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“How do you know the fish won’t eat us first?” asked her husband. Death seemed so close that we could talk about it flippantly. “We should do something to spare our people the bother of searching for us,”said Charan. He seemed ready for the end. In the pitch darkness I could imagine his aquiline nose, his thin neck and his lips set in a grim smile. “This is what we can do,” he said, and he emptied Suman’s wicker-work basket. Then we heard the rustle of paper. Suman always says we should expect the unexpected from Charan, in word and action. She seemed to lighten a bit as she watched. I imagined that little dimple which forms below her left cheek when she is amused; it helped to put me at ease too, mostly for her sake. “I am going to write on this,” Charan continued, “‘We were drowned near the Teesta Bridge. Please inform our relatives.’” We could hear the scratch of paper in the eerie silence. We thought it was one of his macabre jokes. But he did really fold the paper in a strip of polythene, fix it to the inside of the basket, and fling the basket down the hill. The water cast an eerie gleam and we imagined the basket falling halfway down the hill and rolling into the speeding Teesta. But the moment with its butterfly-lightness lasted for only a brief while. It is strange that when one accepts the inevitable, one goes whole-hog and taunts oneself with every unpleasant fact of its consequence. We reflected on how our disappearance would affect our families. Charan and I both knew that as members of joint families with flourishing businesses, we were respected as elder sons and as responsible men who helped in running the businesses. “ Of course, they’ll miss us,” I said. A pause. “And then younger brothers.” Charan completed my thought. The callous fact gnawed at me: Is this all life means? Is every individual dispensable? Do we leave no mark at all? What, was life as ruthless as the Teesta which had washed away the landmarks of the valley? Like the landmarks, would we too be lost and forgotten? For the first time, in the emptiness around us and with an angry river below, the pitiable helplessness of us as individuals struck me. Four green spots atop a crest, then nothing; the image accompanied this thought. At 10 p.m., we heard the needlewood tree crunch its last roots out of the earth and tumble with slow reluctance into the water. We looked at each other. “What do we do now?” Charan said. The absence of the tree’s silhouette changed the appearance of the surroundings, which in some subtle way it had helped to render familiar. The darkly gleaming expanse of water swirled ferociously close now.
MOUNT HOPE