Fiction by actor Manav Kaul: A physical and metaphorical journey to Kashmir to relive the past

There were mountains up ahead that weren’t visible; the entire city was submerged in rain and fog. When I walked into my room the moisture would cling to my feet, again and again. If I touched my body, I could feel the moistness there as well. I didn’t know since when, but my body was adamant about setting out, about going somewhere. Instead of loitering about in one’s home, one’s emptiness finds more purpose if one wanders around in a strange place. I was always among those who looked for a purpose. Now I had the reason to not do anything.

I was in Cherrapunji, and Meghalaya was under lockdown. I couldn’t step out, and it was difficult to roam even in the premises of this hotel as the rains would cease only briefly. So, all in all, there was just a room, or one could sit in the dining area. Now that I couldn’t step out, the fog would keep roaming with me in my room, in sympathy.

I sat at one spot for a long time and watched the passage of time. What is time? If I have paused for now, why does it keep flowing so fast? This, and more questions like this perplex me. According to Einstein, time is not the same everywhere. For instance, for the person living in the hills, time runs faster, and for the one living closer to the sea, time is slower. Likewise, for someone static in one place time runs fast, whereas for someone on the move, time seems to move slowly.

For many years I have lived close to the sea, and for a long time I have been roaming about as well. For me, time has always been slow. I often touch the mountains, where time runs faster, and I return. Sitting on the mountains of Cherrapunji I wondered, do they know that time is running fast for them? I remember once Rooh had asked me, “If you like the hills so much, why don’t you live there?”

I wanted to say yes immediately, but the “yes” got stuck in my throat. I said, “I have often thought about this, but I haven’t been able to decide.”

“You must first decide if you can exist within what is extremely dear to you.”

Rooh knew my answer. But I had no idea about it. A year earlier, I had decided to buy some land in the hills. I had reached Dehradun with the help of my friends and started scouting. I had taken a book along with me: Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. It’s a book about travel, in which Olga records her journey as it unfolds. The closer I got to buying land the farther away this book took me from my land. Once I finished this book, I realised that I am not that person who would make a house in the hills and live there.

I cannot exist in spaces I love. I want to merely wander in them. Even after so many journeys of my own, I was very far from the kind of journeys recorded in this book. At last, I took a room in Landour and began to work on a novel. I am still carrying the incompleteness of that novel within me.

With the desire of seeing the new mountains, I stayed on in Cherrapunji. There was the Seven Sisters Waterfall in front of me and in the distance was Bangladesh. Few things were visible due to the fog, but seeing less gives you much more than seeing more. This constant moistness, and seeing less as opposed to more, was keeping me in a beautiful dreamlike state. For hours on end I would sit in front of a laptop, correcting my bad writing. I could stay in this state for months. Just then, in this frozen, beautiful set-up of mine, I had a dream. When the dream ended, I saw a bright light entering the room from the balcony. I looked at the time, it was ten already.

Truly, time had moved faster in the hills. The clouds were dense, but the rain had held. The imprint of the night could be seen on the morning. I got up but did not immediately sit in front of the laptop; instead, I stepped out on a quest for tea.

After walking for a while, I found a small shop. As soon as the tea touched my hands, I saw the fog enter the shop. Maybe I was still in the dream. I felt that the moment I stepped out of this shop I would be in Kashmir. I had dreamt about Kashmir the previous night.

A sudden occurrence of that dream after so many days seemed strange to me. Like the time I had received the news of my father’s demise, I had come out of my kitchen and begun pacing in the room outside. I was waiting to stumble. I felt that I was still asleep, and I would wake up immediately as I stumbled. But I didn’t and hence couldn’t wake up.

When we go far away, a kind of wait begins. We are looking for something that we can’t find in the place we had been living in. We have to leave our homes to touch the old roots on which this tree stands. We are not trees, though; we can wander.

When Kashmir had been left behind, I would go back there in my dreams each night. In those dreams, I would take all my recently made friends along too. But when I woke up in the morning, I would find myself crying. Our colony in Khwaja Bagh, Baramulla, was deep within me. Mother would ask, “Why do you cry every morning when you wake up?” I would lie to her and say, “Nightmares.” Father was Kashmiri. Whenever I would go to him to talk about my nightmares, I would end up blurting out only one question, “When will we go back to Kashmir?”

His response to my question was always silence.

Excerpted with permission from Rooh, Manav Kaul, Penguin India.