Right on top of the world

A life-changer of an experience, and all I had to give in return was a week of taking off from the routine

April 09, 2017 12:58 am | Updated 12:58 am IST

“Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?”

- Albert Camus

Indeed, should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee? It seemed of the same order to me.

It’s been months now that I stand on the terrace, looking at the ground below and wondering if it must take a very long fall. A very long time spent in the air to rethink if the problems were fixable, a very long period of helplessly jerking your arms seeking help with nothing to hold on to, and a quiet last second when you hit the ground and everything blacks out and you finally find out if there was a god at all.

You fool yourself into living another day with tiny excuses. Vesting your hopes on the last leaf of the tree outside your window to fall, only to come back from college and see that the storm took the tree down with itself. Reaching out for a piece of poetry, or a cigarette butt, another cup of coffee or another romance, but the thing about them all is that at one point they all come to an end, leaving you sniffing for more. It’s just a vicious cycle that goes round and round.

Like days and nights that mean nothing for someone who does not sleep. Like the ceiling fan that gives me company while I stay awake, and like my aching heart that beats like it’s a backward countdown every single day but does not dare to stop and ends up counting all over again.

I think they call suicide cowardice because they know no one is bold enough to succeed the first time. We can see it in the signs it leaves behind. The scars of a thousand shallow cuts before a deep one. Too many public breakdowns and family embarrassments before your

mother can boldly accept something has to be wrong. A lot of worthless questions by the therapist before it’s too late to start with the right ones. Too many occasions of having denied sex to the boyfriend before he takes you out one day and with welled-up eyes that do not dare to look into yours, asks you if there’s someone else. Your hands intertwined in his hands, tremble like a broken heart and you nod your head and swallow some of your words and say, “Yes there is. And it is me.” Both of you hold each other and cry for the rest of the night. You don’t think of long-term plans, you live life as one with fourth- stage cancer. No renewal of the library pass. No accordance with diet plans. And the worst, a constant inability to reciprocate love since a relationship is now a temporary matter. The aftermath of impulsive screaming at your old patients and banging the door at their faces, or ignoring your partner’s phone call for weeks even if that includes their birthday, is that you end up sitting in the dark store room locked-in alone. You pull your legs towards your body and bury your face between your knees. And think, the only thing worse than being in love with a person is being in love with a mere shadow.

You shrink into a little insect in the darkness, crushed under the weight of your own heavy heart. You think of how Franz Kafka wrote ‘The Metamorphosis’, a story they taught you in school, where Gregor Samsa turned into a frightening giant bug, and you could feel yourself transforming just along those lines. You feel the void is overpowering when you hear a little knock on the door, a faint voice asking if you could join for dinner, and it pulls you back to the realisation that there is still some world left out there. There have been instances of your waking up in the middle of the night and crying loudly, howling while rolling on the floor. Your friends think you had a break-up, the neighbours think it’s drugs, your parents think it’s the fault in their upbringing. No one ever diagnoses the right cause, including you yourself. When I had stopped attending classes completely and was about to get de-registered, my boyfriend came over. It’s weird how these lovers find their way back to you all the time, no matter where you hide

yourself. And offer you homemade sandwiches or cappuchinos in your worst times, and act as if nothing ever happened.

It’s the most special feeling of the world. It is also the loneliest feeling in the world. I know how love can be the solution to everything but depression was not one of the things. You can only hug their bodies but not their souls. In the end, the responsibilities of people can only be taken by their own selves.

And I do not know if he could read my mind, but he extended a piece of paper towards me which had some dates and schedules and asked if I would like to travel. I said no, I hate travelling. I love enclosed spaces and I simply hate those trains where people sit so close to your faces, you have no option but to start a conversation.

He said it was not that kind of travel. It was something else. I could see he did not use words bordering on mockery such as “soul-searching”. But what else could it be, when someone suggests you go for a week-long solo trek.

In the following days I banged my hands against the walls of my room. Because, did this mean I had reached the verge of needing a “break”? I went on for days surviving on coffee as if it’s the kind of fuel that can keep my body working, and I went on for days without speaking to anyone in the family. But after two weeks like this I looked into the mirror. It was like staring at a stranger. The weight- loss, the balding head, the wrinkled face. I needed sunlight on my skin and fresh air to purge me from the premature process of decaying even before I was dead. I decided I needed to go for that trek.

The journey begins

When we were seated in the bus, preparing for an overnight journey to the place where we would begin walking, I tried (read they tried first, and I just tried back) to converse with the other people involved. There was the guy with the camera creeping everyone out by making them the subject of his portraits. And there was this guy with a guitar (attractive) who could easily pull off an Eddie Veddar. There were a few working women who had a lot of inside jokes to giggle at. And

there were these two trek leaders, athletic and extroverted owing to the nature of the work, who made introduction very easy for all of us.

I was drowsy enough to fall into deep sleep when I heard some men behind me talking about homeopathy and spirituality, and it convinced me I should not have come. I cursed my boyfriend who thought this was a “good plan” and was convinced now that a guy who reads Malcolm Gladwell should never be trusted with instincts.

