The Previous Night

Fiction

It was May of 2016. The sun was scorching the ground to fire as I walked out of the auditorium along with my group mates after delivering one of the worst possible presentations. It was our final thesis and the last step out of engineering. I reached my room, picked up the bags that I had neatly packed yesterday, and made my way towards the waiting cab. The campus never looked more deserted that day; the people who made it beautiful for me these four years weren’t there anymore. It’s always terrible when you are the last to leave, too many emotions and too little time to digest.

The airport was over an hour away and all I could keep wondering was whether I had achieved what I had set out to be when I showed up to this esteemed place as a scared yet somehow optimistic seventeen-year-old. The matter of truth was that I still didn’t have an answer to that. Four years had passed and I had enjoyed every bit of it, both its ups and downs. However, when it came to being an engineer, I don’t think I quite picked it up. I knew this very well, maybe that’s the reason I couldn’t convince myself that I was finally able to achieve what I wanted. I boarded my flight to Bagdogra where my family was waiting for me. We had planned our trip to Sikkim and may be Tawang if time permitted. Dad had only gotten a week off for vacation, so we didn’t want to waste any more time, therefore I directly joined them there from college.

I looked messy, long hair and skinny structure, both of which any parent would never want to see their child go through or live by. But before all this could get to me, I felt happy, at last. I was really glad that I was about to meet my parents and my brother. It was getting too lonely out there, I desperately needed their company and there they stood, smiling. I ran to them and hugged them real tight. I was finally home.

It was close to a five-hour ride to Gangtok, despite the driver claiming it to be only four. We had planned to station ourselves at one of the hotels where we could drop all our luggage and travel ahead. It was a quiet place, more serene than the photographs shown on the website, quite contrary to my experience. It was already eight in the night when we reached there, we decided to call it a day as most of the shops had started to close in the surroundings. We freshened up, ordered food indoors and had a long chat about where my career was supposed to go before everyone went back to sleep. I shared the room with my little brother. He was fast asleep as soon as we fell onto the bed while I kept staring at the ceiling. It was over an hour but I couldn’t get any sleep so I walked out to the lobby with an old novel in hand.

I am not a voracious reader or even an average one, I hardly read any books but if I did, it would be in parts which might take months to complete. I am more of a movie guy, the one who watches Harry Potter movies to learn more about the story than read through the pages of the esteemed series. So there I was sitting in the lobby, with ‘Murder at the Orient Express’ in my hand when I heard a woman sob profusely. There was no one at the reception at that time. I was quite startled as I stood up and moved closer to the room adjacent to the lobby, the place where the sound was coming from. As I almost reached the door and was about to knock, the crying sound stopped all of a sudden. The door immediately opened and a lady in her mid-thirties walked out with tears in her eyes. She went and sat right where I was sitting while I stood at her door staring at the severely sweating moustached husband, at least that’s what I thought, in the front. There were no words exchanged, as I went back and sat in the lobby while the moustached person shut the door from inside.

‘Are you alright?’ I asked the visibly shaken women.

‘I am good. Can you pass me that water jar?’ She replied.

‘Sure.’

She slowly poured water into her glass as she asked me whether this was my first day of stay here. I replied in affirmation. Post that, we got talking where I realised that she was the owner of the place and had moved to Gangtok, her maternal place, only a couple of years back. She answered all questions except about her, except about the recent fight she had with the moustached guy. Finally, I saw the time and it was close to midnight, that’s when I decided to bid adieu to her and walk back to my room. However, she relented and asked if I was comfortable to have a walk around in the neighbourhood, to which I replied negatively. It isn’t advisable to trust a stranger that too in an unknown city. I went back straight to my room and slept. The next day, we left for the northern part of Sikkim where we had planned to stay for a couple of days. It was on the third day that we returned only to find that the moustached guy was nowhere to be seen. The police were all over the place, questioning the whereabouts of this person and the twenty-five lakh rupees that were missing along with him. The same lady in mid-thirties appeared from nowhere with the inspector and pointed her finger towards me.

