Death Of A Demon

I held on to the cold, jagged walls of rocks on both sides of me. My feet felt off-balance. Sunlight peeked through the crevices above me. The sound of gurgling water became louder with every step I took down the uneven stairs, leading me to the tunnel's end.

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“The waterfall at the end of it better be worth the treacherous hike,” I muttered to Nikhil. 

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We learnt about this waterfall from a kind local. It did not exist on the tourist map.

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The end of the tunnel was flooded with sunlight. Nikhil took my hand and helped me get off the last stair, onto the stream that flowed below us. The shallow water rippled on a bed of pebbles. A slight left turn, and we were looking at a magnificent waterfall - a tropical paradise at the end of a treasure hunt.

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We had come to Bali so that I could take my mind off things, after the biggest tragedy of our lives two months ago. The previous two trips were all about roaming the temples, swimming in the warm sea, and hiking a volcanic mountain. On that trip, between chatting with the friendly locals and lying under a starlit sky, Bali grew under our skin. We carried a little bit of the island back home with us. This time, we had no plans. We only wanted to be swaddled in the island’s peace. 

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The veils of water cascaded down many frothy levels, spanning several metres in breadth. It was a combination of many waterfalls that joined hands to form a big one. Sunlight streamed through the thick foliage above to form small illuminated patches in the pool of water at the base of the waterfall. Not a soul was in sight.  Below a tree, a local deity made of stone sat surrounded by a few tiny bamboo boxes with flowers and rice offerings lying around him.

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For a few minutes, I admired the thick foliage of countless shades of green, interspersed with ferns, and moss-laden rocks. Birds chirped boisterously as if trying to settle an argument.

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Then the Red Shadow loomed from the corner of a big tree on the right side of the waterfall. With its accusing eyes, it reproved me for my failure.

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This Red Shadow has been tormenting me in the past two months. It was more obtrusive when I was alone.  And even when I did not see the shadow, I felt its dull pain in my chest; as if it was grabbing my torso. It lurked around me, jabbing my back whenever it pleased. In my exhaustion,  I surrendered to its scalding embrace as my mind sunk into the whirlwind of that fateful night when the shadow was born. Since then, it had dug its sharp claws into me, scraping the veneer of normalcy off my surface to expose the guilt and shame below. A glob of white pain dug a hole in my heart. For weeks, I lay inert on my bed day and night, chained in a mesh of powerlessness. Nikhil and my mother suggested that I needed a change in routine. I took time off from work and tried diverting my mind with music and reading. Nothing worked. We decided to consult a therapist after the vacation.

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At the time of the miscarriage,  I was visiting my mother in her remote town. Lying in a pool of blood, in a crumbling government hospital in the town, I saw the shadow rise from the head of my stillborn child and colour my line of vision. They buried my baby by the river Ganga. We didn’t cremate stillborn babies in our faith, they told me.

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Two months after the tragedy, I still could not bear to look at rivers and streams without thinking of my baby. Was her body fused into the soil and water by now?  “Why did this happen?” I had asked many times. To myself, Nikhil, the doctors, God. “Unexplainable, a freak of nature,” the doctors had said. Coils of agony gripped my being since then. Nikhil, though still grieving, remained the bastion of strength for the both of us. He was now wading through the pool below the waterfall, trying to find a shallow spot to unwind.

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To escape the Red Shadow, I focussed on the waterfall. The veil of water falling from several meters above me hit me hard on my head. I went to its periphery, where the force of water was less.

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Water, the primordial. In whose buoyant cushion, life began in the womb. The bearer of joys and sorrows inside our hearts and bodies. The claimant of the last ashes and remains of the ones who we held dear. And now, it was a shield, pouring down on me. Through its eternal cycles of precipitation, it transcended time and space. I pushed out all thoughts of other times and spaces. I wanted to be right where I was. I felt the shadow’s invisible grip on my chest loosening.

