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Mist in the Valley

As he put the jeep at the gentle gradient that started from the Chandi
Mandir army base at the outskirts of Chandigarh, in the Punjab, Captain Udayan Bose,
‘Uday’ to his family and friends, exulted. The war was over, his unit had been given a
fortnight’s leave, and here he was driving up the lovely road to Kalka, from where the
Simla hills started. The British had made this road nearly two hundred years ago, and
their love for their work, the sheer poetry of their road building, was evident.
It flew, straight as an arrow, to the Kalka turnpike, then curved away into
the hills, following the natural contours as it climbed past Barotiwala and headed towards
Solan, the halfway point on this famous old road to Simla, summer capital of the British
Raj. Beyond Solan, the road got steeper as it ran up against stubborn resistance, which the
English had overcome with dynamite, blasting hairpin bends through the mountains,
keeping the gradient just right, smoothly rising away through the mist and into the clouds.
He was only twenty-eight, footloose and fancy free, and all nature seemed
to smile indulgently on the happy-go-lucky, handsome young soldier as he whistled his
favorite tune, the theme from ‘A Fistful of Dollars’, a melody not easy to whistle unless
one is very happy. Exceeding happy now was Udayan Bose, as only youth can be when
there is free transport of one’s taste at one’s disposal, a long holiday ahead, and, at the
end of the road, a gray old mother, affectionately scolding but hot with her pride at her
only son, all grown up, a man, and a fighting soldier like his late father.
Then there was Tara, his sister, and they would tease each other and joke
about the good old days, the deep bond between them never voiced but always there,
always keenly felt. Yes, a young man, so precious to nature, lighthearted and with the
world at his feet, many girls to miss him but no special one to keep him awake nights, an
open jeep, blue skies with fleecy little clouds adding just the right contrast, the pines on
the hillsides, the winding road seeming to climb to the clouds themselves, the Valhalla
trail for warriors fallen in battle…which soul was so poor, so insensitive, that it could not
understand his elation?
He thought, as he reveled in the power of the jeep as it flattened the
terrain, how right was everything, how perfect, remembering some words he had read in
a recent book called ‘Memories are Made of This’, in which the author had quoted a
columnist called Jason Schneider who wrote on cameras. “Using a Leica is like driving a
Ferrari on a winding road;” Schneider had written, “the sheer excellence of the machinery
creates the overwhelming illusion that one’s modest capabilities had been vastly
extended.” Uday knew what he was attempting to describe: the ecstasy and exhilaration
of adventure.
There was a tide, surging in his blood, that drew songs to his lips, made
his feet tap to some inner music of the heart; all of him seemed to beat and throb in time
with nature, he was so pathetically young, it was touching, but this he didn’t know, he
thought of himself as a cool, professional soldier. Only at war, maybe, and that was a
grim business at best, something he hated, deep in his heart of hearts; how he loved that
quote from Carl Sandburg: “Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.” Ha!
Ha! What a blow for the Generals and the politicians, who sent young men out to die for
causes they didn’t pretend to know much about.
The previous night had been spent in revelry in the mess with his friends,
also off on their own vacations, and the heavy brunch of rice and chicken curry, topped
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off with two bottles of beer, was beginning to get to him. He checked a yawn as the
Chambaghat turnoff was left behind, and now the road was high in the mountains; the
entire valley lay unrolled to his left as the sturdy little vehicle lurched around the bends.
Uday was drowsy, and he recalled his father telling him, long ago, how he’d been sitting
next to the driver of a three-tonner on the Bareilly-Moradabad road, and the man had
dozed off. If he hadn’t grabbed the steering wheel, the car, already drifting, at speed,
would have gone clean off the road.
For a moment, Uday’s own eyes seemed to lose focus and there was a
momentary blankness…then he had recovered quickly from the wave of sleep that had
taken him unawares, a little shaken by it. It hadn’t been too healthy a spot, either, just
some railings and the misty valley floor thousands of feet below.
