A Dream of Horses & Other Stories Read Free Page A

flashes in the wide spaces between the trees that are stark and echoless. The heat fails to touch him, for he shivers and his teeth chatter, but his lips are sealed, allowing neither the saline fluids to enter and sting his tongue nor the sobs to escape. Surely this is all a dream, but how to explain the pain that persists in his shoulder and spreads across his back, obliging him to slow down every now and then. Yet he must keep up his pace; from what he knows of these parts, the brook is at least two miles away.
    Barely a year ago, he was still in the village, playing, running errands, and going to the new school. Although not quite taken in by school, he was the last to leave each day, for he had early on made the discovery of some books in the common room where it was always cool and shady. These were strange things,alive to the touch, and he stayed alone, reading and weaving fantasies until light began to leave the sky. He was just beginning to make sense of the words, but the pictures spoke to him openly – of distant lands and times, fishlike maidens and fire-spitting dragons, magic cloaks and tunnels you took to slip into the earth’s belly. Only if he had not been hurriedly despatched to live with his uncle in town. More than once, his family had received feelers from the guerrillas that he was now old enough to handle a gun.
    In town he could not go to school immediately: that he had to wait for the term to end was one in many reasons. With each day he grew ever more listless and six months later succumb to the offer of becoming a soldier in a new ‘civil resistance’ movement fostered by the authorities. The allowance was handsome and at last the bookstore lay within easy reach. But without a warning he was removed to the camps on the edge of the forest along the main road to guard the town and resist the advance of the guerrillas. Here all you saw were khaki clothes, guns and bullets, and some food, but never books. Here, too, was a boy of his age who by the third month had become his friend.
    Last evening he had found his friend fingering – he could not believe it – a book, hardly outside his grasp, waiting. He moved towards it, but just then there was a shuffle of steps outside the tent and, as if a trance had been broken, he ran away in confusion, though not before hurriedly imploring his friend to bring the book along in the morning to their secret place. Night was spent counting stars, awaiting the light that would wipe them away. At dawn he was already at the meeting point in the forest, though nearly three hours passed before his friend showed up – he could not comprehend it – empty-handed. Uncontrollable rage welled up in him, making him dizzy, and he came to himself only when he heard the shot.
    He falls into the stream with open arms and drinks greedily, never noticing the shadows that are thickening over the hill.

The Light Ascending
    All will grow dark again
.
Samuel Beckett
    Somewhere behind the tall water tank is the trail that leads into the forest. The iron mesh has an opening there, like a wound that hasn’t been allowed to heal, and you can slip past it to the other side without any discomfort. Locals who work at the institute prefer this shorter course to return home every evening. Part of the way they leave the trail to cleave the wilds, descending into the bowl of the valley through routes that remain hidden to the untrained eye, routes as many as rivulets in the rain, routes like hieroglyphs that can only be traced if one learns to read the symbols, to touch and to look closely: the impress on a patch of grass, the carelessly crushed cigarette butt, the broken twig, the startled call of a bird in flight.
    At nine thousand feet above the sea, this is pine country. Leaving the stinking dump that Simla has become – a dump through which remnants of the Raj rise like smoke here and there, not just vertically through space, but horizontally, too, along the axis of time, moving from a