I broke into a trot, negligently hoofing along the path riddled with thick undergrowth and mushy mud. Spineless shrubs drooped lazily on either ends, their heads crowned with wild flowers fidgeted between my legs as I crossed their paths. I wounded my left hind leg around the knee and was slightly bleeding. I paused and looked about me; it was so dark that shadows were clinging desperately to their hosts. Around me were the sights bees buzzing overhead; crickets chirping from their hideouts concealed in the burrows between the trees; birds flitting their wings melodiously from treetops; and antelopes flexing their long bodies on forelimbs. In the distance, there was the bewitching sound of water splashing from a height into a pond.
Near the pond, I heard the sound of lapping tongues; a herd of them must be together. There was no escaping the dark; night had gobbled up everything around me. Fireflies flickered through the branches of tall trees; they were heading nowhere in particular. I often wondered why they knocked into everything that emitted light; their blunt bead shaped heads running into fire lit objects confounded me. Presently, a moth mistook my nostril to a funnel and was tiptoeing inside; I sneezed so hard that it hit the dead bark of a fell tree. The moth was neatly wrapped in my phlegm; with my pointed head, I examined a grasshopper with his frail transparent wings approach the sticky moth. Swaying my thick frilled tail sideways, I turned around to notice that I stood in the middle of a clear ground with fell trees. Lonely and deserted, the dead barks peered at me through their deep eyes beset with pale brown tree rings around them.
I still carried the saddle over my back; it was a mark of domestication. This world was new to me; its lurid darkness and multifarious life frightened me. Back at the stable, I was attended to; hair on my tail was washed every day; and my health monitored. I was let off to amble about aimlessly twice a day, at dawn and dusk. I spent the afternoons ruminating with my head sunk between my forearms. My stable was located at the summit of a mountain; around me, carpets of green fields ran into lolloping folds to meet the horizon. I celebrated the misty mornings cantering about the treeless grasslands.
The wild forest on the contrary, was dark, and filled with pungent air. It inhabited countless variety of nocturnal creatures that silently skidded out of their burrows, merrily suckled their kin, and off they shot into the pitch black night like it sank them in aphrodisiac vapours.
You must be wondering what brought me here. My master was working on an experiment; a tall man with brown beard, he squinted his eyes at everything around him. Nature pleased some and amused some, but it overwhelmed my master. So much so that on a pleasant morning, when I was off to amble along the grainy road, master was meditatively squinting at a tuning fork. At this very moment, his wife, a lady full of grace and poise, lost her footing and fell off the staircase. The balustrade gave off for some mysterious reason, and fell on her spine breaking it into two. Her cries of help never reached the master who continued to squint at the two tongs of the tuning fork. From a distance, i noticed that couple of maids were hurriedly running from the thick iron railed entrance of the mansion towards the house. But I could not care less, it was a pleasant morning and nothing could deter me from sneezing and hoofing.
I returned to find that the ladyship required urgent medical help. Master was devastated; he stood before the curtain-less windows that overlooked my stable. Outside, dark clouds smudged the blue sky and in no time, it began raining. There was no time to loose; the lady could have sustained internal injuries. In the rain that beat on my strong hips ‘splash-splash’ with heavy drops, through the mud water that dirtied my legs, master and the missus rode on my wide back. The nearest hospital was about sixty kilometres away on road; through the forest, it was about half of that.
Naturally, given the circumstances, master kicked the heel of his boot into my side belly and I proceeded with caution into the woods. The entrance to the forest greeted us with haphazardly laid out logs of wood; squirrels slid past us; snake heads sat on neatly wound tails; monkeys hung to slim branches by the hook of their tails; and dogs were chasing rabbits. As I rode past the innocuous entrance into the forest’s belly, sunlight dimmed; leaves broadened; hyenas were tearing apart raw buffalo flesh; flies laid themselves out like a spotty mat on dead corpses; fat mosquitoes forked open our exposed skin; and the master rode me into a quagmire.
As the sand sucked us in, a group of wild monkeys gathered around us for the feast; they lowered themselves on the hanging banyan roots but were dissuaded as the master belligerently protected the missus and me. The cacophony grew louder as we soldiered on helplessly. It occurred to me that neither my training nor my master’s natural curiosity was of much help.
