by Parth Pandya
First the dark clouds came, marching on like an army without a general, displaying the kind of indiscipline that would have lost them a war had they been men. But men they were not and there was no enemy to contend with. In fact, their invasion was a welcome relief to the blistering heat that had filled the hills of Coonoor for the past one month. Kavya sat on the edge of the window, enthralled at the sight. Kavya was looking forward to the raindrops that were to follow. I’ll embrace them as I embrace Nikesh, with no intention of letting go. The monsoons this year had two ardent fans.
Nikesh emerged from the kitchen, carrying two cups of coffee in his hand, leaving behind a trail of steam emanating from them.
“Here you go!”, he said, offering up the serving to Kavya, who accepted the cup with a smile.
“Flattering to deceive?”, he asked, raising his cup and pointing towards the clouds.
“It always rains when we come here,” said Kavya. “Trust me.”
She was of course right about it, just as she had been right about many things over the years. This was the fifteenth time they had come here. Every year, like the ritual crossing of the earth around the sun, Kavya and Nikesh would come to the unimaginably named “Hill View” lodge. The rains were a subscript that had been written into that story.
Kavya remembered the first time she had seen Nikesh, looking out the window of her room. It was during her trip to this place 15 years ago, in 2001. He was rubbing his spectacles onto his shirt, so that he could see through them. Nikesh was drenched, having encountered the wrath of the Coonoor rains that had poured on him without any warning. Kavya was sitting on the edge of the window of her room. She believed that gazing into the expanse gave her grief some space to disperse. The hills were full of lush greenery, turned a shade darker with all the rains they were getting. The sound of the thunder found great echo in the valleys below her. There was happiness bouncing in the puddles of water. There was laughter of children in the street. The city was coming unburdened from the tight grip of the heat. Yet, Kavya’s grief couldn’t elevate itself above this.
Kavya had the most intractable of problems. She had the strangest of afflictions – one she believed would grab her and sink her to the abyss before the year came to a close. Her belief in her own fallibility was so strong that it threated to become a self fulfilling prophecy. Her phobia about living was going to kill her. Her depression was diagnosed, but not cured. Her support system had tried to revive her, but failed. Kavya looked at the ground outside, pelted with the rain drops and wondered if she too would wither away like a small plant, from the effects of the downpour. She had escaped Bangalore to come to Coonoor. No one in her family knew her whereabouts. She knew that they would be distressed, but she was beyond caring.
It was in this moment of helplessness that she saw Nikesh wiping his spectacles. There was nothing remarkable about the man. Everything about him was decaying in small measure. He had a small bald patch on his head, a small paunch, small legs that he was using to scurry into the lodge. Kavya barely registered him as he vanished from her sight.
The lodge was serving dinner each evening. Warm chicken soup with parathas and paneer sabzi and biryani, cooked up by the home cook awaited them that evening. Nikesh and Kavya both petered down, realizing soon that they were the only visitors to the lodge that day.
Nikesh, sensing that staying quiet was even more uncomfortable than saying something, chose the latter.
“Strange, isn’t it?”, he said, walking up to Kavya.
“Such a beautiful lodge, such good weather, and only two people coming over to occupy it”
She gave him a half smile of acknowledgement and went back to playing with the paneer with her fork.
“I must confess I am surprised that you are here by yourself”
“Aren’t you too?” Kavya shot back.
“Touché. Would you like to go for a walk tomorrow? I am quite the expert on the local vegetation here.”
Kavya decided to look up and scan the face of the man making a proposition that seemed odd to her given he didn’t know her. Should she go, she wondered?
“Trust me. I am not a serial killer” Nikesh joked.
After all, what have I got to lose?
“Don’t all serial killers say that?” Kavya replied, to which Nikesh laughed. His laughter unlocked a trapped door within her.
“Alright,” she said, and the evening drifted away with the gentle breeze outside.
The walk through the winding woods next morning winded Kavya up, while Nikesh seemed to float on air. He seemed accustomed to the mountains; to their harshness, their challenge and the prizes they offered once you surmounted them. Nikesh continued a stream of stories while Kavya tried to keep up. He spoke about himself, his life before as an investment banker, the pressures of his job that made him quit and wander about, his love for Coonoor, for the rains that he never missed. He spoke about the time last year when he had wandered into the woods for a long hike in the midst of heavy rains. Every step of the journey was treacherous and yet he undertook it with gay abandon.
“Why would you do risk your life for something like this? Don’t you value it?”
Nikesh paused. “Do you?” he asked.
Kavya was taken aback by the question, surprised how he spotted the inner demon that she had not revealed to him. He looked at his eyes. He knew.
“Not all of us are made the same way, Nikesh.”
“You won’t know the value of something until you have lost it,” Nikesh said.
“How would you know? Won’t you have to die to find out?” asked Kavya.
Nikesh walked up to Kavya and held her hand in his gently.
“Maybe I have,” he said, hoping that the softness of his voice would make the truth more palatable to Kavya.
“My recklessness cost me my life. Let’s see if we can save yours, shall we?”
Kavya tried to register the many things that she was hearing. The irony of a ghost exhorting her to live was not lost on her.
“Let’s make a pact. You promise to live on and I’ll always keep you company. Both of us shall not be left wanting.”
“How so?”
“Let these rains unite us year after year. Come visit this place and we’ll exchange tales – stories of living on.”
“Even though one of us is dead?”, Kavya joked feebly.
Nikesh roared in laughter, an unabashed expression of joy that reverberated through the woods.
Kavya asked for time to mull over this proposal. More than anything else, she needed to breathe in this absurd reality that had been presented to her.
“I’ll wait,” said Nikesh, and they parted ways.
The following year, Kavya arrived for the season, like the gentle breeze that brought the rain clouds with it. She got off the car and looked around her. A man who was not alive smiled from a corner. An annual rendezvous was established. With the man and the rains that never let her down.
Picture from https://www.flickr.com/photos/sarit_arora/