He pulled over to the side, took out the canteen of water and splashed
water thoroughly on his face, even soaking his hair, before pouring himself a cup of
coffee from the thermos his batman had thoughtfully packed. There were sandwiches,
too, but these he ignored, he wasn’t hungry, and suddenly his spirits sobered as the
euphoria left him unaccountably. He decided to press on home to Simla without any
further delay and give Mother and Tara the surprise of their lives.
He hadn’t told them he was coming, to that old house with the antique
plumbing that he heard the Americans were willing to pay generously for. Americans!
They were nuts about history, tradition and that sort of thing, dismantling old Saxon
castles and re-assembling them in Connecticut or wherever. Crazy! He had heard that if a
castle was said to be haunted, it fetched double the price, they were so keen on men in
ruffed collars walking around with their heads under their arms, or dragging a ball-and-
chain around at the stroke of the midnight hour.
Uday was keen on westerns, especially ones that had John Wayne in them
(although he felt ‘Chisum’ was going just a little bit too far, John Wayne was in bad
shape from his multiple lung operations after the cancer had hit him, and looked all done
in) but he didn’t mind a chiller now and then. He had seen the ‘Omen’ series and was
impressed by its direction and cinematography, and ‘The Exorcist’ had been almost as
good as the book, quite a feat because portraying the supernatural was easier in print than
on celluloid. It was incredible, an evil spirit having its way with a woman whenever it
liked: what did it take to produce that kind of mind, one like Blatty’s, he wondered?
Writing a really convincing ghost story was probably the most difficult thing of all, he
mused.
Though he’d never really believed in ghosts and spirits, Uday, like most
people, had a fascination for them—as if Hollywood and Stephen King didn’t know that
already, he thought cynically. ‘The Omen’ had raked in enough box-office receipts to
feed India for a year. And now this unknown Indian director with the weird name, Manoj
Night Shyamalan or something, had made a movie called ‘The Sixth Sense’ about a boy
who could actually see spirits! And this guy, this formerly unknown Indian fellow, had
won awards and had now roped in Bruce Willis, of all people (what made that moron
divorce his lovely wife Demi Moore, he’d never figure out, the lousy, reed-voiced,
celluloid strongman…any of the guys in Commando training could take out Willis in
about five seconds, he fumed) for his next movie.
The post-prandial stupor had passed, and Uday drove cleanly,
automatically, letting his mind keep itself busy as he drove…this ghost story stuff was
just what the doctor had ordered to prevent him from dozing off at the wheel again.
That…that little incident back there had been most unlike him. The careless didn’t
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survive long on mountain roads…especially if they were unlucky enough to attract the
unwelcome attentions of a Churail. Churails, he’d been told, were spirits that looked like
beautiful—very beautiful—women, in white (remember William Wilkie Collins and his
book of the same name, The Woman in White…and what about ‘The Moonstone’, also by
him?). Uday always found that he had a book title or two up his sleeve to match a given
situation; it was a trick of his mind that many appreciated but some deprecated. He
shrugged, as if to say that was how he was made, take it or leave it.
Speaking of Churails, he knew of two cases, personally experienced by
people well known to him, people whom he would trust with his life to tell the truth. The
first concerned an old friend, who worked in an insurance company as a Field Officer. He
had been transferred to Jammu, and one evening, as rode uphill on his motorcycle on the
road to Katra, the roadhead for the holy shrine of Vaishnodevi, he passed a woman in
white. She was alone, and though well dressed and obviously well-to-do, she was
unescorted and on foot. For a moment, he had slowed the motorbike in a sympathetic
reflex, but had kept on his way, even though they had looked each other in the eye. This
was India; one didn’t dream of offering lifts to strange women, and that too on the pillion
of one’s motorcycle. Happily married he was, my unlucky friend, thought Uday, but the
woman’s raw beauty had impressed him.
And as he rode on, he got a queer feeling that he was not alone on the
machine: there was someone on the pillion. But every time he turned around uneasily to
check, he found, of course, that there was no one there. Six kilometers later, he met with
a near-fatal accident that had him hospitalized for several months. “Death rode with me,
that fateful day in the mountains,” his friend used to say with utter conviction, “for her
feet were turned backwards, a fact that registered on me some time after I’d passed her.
