So this is day two in alwar with dhruv and alap in alwar (read: spirit~catcher before).We just return from a night trip on karni hill, during the ninth night of navratris.. Dhruv is partially mad,his behavior from the first night has made me rethink my sanity in his presence.. his existence; i dunno collapses on him by this time or something, both of these are from my school, alap being in the same college too. I know dhruv from before, he is one of the nicest genuine people i have ever met. But hes been suffering from some kind of mental block for a while, and its clearly visible, the last night on the karni hill with the full moon made him a lot more unstable, he showed some weird behaviour to alap and me. But all was good on a trip until its no good anymore. We crashed in the hotel till afternoon, I had walked a lot the previous night. and some good rest and instant death was needed.
We get up after some 4 hours of rest and decide to go to another place. That was one of the reasons i decided to trip with these two people, both were strong, for doin absolutely vela panti, to use all resources in the body for a quick powerful journey.
We head to the taxi stand after finding out another site to see. There is a huge lake some distance from alwar-silserh, some 20 odd km away from alwar. The buses are there, but we want to spend some chilling time travelling, so we take a taxi one way to the place.. on the way i get to see all the ourskirts of this small town. its a typical rajasthan village... low levels of litracy, hygine and immense poverty. But the weather and the sights were pleasant enough. We reach silserh in a while.. we drop ourselves and see a huge hotel where all the other tourists were also present, this was the only human inhabitation near this lake, the hotel (a costly one).. had taken over exclusively, so people visiting this place, sit in its outside restaurant and eat their food, we did the same. some energy food while we looked over the lake. it was huge, considerably full and completely empty.. some boats at the periphery but no one had been making business recently.
Perhaps it was off season. The hotel is perfect and cosy for couples, a perfect getaway... rooms looking over the lake. and nothing else to bother, no human interruptions :)
So we decide to descend from the hotel to get to the lake, after all we didnt come all the way to eat up some asshole hotels food, we need to be right next to the water... many langurs with cruel grimacing looks on the way, i am never happy with langurs, but i try to be brave.. we reach close to the lake, its too placid and beautiful, and no single person anywhere for miles.. its a huge lake, there is a highway road at the extreme end at one part of the lake... and the entire scenery is surrounded by hills.. an amazing sight. We go forward to look for a place to sit and chill out, takes us time but we finally find a place close enough to the lake which is clean too. Twilight is upon us, its getting darker by the minute. We sit and make ourselves at ease, dhruv borrows alaps pod and starts listenin to his collection, in no time hes become very emotional. Sudden outpouring emotions for him, its probably in a long time hes gotten out, and sat at ease with people at ease.
I enjoy myself thoroughly, the lake doesnt stir, so we get up and slide rocks on it. There is ease, and freedom within each of us.
It gets darker so we start moving back, we find a little village road at one end of the lake and start following it, we find some village folk who tell us that the road will lead to the main road. Thats all we needed to hear, we see the moon come up (tonight is full moon- an amazing shine already in the sky~) and start seeing every part of the jungle road in a different light. Dhruv is very concerned (a city reaction for city folk) that we will get lost and die or something, alap and i dont pay him any attention, he starts to irk me now, with his random psychotic behavior, so i move slow while alap moves faster than his pace :) , and dhruv is left to alternate between fast and slow to be with both of us .. hahaha... there are some houses away from this road and the road keeps going on and on, i guess walking it... it would have been some 7-8 kms in length... we stop over at one place where we head off to the middle of a field and relax... the entire field is white in moon light... amazing. Fields always house lots of snakes, so I remain a bit cautious. Then we start back on the road, alap takes some route and gets lost, none of us even have a torch, so all three of us become separate during the walk, I start shouting their names and finally i get to hear alap shouting back too, so we meet up and similarly we find dhruv... the locals would have thought us to be mad or drunk i guess.
So we reach the main road and then finding no bus there, just head back in the road we came from, the night was young and we were still in a mood to trip though we had already walked quite a bit.
So here is where the fun bit starts, we head back in for quite a distance on the lonely moonlit covered road, and find a patched area to sit by, a smaller road goes inwards where couple of thatched houses are. The lights arent there, and we sit there for a long while. we have no hope of catching a bus this late (around 12) and we didnt know what was coming next, perhaps that was the error.
