It has been a long time since I have posted on my blog. The IIFT schedule has sapped me of all my imagination. Now that I am doing my internship, I m trying to revive my weird imagination and blogging habit! This story, needless to say, is purely fictional. This time I ve cut loose with a high probability of sounding ridiculous! So feel free to comment/criticize, I m not too sure if I ve written a good story this time around. Anyway, it feels great to blog after a long long time.
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I packed my back pack, put on my shoes and slowly tip toed out of the room. I slowly closed the door behind me, which creaked loudly. I almost thought I had woken up my roomies. One of them turned from one side to other but did not wake up. I heaved a sigh of relief. I checked my watch. The fluorescent light showed 4 AM. This was the time when generally everyone in the hostel would have gone to sleep. I had planned it all well. I had couple of hours to go and be back in time for the Yoga classes. There would be some souls still wandering around the campus or in the computer center but I had planned to jump over the back gate of the campus, towards which not many people went. I slowly got into the elevator and went down. The guard was sleeping and the door was closed. I had to be extra careful. I put down my bag and opened the door first, which was not locked, thankfully. I came back, picked my bag and very meticulously slid out of the door. I did not bother closing the door behind me.
I started walking towards the back gate. I had considered all alternatives, but I was left with no choice, only this one seemed correct. I had to go like this. The gate remains generally closed. As a result, lot of weeds had made their home all over the Iron Gate, most of which was rusted. Through the railings of the gate, I could see the dense darkness of Sanjay Van towards the other side of the road. The silhouette of the tall trees and their branches looked like a giant witch with her hair loosened over her face. I wondered why I always have such weird imagination; it was just a forest after all. I reached the gate. I tried to estimate the height of the gate. My friends would agree, I am not very good with such estimates as heights of such structures. For instance, my friend rolled all over the floor laughing when I estimated the height of Charminar to be sixty or seventy feet at the maximum, when in fact it is well beyond a hundred feet, twenty more actually. So I didn’t bother telling him what I thought was the height of Delhi Gate. Okay, “not very good” is actually an understatement after this example. Agreed, accepted and acquiesced! I am bad with such estimates. But anyway, I reckoned the height of the gate to be around ten feet. Ten feet was easy. I climbed up and jumped over. I set out to complete my self-assigned long pending quest…
Rewinding two days back:
“Hey! Have a look at this. This is amazing. I did not know we live in such an exciting place”, exclaimed Vivek, my neighbour in the hostel and a very good friend. He went on, “Sanjay Van is one of the most haunted places in India. Look here, Wikipedia has an article on it”
I, Vivek and Rohan were sitting in Vivek’s room doing some the economics assignment when Vivek took a break to browse and god knows how he landed up with this piece of information.
“O wow! That’s cool. Read on. This is interesting”. Rohan, my roommate, seemed genuinely excited about this news. He rubbed his palms against one another and gestured, with joined hands, towards Vivek to continue. I grew curious too. It was a welcome break from the boring assignment that we were doing anyway.
Vivked obliged and continued “ It is said that a woman with white hair in a white dress and a stick rides on a deer between 4 AM and 5 AM in the morning just before sun rise. People have heard screams and strange sounding voices while passing by the road adjacent to the forest during that time”
“Ah, well. We have seen it in hundreds of Hindi movies, this white sari stuff. It is so contrived and banal. It has to be a wild imagination of a B-grade horror movie fan or a jerk who had nothing better to do than post such stuff on Wikipedia”, commented Rohan suddenly losing interest in the entire matter.
“Yeah, rightly said Rohan. But I like the imagination of this lad. What an imagination he has! White Sari clad woman on a deer? Of all the animals in the forest, a deer? Sounds damn stupid and funny to me” Vivek added and both of them laughed.
I joined them but just with a weak smile. Lots of thoughts crossed my mind. A deer. Last time we had gone trekking in Sanjay Van, we happened to see a huge deer. It was a Nilgai, I think. Besides, there were not many animals in Sanjay Van apart from deer, peacocks and monkeys as far as I knew. So, it fit in properly for the mysterious woman to be riding a deer. Although it did sound funny, it was possible. I wanted to check it out and confirm it myself. I turned towards both of them and tried to put in a proposal for a probably once-in-a-lifetime expedition to the Sanjay Van, a quest for the ultimate reality, but both of them were back on their laptops with their assignments. For the fear of being laughed at, I dropped the idea of asking them to come along although I did not banish the thought of the expedition altogether.
That night when we were lying on our beds in the room, I casually asked Rohan if he really thought the whole Sanjay Van thing was a joke. He did not answer. He simply nodded his head lying on his bed on the other end of the room which I could not have seen from my bed had I not turned in that direction. He asked me to put out the lights and go to sleep. I put out the lights but did not go to sleep. I was planning. I had to go to Sanjay Van and find it out for myself. It had to be the night after that night so that I could sleep after the Yoga class at 7 and get up well in time for the session at 11:30. I started thinking of the supplements that I would require for my expedition- a torch, a match box, a candle, a camera, a water bottle and a thick stick, just in case. That’s all I could think of, then. I decided to collect these things the next day. Having contemplated, what I thought of as a decent plan, I slept and decided to plan for the rest of the things the next day.