Even now, her evil beauty haunts my dreams.” According to him, this was the
unmistakable sign of the Churail, the backwards-turned feet. “When death is near, you
can sense it, feel it, Uday, believe me.”
Uday hoped that wasn’t true. When he met Death, he didn’t want to know
about it; he just wanted to die unawares, with a song on his lips, like a happy warrior. He
wasn’t exactly the spiritual or philosophical type, but now he found himself reflecting on
the fact that Satan so often used things that weren’t his, things that were holy, such as
beauty, which was a holy thing, whether physical or mental. But he couldn’t quite get his
act together, so that the imitation came out flawed, like the beauty with the feet pointing
the wrong way. Could it be, he thought, that all love, all literature, even ghost stories,
were all flawed copies of the original, divine versions?
No matter how much we pontificate about our personal perceptions of
these divine things, wasn’t it true that they were far removed from the real items? Was
this the reason why the Great Masters, who got a glimpse of them, could never speak
coherently on the subject afterwards except through the medium of parables? Their
explanations were unintelligible to others simply because the Divine was only
approachable at the intuitive and not the intellectual level.
As he drove on, Uday recalled the second case. He had reached Jammu, en
route to a pilgrimage to the famous shrine of Vaishnodevi, and decided to hire a taxi upto
Katra. To his lot fell a taxi owner-driven by a man not much older than himself, a
handsome Rajput with a regal air about him. As they drove into the hills, Rajaji (as the
owner of the taxi—real name Parminder Singh Minhas—was so appropriately called)
regaled him with stories of these hills and this treacherous road…tales that made Uday’s
scalp tingle, for the Rajput was a great raconteur. Once, he said, he had stopped to give a
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lift to an old woman with a bundle on her back. Rajaji was driving one of his trucks at the
time, and since the cab had a spacious bench seat behind the driver, he felt it would do no
harm to accommodate the old lady who was, apparently, even older than his mother.
But once on the road, he had the sinking feeling that usually accompanies
a realization that one has made a serious error of judgment. As Rajaji drove on, he
claimed, the truck seemed to get heavier and heavier, which was surprising because it
was empty at the time. Out of the corner of his eye, the noticed a movement behind him,
and glancing around, found to his surprise that the old crone was transformed into a very
beautiful young woman in a white ‘suit’ (as they nowadays laconically refer to the
traditional female attire of women in the north, comprising basically a long kurta or long-
shirt, and pajamas.) But the pajamas the woman wore were the ‘chust’ variety, i.e., they
were tight fitting, regarded in this conservative region as being rather unconventional if
not downright forward. Few respectable women wore them in their native village,
perhaps keeping a pair or two for the occasional visit to friends or to the big city.
Rajaji had warrior blood in his veins, but even that ran cold as he realized
the implications of the situation; a glance at her feet had confirmed his worst fears, for
they were pointing backwards. In his philanthropic zeal, he had unwittingly given a lift to
a Churail! The Rajputs are a martial race who prefer to die in battle rather than run away
(Uday knew that: he belonged to a famous regiment—the legendary Rajputana Rifles—
that had twice given the Pakistani Rangers severe chastisement. They were men who
could march at a hundred and forty paces a minute in full battle dress, who literally lived
the regimental motto ‘Death Before Dishonour’).
Rajaji was prepared to die, but he was not prepared to show his fear. He
matter-of-factly asked the woman where she wanted to get off. At seeing his boldness,
she indicated that she wished to get off right there, and, sliding past him to the offside
door, opened it and alighted, with the truck doing fifty kilometers an hour! But not before
telling him that had he shown the slightest sign of fear, she would have killed him.
They became close friends, Uday and the proud warrior who was, in a
special sort of way, his clansman, so much so that Rajaji waited for him at Katra while he
went up to the shrine and returned the following day, spurning lucrative offers for a
return trip from other pilgrims simply because he had given his word to the tall Army
Captain that he would drive him back to Jammu. He did not strike Uday as a braggart or a
teller of tall tales. And from the salutes they received all along the road from sundry
drivers, it was obvious that Rajaji was a well-respected man in the region.