Then it happened. With a jolt, sand beneath my feet slid away and my front hooves settled into solid grooves. Master sensing the opportunity, crawled onto my back and sat motionless with the ladyship’s dead body in his arms. She died in the fall, it was tragic; even more tragic was the fact that we were going to die too. Hours passed by; that night, a tiresome master tried his might to shoo away the monkeys that dug their teeth into the dead ladyship from suspended hooks of their tails. In the dark, we spent the night amidst nocturnal eyes that peered at us from treetops and burrows. As the night wore on us, I grew weary too; but I showed no signs of it, lest the devastated master attempted anything silly.
It was dark throughout, I sensed the mornings from the retreat of nocturnal creatures into their hideouts. The night after, pungent smell rose up from the dead body and announced to the woods of its presence. This drew rabid drooling foxes to the scene; the monkeys climbed a bit higher, and a trail of wild ants was already limping across the quicksand with their feeble bodies to feed on the corpse. But the master did not budge; as the ants nipped away a bosom of the corpse, he embraced it closer; as one of the monkeys chipped away the ear and a cheek, he embraced it even closer.
All around us, hungry mouths impatiently waited for us to die. A week passed and now the dead corpse in master’s arms sported but flesh on her thighs and around the ankles. Rest of it was gorged heavily by the monkeys and ants; on the fourth day, a lean boned fox attempted a long jump, snatched the jaw bone and jumped back. The poor thing ended up in the quicksand himself; this deterred other foxes from attempting an aggressive jump. Three weeks passed, and the master folded the skeleton of the dead corpse into a saddle and wore it around my belly.
Months and years passed, seasons changed; flowers blossomed, leaves shed and the quagmire carpeted with dry twigs. In the summer, the heat was unbearable; our collective sweat oiled the quagmire like a lubricant does a machine’s; in the winters, mosquitoes turned our pale bodies into spotty blotches; rainy season was the most harrowing of all, it filled the brim of quagmire’s walls and asphyxiated us.
Through the decades and centuries, around us, tall trees shed their branches and eventually fell themselves; generations of monkeys, hyenas, nocturnal creatures, ants and baboons evolved. The forest thinned and sunlight trickled – at first in random shafts into the dense forests, and later it trickled through the porous membrane of the thinning forest top and occupied the whole.
Finally the men came; they brought tractors, earth movers and bulldozers with them. In their wake, forest bereaved like a mother dog whose babies are dragged away from her by the master to sell, one by one. All the trees were felled and we were rescued after ten thousand years. The quagmire itself dried out, for the forest thinned and the sun squeezed every last drop out of it. The wild beasts were a thing of past now. Even ants shrunk in size, their bellies now smaller and antennae stiffer; one found them trailing upside down running along white washed walls of cement roofs for hours and hours together to nip away a puny little sugar lump.
Snakeheads no longer sat leisurely staring into the woods; they now hid under the door mats of newly constructed houses in the area that was once their forest. If found, they were preposterously exhibited to a crowd; snakes now rose up from a rope basket to sway their heads nonsensically.
A carcass was no longer feasted upon like it happened in the past; now the carcasses were that of slender boned and undernourished creatures; it evoked feelings of pity rather than hunger. A wild buffalo, who once drove away a herd of lions at the water pool in the belly of the dense forest, was now found ruminating about its glorious past. Munching grass in the afternoons by the shade of thatched roofs of milk poultries, one did not find a sadder imagery than this.
Monkeys had adapted to occupy temples and feed on the leftovers; where once they whisked away with authority and exhibited power in group formations, now they surreptitiously sneaked from behind a little girl to snatch a handful of coconut. Ferocious foxes had become petty dogs sniffing their way into the garbage heaps. There was a time when their frothing saliva in packs got solitary lions into shivers; now they licked their masters’ paws more than their own, sight of unmistakable evolution. Eh!
We returned home to find our mansion replaced with thirty storeyed buildings. Automobiles whizzed past with big mouths honking horns; rattling paths of the past were replaced with tar roads. The romance of sitting by the summit of the mountain and gazing upon the folded carpet of green fields that kissed the horizons was no longer there. In its place were the sedentary seats and crouched cubicles behind glass walls. Master could not bear it; we visited the national science museum, and ransacked the place for our tuning fork.
Since then, with a tuning fork in his hand, master rode on my mauve back in search of past.
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