The gang I joined was part of the timber mafia. The timber mafia was very powerful up there. They were involved in the cutting and smuggling of khair wood. Maybe you have some in your home? All the big people do. Or maybe in those grand apartments you’ve been constructing all over the land. Anyway, I was attached to this certain logging crew. Tough guys, with experience. They were supposed to escort me to a place in the forest where my journey would be complete, where I would be passed over to Himmatgiri. In exchange I would act as security on the way, as they carried out their logging missions in the night. “Where would this place be,” I asked, “where we would meet the mysterious Himmatgiri?” They said this would only become clear over time. I found this all quite hard to understand, but I did not raise my voice in questioning, because I knew silence was my friend. But after some time trekking through the forest in the evening light, I decided to provoke them. I laughed. “You know, some people don’t even think this Himmatgiri is real.” I felt a collective shudder run through the ranks. One old logger said, “I will say a prayer for you tonight.” No more was said on Himmatgiri. I traveled silently, a rifle in my arms.
And so the work began. It was very scientific work. We only worked at night. We had these cycles on which the timber was transported through the forest trails onto the roads, and on the roads the timber was loaded up onto trucks and mixed in with legal wood bought at auction at the Government Depot. We sent these trucks through selected checkpoints, where those officers stationed at certain times had been paid to turn a blind eye. If that sounds dull, it gives no indication of the land we were in.
I’ve never been religious, Sunny Wadia. My brother was, my mother too. But not I. I bathed and performed puja like everyone else, but I never felt God in my heart. Not until I stood in that place. Have you ever seen the Terai forest in the night? I’m sure you’ve seen many things, but there are places men like you don’t go. Places and ways of being. If you went, you’d go with your big cars and your suit and your men. You wouldn’t trek alone into the depths in the night. There are all kinds of spirits and gods in there. Leopards and elephants and tigers. And then there was Himmatgiri. The farther we went into the forest, his unspoken name seemed to hang over all. No matter we had the firepower—Chinese AKs, Sten guns, grenades, shotguns, pistols, machetes—it felt like we could be doomed anytime. The superstitious men kept charms, said prayers, offered sacrifices in our camp. They slaughtered goats and chickens to the local deities and prayed before they went out to cut the first trees of the night.
How had I come to be there? Where was I going? I couldn’t seem to remember clearly anymore. There was a blank behind me, and only the endless trees in the night. I had vague snatches of the journey I had taken, the killings I had done, but even these now felt unreal, as if I had dreamed them all up, as if they had happened in another life. I felt removed from the self I had held so tight. When I talked to the logging crew, it was as if they were talking to someone else, someone who had been with them in the forest for a long time, who had lived with them for years. Sometimes I even forgot my name. Sunil Rastogi. I had to repeat it to myself when we returned to our camp in the safety of the morning light. Sunil Rastogi. Sunil Rastogi. But even this name lost its meaning, detached from its object, like any word said over and over in time.
It was on the fifth night, or maybe the five hundredth, that it happened. We were out there cutting in the dead of night, three a.m. There was a chill in the air. We were just over on the Nepal side. We’d been cutting for two hours by then. I was patrolling the edges of our zone, a cigarette in my mouth, watching the jungle, watching out for rangers, for leopards. Break time came and the cutting stopped. The saws and axes fell silent. As soon as they did, I noticed the fog creeping in, arriving on all sides, so suddenly I couldn’t see. An uneasy feeling stole over me, something very bad was close at hand. I listened without moving, without speaking, straining my eyes into the forest, until I imagined many things. Things moving in the dark. I grew panicked, crashed through the fog calling out to my men, but no, there was nothing. I stumbled farther and farther, until the fog dissolved and I found myself lost and alone. Then I heard a voice in the wind. Sunil Rastogi, it said.
I did not want to be there anymore. I did not want to meet this man. I wanted to go home. I wanted to run. I turned to find a path. I turned to run. I gripped the gun in my hand. And that’s when I saw her. A sight one could not imagine in a thousand years. There was a girl. A naked girl, with long black hair, running through the trees. Running, not more than ten meters from me, ghostly pale in the bare moonlight, running across from me. She seemed beautiful, but there was something dreadful hanging over her. When I caught a glimpse of her face I understood what it was: though no sound came out, her face was contorted into the rigor of a scream. I stood there paralyzed as she crossed my path, and when I turned to see her running away from me, I saw a great square pink bubbling patch on her back where the skin had been peeled away. I watched in awe as she disappeared into the fog, and when she was gone all sound returned to the world, and I was crying out in terror and firing my AK up into the night.
With the gunfire the men in my logging crew dropped their tools and ran toward me. Yes! They had been there all along. “What is it?” they cried. “An elephant? A leopard.” I looked at them in disbelief. Hadn’t they seen it? The fog? The girl? They looked among one another. “Where did you go?” I shouted. “Where have you been?” They grew reticent. Their expressions were knowing and wary. “We’re here,” one said. “Where?” I replied. “We go no farther” came the answer. One of the other guards spoke up. “Let me see your gun,” he said. “It looks like it jammed.” With that the gun was snatched from my hands, and not a moment later I was being grabbed from all sides, pulled toward a tree, and lashed to its trunk by heavy rope. A gag was tied around my mouth. Another round my eyes. I couldn’t move, see, or scream. I could only hear the men marching away until the silence of the forest returned. I’m being sacrificed, I said in my mind. And then footsteps. Footsteps approached through the forest floor. Coming closer. Until they stopped before me and I heard steady breathing and hot breath, and I shivered as I heard my name emitted from the depths of a stranger’s chest.
“Sunil Rastogi,” it said. “So you’re the man who will not die.”
And his hands peeled back the rag that covered my eyes.
17.