As his jeep moved ever closer towards home, Uday remembered his good
friend Rajaji again with affection, for they corresponded regularly, and Uday
remembered the Rajput’s long letter of appreciation at receiving copies of his
photographs that he had taken of him. Thinking of Rajaji set off a chain reaction in his
mind, and he recalled, one by one, all the dear friends he had made in his life, some still
in touch and some now scattered in the struggle for existence. He recalled sadly that
many of his batch-mates had perished in the war, and he hoped their folks were coping
with their loss. It was said that in the bloody battles of the Marne and at places like
Ypres, during the First World War, the spirits of dead men were often seen marching in
broad daylight.
Now his mind went off at a tangent and he recalled the story of one of his
favorite books, ‘The Shepherd’, by Arthur Hailey, where a fighter pilot, lost in fog over
the Channel, his plane low on fuel and with the radar shot to pieces, is guided down to a
deserted airstrip by another fighter that seems to come out of nowhere. On landing he
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finds that the aged warplane, whose identification numbers he quotes, had been shot
down years ago. The concerned pilot had perished in the crash, and his defunct squadron
had long been de-commissioned. Chilling…but strangely heart-warming, being guided
down by a long-dead pilot. Stranger things have happened in war, he reflected…it was
rumored that even now, in the Ardennes, the villagers sometimes hear the rumble of
phantom Tiger tanks, with their fearsome .88 caliber high-velocity guns, as they continue
to fight the battle-weary Allies in the Battle of the Bulge, December 1944.
Now Uday found himself on the home stretch, putting the jeep into first
gear as it howled up the steep slope to the old house. He parked under the pines to the left
of the drive, then gathering his bags and the presents he had bought for his mother and
Tara, went up to the door and rang the bell. It took quite some time before it was opened,
and he didn’t recognize the new servant, who silently admitted him into the drawing
room. Dumping his things on the sofa, he heard barking upstairs, which was just old
Billy; man, was the old boy going to jump in his lap, he loved Uday so! Billy came
bounding down the stairs, took one look and vanished under the sofa. Silly dog, didn’t he
have a nose or something, so what if Uday Uncle was in uniform?
Then they were coming down, and he could see that his mother had aged,
she was all bent over, sort of frail-like, it didn’t feel too good to see your dear ones
wasting away with age, why did it have to be this way, why couldn’t people just live
throughout life as they looked in their prime. And Tara, my God, she looked like she’d
seen a ghost, the way she was staring at him. He held out his arms to them and yelled at
the top of his voice “Mother! Tara! I’m home!” But there was no response, and under the
sofa, Billy gave a plaintive whine. His mother looked into his eyes. “You loved us that
much, Uday…that you would come back…all the way…Oh! You poor, sweet boy, just
my luck, first your father, then you…” And Tara, eyes red-rimmed (with weeping?)…
“What the hell’s going on, what’s with all this… what’s the big idea, guys,
some kind of a joke?” he remonstrated. “Now look here, people, I’ve had a long drive
and I’m bushed, I don’t need this crap, so spare me, OK?” No reply.
Then they were holding each other, his mother and Tara, sobbing
desperately, as the old Panditji who had let him in, now stole up cautiously behind him
and sprinkled the Ganges-water on his head, muttering incantations … and he got it,
finally.
He’d bought it, back at that turning in the mountains when he’d dozed off,
gone clean off the edge, the jeep smashing the flimsy railings aside like toothpicks in its
vulgar haste to reach the valley floor, with his life flashing before his eyes and all that
ghost story stuff coming up just to warn him…but his wish had been granted, he hadn’t
known a thing, it wasn’t his fault, then, that he’d come back to take one last look at them,
the only people who mattered to him, he’d seen them, and now it was time to go.
Capt.Udayan Bose, late of the Rajputana Rifles, walked out of the house
without a backward glance, down the road and into the misty valley that lay beyond.

~*~
“It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.”
~THOMAS MANN, The Magic Mountain