Dhruv is listening to the pod and weeping and going crazy again, alap paces up and down on the road, half mad. and i am too tired to even stretch.
Suddenly some people arrive on bycycles- the inhabitants of the houses near by; they ask alap who we are or something but alap doesnt understand them, and perhaps replies to them very incoherently, they look at me and dhruv sitting like drunkards on the ground in the dirt. They dont tell us anything. i dont even bother to look at them closely. i ought to have had.
Suddenly the entire house is awake, and everyone is shouting.. we start heading out of the place.. they come behind us, all males. telling us to stop; at this type of a situation there are but two options, stand and defend yourself-cause u were not doing anything wrong, or avoid the trouble and make a run for it, i should have gone with the latter~~
Some 4 young arses like ourselves surround us, and start questioning us, alap isnt too bright with hindi and dhruv is an arse, so i tell them that we just chilling there, they tell us to come back to near the house, in the plain light we can all see each others faces clearly, the entire household is there, and now i see that all the males are carrying sticks.
There are women, children (many of them) and the elders (two of them), all congregated - so they start grilling us slowly, asking and asking and asking our intention and our nationality. They can see that we are not from there and they confirm it when they get to know we are from delhi,
there isnt proper coordination between us three, and this gets them more suspicious, they cant fathom that we just chilling in their backyard cause we were goddam tired. that we were tourists.
The young ones are out of their head drunk. they were the ones who caught us and listening to alap in the first go must have triggered that we are some asshole tourists with a lot of money for them, so they suddenly start accusing us of stealing their buffalo and how that costs some 20,000 rupees and how they want it NOW, or they will take care of us.
this is when i get psyched, they are all smaller than me, and i could have fought to survive, but they have laths, and one on the head and i would be deep in concussion in the middle of no where. i did not like myself entertaining the eventual consequence of this horrid moment
The young ones start playing with out bags and our hair and what not, i get couple of slaps to my head, to show that they are the men, and dhruv gets his specs broken (without which he is absolutely blind) cause he gets so frantic at the situation, that he is not able to control his smiles and his tears ~ (for true!)
alap is rational but after some time he as I, realize what is going on, this family has seen an oppertunity to steal. They want to rationalize it and take it, mostly the younger guys. Alap takes out all his money and offers them, but there is one elder (the guy who becomes our saviour, who doesnt want anyone to touch the money till its all resolved)- he wants to know what we are actually doing there in the middle of the night, and i (cause i am most fucking rational and sober in this mad group) explain over and over and over again-pleading, silently, defiantly, angered yet in control- that we are just chilling and that this is wrong- what they plan to do.
he understands that, yet the elder also keeps looking at the money kept, he doesnt want anyone to be near it, yet he is also mesmerized by it. i could see that; these folks hadnt seen some 8-9 500 rupee notes together for perhaps a very long time.
This ordeal easily lasted more than an hour, in which we all got assaulted and basically humiliated in the middle of nowhere, i was now too tired to argue anymore.. so at the last go i tell him that if he wants to steal from a shiva bhakt he is free to do so.
The elder of the family suddenly gets up from where he was seated (next to me listening to me, while all the hooligans had us surrounded and were standing)- he tells me to get up and looks at the others as well, he tells us to get our stuff, and take our money and get out then.
The young fuckers arent happy, they are drunk and ofcourse in front of money have no conscience- they would have been happy to have taken the money and then perhaps offered us some water while telling us not to steal any more buffaloes it seems.
These fuckers lunge for us, the elder actually comes in between us and them to tell us to leave then. We walk like we have never walked before, dhruv is still in a daze, while alap and i are very very very relieved to have survived from a lathi charge.
The night is still young, and without a single transport on the road, we walk all the way back to alwar city (some total distance of 30 odd km walked in 4 hours), which we reach again by early morning, we arent able to find our way back to the hotel and some local politician in his car picks us up to actually drop us to our hotel (pretty courteous of anyone in this day and age i say especially after what we experienced in the night)
The bed hits us before we know what hit us.
Peace
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