Fast forwarding to present:
All the discussions and lengthy talks that I had with others on this matter were all going through my head as I walked towards the entrance to Sanjay Van. The entrance generally closes after 6 PM but one can easily jump over the fence to enter the forest. In fact, even under normal circumstances, it is easier to jump over the fence than to use the main gate, which is so small that barely one person fits in at a time. Let me not get to the estimates now but it is definitely less than 5 feet (I hope!).
I jumped over the fence and entered the forest. It was darker than coal and I couldn’t see a thing. It was August, so the night was not as chilly as it would probably become in December. I slowly treaded the mud pathway, with my torch light ably guiding me. I walked along the path for a long time. This was a familiar path. We had walked this way a lot of times earlier up to the ruined fort. After walking for about ten minutes, I reached the small bridge which had dirty water flowing under it. It was dark everywhere except wherever my torch pointed. I stood on the bridge for a while and pointed the torch towards the water right under me. Then I slowly tilted the torch head towards the flow of water. I saw something that looked like twigs of a tree. I turned my torch in that direction. The small branch of the tree was followed by head, neck and a full body! It was the deer.
My first impulse was to drop the torch there and run back as fast as I could. But, I decided to persist. I tried to observe the deer closely. It was drinking water. Its eyes were closed. I pointed the torch light directly towards its eyes. It got disturbed and opened its eyes. What a sight it was! The eyes sparkled in the dark background. I quickly switched off my torch. It continued to stare at me. The darkness was of no help, it was directly staring at me. The probability that it stared in some random direction and that direction could be my direction was very bleak. So, I concluded that it could see clearly in the night.
It started to move in my direction. It took a couple of steps, bent forward with its nose tilting upwards as if to sniff something. Then, all of a sudden, it retreated and started running in the opposite direction. I quickly put on the torch and started running in behind it. It was a futile exercise, I knew. In seconds it was out of sight. I cursed myself. I shouldn’t have startled it in the first place. I stood there in darkness with my hands down and the torch pointing the earth under my feet. I saw the hoof-prints of the deer, which just vanished into thin air, under the circular brightness created by my torch. I started following the trail. It took me deep into the forest where I had not gone anytime earlier. After walking along for about ten minutes, I reached a dead end: grass! With no more hoof marks, I just moved in some random direction. I treaded along until I heard some noise. I felt my heart pounding inside. I was sweating too, partly because I had walked for quite some time and majorly because I was scared.
I somehow managed to muster enough courage to move closer towards the ‘noisy’ area. It was coming from the area behind the rocks in front of me. I climbed onto one of the smaller rocks. There was a small slit in the wall formed by the pile of rocks. I peeped through it.
There is a famous saying which goes something like this “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity”. I stood there, peeping through the crevices of the wall, with an aim to provide empirical evidence to that saying, inadvertently of course! If it were not for this incurable state of mind, I would have been sleeping soundly. However, since the first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity, we must also learn bear its consequences. Consequences can be good or bad and I was probably among those lucky few to have faced good consequences that night, or so I think!
The deer stood there nibbling a long white cloth in the process of gripping it in its mouth. When it finally managed to take the white cloth in its mouth, it moved backwards. The slack cloth suddenly became taut as if the other end had got stuck into something. It indeed had, not to ‘something’ but ‘someone’. The white cloth turned out to be that someone’s garment. And, that someone was sleeping on the ground on a bed of dead leaves. The deer clearly did not like that and was determined to wake the person. The person finally got up and that is when I saw her for the first and the last time. She had draped the white cloth around her and left one end flowing. It was not a sari but looked liked one because of the way it was worn. She had a decent looking face and her hair was let loose. She gently tapped on the deer’s head with a stick lying on the ground on her ‘bed’. The deer seemed to like it and made some strange noise encouraging her master to do it again.
Then suddenly, both the deer and the woman looked in my direction. They were directly staring at the exact location where I was standing. I felt exposed although there was a huge wall of rocks between us. My heart began pounding so hard that I was convinced it will get tired very soon and give up beating all of sudden. Their eyes shone brightly in the dark. They had a strange malice in their eyes. I couldn’t see that any more and closed my eyes. I was sweating profusely and shivering. I could feel them come close to me, their footsteps growing louder every moment. I could feel the wall between us vanishing into thin air. I could hear their breathing, they were very close now. And then, I couldn’t hear anything. It was all dark and my mind went blank. I fainted.
When I woke up, I was taken by surprise. The dense forest was nowhere to be seen; instead it had got converted into an atrium. It was indeed the atrium, where we have our yoga class everyday. And, worse! The woman had got converted into our Yoga professor and the deer had yet again vanished. The professor was standing right over my head and nodding his head to display his disapproval. His eyes were shining too, not unlike that of the woman and the deer and were red with anger. He was demanding an explanation for my snoring during shavasana…