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I looked up through the droplets of water and saw a golden rim of light encircling a stream. Little golden droplets floated about in an unusual pattern. Shaped like the palm of a hand. It slowly morphed into something with wings. Little glowing balls of something. It fluttered.  What was this beautiful creature in this dense forest?

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“Maya!” Nikhil called out to me.

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I turned around, pushing the long, wet strands of hair away from my face with my hand. 

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“Look!” I said pointing upward. When we gazed upward, it was only the water falling between the ferns. Moments ago, I thought I could touch those illuminated aerial creatures. And now their absence mocked me. I blinked several times, hoping to conjure them each time I opened my eyes. But they were nowhere to be seen. Nikhil studied my face with confusion. I did not venture to describe what I saw to him.

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I was starting to doubt myself. Was I hallucinating? Some kind of play of reflection and refraction of water droplets? A small part of me rebelled against reason. Did I need to know everything? It was magical. It was as vibrant as the sun shining above me. I could keep this memory in my treasure trove to revisit on cold, dark days.

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We returned to our homestay in Ubud, the spiritual heart of Bali. We sat in the garden looking over verdant rice fields. As the sun went down, the sky got busy painting a riot of grey, blue, orange, pink and everything in between. This time of the day never got old. We looked in awe, sipping the cool watermelon juice that our host served. As the night descended, we sat on our balcony, listening to the night sounds of the cicadas and owls. The night was when I got the saddest. Nikhil put his arm around me.

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Something quivered. Rapidly. A vibrating ball of energy. It leapt from me to him at first. Then from him to me. We stared at each other with surprise writ on our faces.

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“What IS this?” Nikhil asked. I had no answer.

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It was akin to a mild electric current but without the unpleasantness of it. We sat still. A part of me feared the unknown. The dash of energy kept moving and flowing. At first, it pulsated in my heart. Slowly, it emanated to the rest of my body like a symphony.

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After a few minutes, my limbs thrummed with a pulsing ache. Like the one that comes after the effort of a strenuous run. A raw, gratifying release. But beneath it, a shiver sliced through my body, like a rush of cold water crashing through me. The two infused the nerves in my body with electrifying wakefulness. A violent contrast - exhaustion and revival, heat and cold, tangled in a jolt that surged through every fibre of my body. I looked at Nikhil. His eyes were closed. He looked too absorbed to speak. Only his fingers twitched a little. Was he starting to tune into this sweet release that I could not define?

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By the end of the evening, my mind was empty and my body felt light. Sleep weighed our eyelids. We did not need more words. It just felt right. The next morning, I felt like air. The clenching feeling in my heart was gone. I realized I hadn’t felt the shadow for a whole day. As the days rolled into the week of our vacation without its ugly head popping hither and thither, I knew I was free.

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It was common knowledge that nature and time could heal everything. But our experience spilt beyond the edges of those simplistic theorisations. My engineer’s mind went in circles, pushing hard to reason my experience into tightly set moulds of the world we know. Maybe that waterfall allowed us to disconnect from our familiar surroundings wired with grief. Maybe the dash of energy was the release that was waiting to happen for months. 

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At last, I could only conclude that I knew only a miniscule of all that existed in our realm of reality. With much effort, I willed my mind to stem its overdrive. For who didn’t love a little bit of magic in their lives? We went about our usual tourist days in Bali. Five days after that special day, we returned home to Bangalore.

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True to its nature, life flowed with its many undulations. We rejoiced in some. We weathered other storms. On some, we fell on our knees and picked ourselves up again. Whenever I needed buoying, I closed my eyes and invoked the memories from Bali to bathe in the blessing of those moments. It reminded me of the impermanence of our miseries. We are now parents to a three-year-old, who is vexed at not finding himself in our photographs from that Bali trip. The Red Shadow has become a demon of the past that dissolved in the island's water; the conduit of all that ebbs and flows. 

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