Part 1 ends.

The mountain and the sea.

I remember discreetly my pick when posed with a dilemma by another friend to pick one, the mountain or the sea, while I chuckled as I answered, “Over a mountain surrounded by the sea.” I know I was greedy there. I wanted everything at a single place yet longing secretly to visit them in pieces to know in real what I actually loved and why. I haven’t been able to figure out the reason though but however I seem to understand what exactly I might have loved in the enumerable trips I have been to, since I was a child.

Water

Port Blair. Mangalore. Goa. Pondicherry.

I seemed to have strangely been in love with the beaches while being equally scared of the gushing water. So, I often used to stroll along the coast, gathering the wet evening breeze under my sobering breath before I found a spot to settle on to watch the dimming sun, set. Memory, you see, a mental picture which you would take along with us in the ever flowing journey called Life. I picked up the notion from a movie titled, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” but anyways it’s a story for another day. I believe some things are meant to be remembered through the naked eye rather than behind a camera lens. Be it the famous night street of Pondicherry or the sparsely visited Anjuna beach of Goa, I wouldn’t dare to forget how it felt to be there in those moments of awe.

Sea, in particular, is kind in its demeanour yet dominating in its presence and vastness. The rhythmic sound of the splashing waves brings out a kind of music which has a soothing effect, especially on me. It brings out romanticism in its truest sense, adding colours to the existing palate of our life. The calmness into which I could stare for eternity to come is the thing that I have found to savour with time, the thing I actually seem to love about the sea.

Sky

Kargil. Khardungla Pass. Shimla. Khasi Hills. Yercaud. Dodabetta. Yumesamdong.

My tryst with the mountains began way before I met the sea. It began from the place where people usually end, “The Great Himalayas”. The dried up mountains to the south of Ladakh to the snow covered ones to its north, it’s a befitting spectacle which one rarely could afford to forget. But I have come a long way, I was only ten back then.

This December, it was the clouded mountain and the windy valley that we happen to choose, making me understand the reason why I seem to love them so fiercely. It so happens with the hills that the time we spend to get to the scenic location is far more than the time we spend at the place. The topsy-turvy road curving upwards with every delicate turn thus remains the significant part of my travel memory, organically peppered with conversations. This part of memory somehow feels a lot important, feels right somehow. The arduous journey packed inside a Mahindra Xylo with an infinite road ahead and with scenic beauty covered all around while being gently graced with differing personalities carrying different opinions yet bonded together by long years of friendship and camaraderie. I now know for sure what I really love about the mountains. Sikkim, one of the most beautiful and one of the most underexplored places that we had recently visited made me realize this over and over again.

Paradise: When the two meet

Pangong-Tso Lake. Gurudongmar Lake.

I always loved the mountain breeze as much as I adored the gushing waves; they felt to me as pious and serene in their truest sense. I was too young to remember much about the time we had visited Pangong-Tso lake. Except the crystal clear bluish water and the deep blue sky at the fore with an abandoned boat at one corner, my memory about the travel is only in bits and pieces. This makes me ponder over the recent things that happened in our week long trip a few weeks ago, which by the way ended with us missing our destined flight, however it’s a story for another day. Gurudongmar Lake, 17500 feet above MSL, surrounded by snow-capped mountains was the paradise we had been lucky to witness. Partly frozen, partly liquid, the lake has been known for its religious reasons, an extremely pious lake, the locals had stressed. I wouldn’t deny their claim, even a bit. It’s God’s own paradise, he seem to have taken an extra effort while making this one. Stunningly breath-taking, applicable even in its literal sense.

The other place, my personal favourite of the trip and one of the best I have ever seen in my life, was the Sea of clouds. The one I had chuckled about; we were at the top of a mighty mountain and below us flowed the ‘clouded’ sea.

It’s never wrong to dream; sometimes they come to life in the most unexpected times and in most unexpected ways. Period.

P.S. Back home. Delhi and its beloved winter smog!

A Year Long Search