so much about a playwright who lived decades ago in a far of place, no way related to our present holiday.
“What brings you to refer Harindranath now?” I asked him hesitantly.
“There is a connection. This place has a role in his life. It happened in the 1930s. He courted a teen-aged widow by name Kamaladevi, who was then studying in Madras [now Chennai], married her and took her to this place for honeymoon”. Raman gave a pause to the narration, lit another cigarette and looked at the sky as if he was telling his own story in flash back.
“Do I need to dwell in detail how a couple would have spent their first days and nights in a place like this. All day they roamed around the hills and walked along the streams, looked for an early dinner, and in the night they gave shelter to each other’s bodies. After a week’s stay, they wound up their honeymoon and left. What evil spell befell on them, no one knows. On reaching Hydrabad, they became strangers. The bonds of love built under the shades of forest trees began to fall apart. They were not on speaking terms though they lived and travelled together. No more they lived as husband and wife. Theirs was the first mutually accepted legal separation in India. A famous writer who fought for women’s liberation could not live with his wedded wife”.
“Why?” I asked, “What happened?”
Raman shook his head. Lifting up his hands, he drew a blank in the air and said, “No one knows to this day”.
“Are those plays were written before his marriage?” I asked.
“I know for certain his plays were written after his visit to this place, I mean after their years of undeclared separation, but living under the same roof. His friends said it was a closely guarded secret between Hirendranath and his wife”. Raman gave another moment of silence to intercede. “I’m just thinking of the strange codes our society has imposed on man-woman-relationships”, he continued.
He looked at the stars as if to find an answer from the heavens. Why he chose to retrace this strange life of a playwright and tag it with a comment on society.
Did this story of love and separation bear any connection to Raman’s?
I wanted to shift the topic to our home turf, more familiar to both of us. I recalled the life of our neighour in our village, Krishna Rao, who was remembered for his constant quarrel with his wife of forty years. “You remember he had a good brood of twelve children and yet fought with his wife on every flimsy ground”, I said.
“Hi! Man, you mean Krishna Rao and his progeny”, Raman said with a sneer. “It had nothing to do with heart or emotional compatibility. It was all about hormones—-the interplay of t over e”.
“What”, I asked in utter confusion.
“My dear friend, it was testosterone seeking estrogen”.
Raman laughed loudly and joined me in recollecting Rao. Every morning, for Rao and his wife life started with a quarrel throwing vessels at each other uttering words most foul on earth. It was a wonder how they sired that many sons and daughters though they lived in total discord. I’d seen Rao’s wife always pregnant and having a child perched on her broad hips. Raman even recited the names of all the children in the order of their age. An incredible memory, Raman had.
“You know they never quarreled in the nights”, said Raman. He repeated it giving a mild stress on the word nights. We had a good hearty laugh for a minute.
“There was a song, Raman reminded me:
Where were you, my dear?
When the lights were out
sung by the American youth hinting their love making when there was a power outage in New York one Saturday night. Ten months later, the population curve showing the birth rate in NY pointed a sharp jump, corresponding to the day they had that unusual power failure”.
“When the lights are switched off, the desire of the body, be it the Rao’s or his wife’s, kept the quarrel at bay. Their house always smelt of babies, as much as their parents were in peace in the nights. In their first twenty years of married life they produced eleven children, and at their twenty-fifth they added one more to bring the brood to a dozen. He was just fulfilling our biological obligation to nature. Paul, did not your God give an injunction: go and multiply, and fill the earth? Rao obeyed it faithfully and kept his routine-—spending the day in full-throated anger and hugging his wife in the night. In their daily quota of quarrel, both had equal share and showed the same amount of force and the same kind of words to abuse each other, while the siblings remained mute spectators. But life went on, inside the cage, never wanting to call it a day”.
“Is it not strange?” I made my comment that kindled Raman further.
“They’d given a free rein to their hormones. Their genes”, Raman said, “were so conditioned to live together, quarrel and beget children. More appalling, Krishna Rao and his wife bore no emotional scar. For them nature is no more than the saucepans they throw on each other. If they had divorced, they might have had freedom. But freedom they did not want. Freedom is not the be-all in their life. Inside the cage, they wanted to stager through its lanes and bye lanes that lead to cozy nights. They would have drawn their own rules of life dictated by passion and not by emotion. Their marriage, though built on friction and discord had survived while the Harindranaths’ went awry”.
As we descended downstairs, I was thinking of my friend Raman. Why he remained a bachelor was always a riddle to me. Why did he not visit his ailing parents; why he did not come to light the funeral pyre, as the custom warranted, when his father died. I kept asking myself. If I were to give credit to our village rumour mill, Raman had had a dalliance with a cute little thing while he was doing his college studies. The village gossip had several strands─-that the girl he was in love with was not a Brahmin (true), that she was of low birth (may or may not be true), that one day he took her to his ancestral farm house at the edge of the forest (subject to verification), that he secretly married her (highly doubtful), that he deserted his parents and never returned (of course, true)-—the gossip had enough weight to shatter an orthodox landed gentry of the day. They, his mother in particular, were shuddered at the thought of bringing in a non-Brahmin daughter-in-law. The wall of justification that they raised was: how could an untouchable become part of a touchable household?
Raman looked back at the parapet wall. I thought he was looking for his pack of cigarettes. There was none.
I asked, “Looking for the pack“?
“No. I’m searching one part of myself. I left it here years ago. The wind washed it away. I couldn’t retrieve it back”.
Seasons keep changing, but nature never bothers to know man and his plight on earth. Winds keep blowing and it never lets men to track its secret journey. When or where it will strike next is not left to man’s guess, Raman tried to tell me.
“Yes, the wind has a power to brew into a storm and uproot trees. But it can’t reformat your memory”?
On reaching our room downstairs, Raman said, “Tomorrow we’ll trek up the mountains. There are small streams. They sprout from springs no one had seen. The streams carry water pure as white crystals, all through the year. They turn into a brook that runs slow, and then joins this thunderous falls. It never bothers to read man’s thoughts”.
Do mountains listen to man's murmurings? I spent the night engrossed in searching an answer my friend could not find.
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