A Dream of Horses & Other Stories Read Free Page B

subdued and painful past towards a cataclysmic future – and travelling for an hour on the road that spirals higher and higher, you come into these hills thathave not yet been laid waste by progress. Here, deep in the pines and deodars, tall and dark and indistinguishable at a distance from each other, magic survives and magical events have a chance to occur.
    From the guest quarters of the institute, it is barely a fifty-step walk up the incline to the water tank which stands on a high wrought-iron structure. Around it there is some flat space to move about and enjoy the vista that opens up between the trees. At dawn, before the smoke and haze has obliterated the view, one can see the snowy peaks, blue, pink, and orange at once, that girdle the world’s edges.
    Yet by noon there is little solitude here, so one ventures past the iron mesh in search of it and the mud path mercifully takes him where he belongs. First it ascends, then curves, and later begins to descend, only to flatten and meander under the canopy of branches. To either side the forest slopes downwards and, intermittently, one can glimpse the road that clasps the hill like a snake, hundreds of feet below. In time the trail splits, one part dropping slightly, skirts along the hill and at half a mile’s walk ends at the spa resort, the other rises to the hill’s crest where an old water pumping station awaits the solitude-seeker.
    On coming to know of the
strawberry trail
, I decided to explore it and thought of going to the resort at least once before my money, whatever little I had of it, ran out. So I set forth one morning soon after my arrival. In barely a half hour I could see the cone-like slate-blue roofs of the building rising over the trees. Suddenly the road bent sharply to the left and the view was lost behind the hill. Now the road was entirely under its shadow and the pines acquired a blackish hue, but above the sky was high and clear and dazzling, all of it making a very pretty picture.
    Unlike in life, mountains always propel me to choose the course that moves upwards. Thus I instinctively selected the narrow path rising past young twisted pines and shrubs whose names I did not know, when it was apparent that thewider, flatter, oft-trodden road I had left behind was the correct way. But as in life so in the hills there is compensation for the drifter.
    The pumping station was in a state of disrepair, and yet there was something striking about it. I went around in circles, unable to pinpoint it. On one side was a line of ancient trees, interspersed with a few young poplars. Here I sat down and was suddenly tired, not just by the slight trek, but with the burden of my choices that lay heavy on me and were now turning into an almost physical sensation of pain. Every story demands some insight into the life of its characters, and one could not have asked for a quieter setting than in which I found myself to recall past events.
    Floating in and out of the courts, I had reached the point from where I could simply stare at myself, ten, twenty, thirty years into the future: a Dantean vision that unsettled me each time. At twenty-six, with much difficulty and late-night hardships, I had written a novel whose publication I had part financed upon it being turned down by several publishers. Aside from winning a small prize and some readers, it went unnoticed. As was also apparent, it made me little money. And yet there was a singular result: I started corresponding with JC, the best of them all, the writer
par excellence
, decorated everywhere, yet miraculously aloof, private, and dignified. Less a writer than a monk. The legend of how fiercely he guarded his privacy refused to die; indeed the talk resurfaced each time he failed to appear to collect a prominent international prize. Obviously I did not know his whereabouts, so I sent a copy of my novel to his agent in London. To my surprise, I received a brief remark about the book inside of a month from