But I was here already, among strangers who I could talk to however I want and never have to deal with again. Outside the window was an army of trees swaying and waving me goodbye under a sky so filled with twilight it was like dawn throughout the night, and ahead was a journey that will teach me a lot about the strength of my legs and the strength of my mind. Was it really that bad? Trekking on

The next morning the trek started. We walked through a forest, crushing dried leaves and cradled between narrow streams under canopies. The winter breeze passed so quietly by your neck it was like nature whispering its secrets. I could not get enough of the purple wildflowers, the orchestra of frogs croaking and beehives buzzing, the shreds of sunlight that could reach me through the leaves and especially, the abundance of a strange countryside silence.

There was some kind of intimacy in walking through an inaccessible part of the world, knowing that you are thousands of miles away from those drunken car drivers crashing into each other and humans ripping themselves apart due to differences of opinion, and with nothing to provoke your lust, your gluttony, your capitalistic ambitions and no one around who has the power to hurt you, except strangers, living directionless lives just like yours and hence seeking shelter amidst the same woods as you.

Everytime we halted, I washed my face in the chilly stream and looked at the world below where the blushful mountains pulled the fog over their naked bodies like blankets, where the horizon was a

zigzag series of peaks and not a crumbling skyline, where you could be sure of not being bombed out at any random moment or being assaulted over a social media comment. I breathed in, held my breath a little and breathed out as if letting it change something inside me, as if it could take out the dead parts of me and make space for me to grow them anew. I looked at the whole group, sitting under a tree and laughing as if they have all known each other for a long while. But who needs to know each other at all to talk since we have all been living the same bloody lives, with a forgotten beginning, an unbearable present and an unfathomable future.

In the morning we walked and in the evenings we sat wrapped in shawls around a bonfire and talked about each other’s lives. The camera guy shared this: once during his regular street photography assignments, he captured a group of rag-pickers playing cards and eating berries on the other side of the pavement where stood the Hard Rock Cafe. He loved how they were laughing and feeding each other from their shares, after which he went into the cafe for a beer and found rich, rotten straight faces sitting alone and smoking, staring like lifeless cover page icons on business magazines. All so well-clad in fur and leather, but all too poor to even afford sleep. It was like these white-collared folks, and not the worker classes on the pavement, who were real slaves.

The guitarist spoke about this song by Steven Wilson which was based on a man who loses his sister in childhood and later in life comes across a raven which sings just like her. He cages it to hear it sing but it never does. When he opens the cage and lets it free one day, he also feels himself freed from the grip of his past.

The trek leaders were talking about their full-time jobs as software engineers which sucked their souls out of them, and one of the women spoke of how she covers her children despite being a single parent and working as a waitress. The nights passed swiftly like good dreams, but the bonfire would never go out, glowing like a will-o’-the-wisp as if waiting for us to return. It’s strange how even after walking 70 km your fatigued muscles

could still gather strength for more. The breathing became difficult, the peak was not yet visible, the ankles were bruised out of overwork but you walk as if it were nothing but your duty, as if it came naturally to you and stopping would be understating human abilities as a whole.

You look at the height, which you are sure is unconquerable, and the next thing you know is that you are already at its peak, panting heavily, tying your shoe laces and looking through your pessimistic vision again at the next impossible-to-scale height which is going to be your next surprise to yourself.

But trekking is not only about physical endurance. It is about mental and emotional endurance too. It’s a lot of patting on your own back, looking at your wounded toes and pulling up the socks again, shouting motivating victory slogans every time you are able to give up and rest. At one point you do not appreciate even the beauty of the valley of flowers around you anymore; you grow into a competitive beast and groan in the pain but someone wriggling through it as if you were raised a fighter. Now you know why journeys were so overrated and destinations so underrated.

The pinnacle And then it’s that moment, the highest peak, the end of the trek, when you look down and see whatever you have managed to cross. It was long, rough and very huge but you are rougher and much larger. You sit down on one of the edges of the cliff, dangling your legs in the air, close your eyes and shout at the top of your lungs.

No one hears you, no one acknowledges you for your courage or resilience, no audience stands up to applaud, but this time you don’t care about it. It is this moment that you understand why your success cannot be measured from the feedback of others.

Your group somehow reaches the top just behind you, and all break down on the ground, relieving themselves of the weight on their shoulders and all talk in unison about the beauty of isolation. If there is any experience that can make you feel the closest to the freedom

you were born with, before taxes and rents grappled with you and pushed your head into the system, it is here, simply sitting on the top of the world and watching it at peace. When the trek ended and everyone was getting off their respective bus stops, I watched them with a quiet smile of my face while noting down their faces to my memories. These were the ones who co-witnessed the best time of my whole life.

Back at home people seemed to be preparing for days to welcome me. The well-made beds and the well-made cuisines, the fairy light decorations and wind-chimes, the floral window curtains and a little Labrador puppy. My life seemed to have turned upside down, and the most surprising thing was that my boyfriend had aborted reading Gladwell and had finally started shifting to Kahneman.

So many changes, and all I had to give in return was a week of taking off from routine. I spent the next few days resting since I could not feel my calves anymore. Mother served burritos and pudding at my bedside, boyfriend read out to me the editorials I missed from the New Yorker, father went to the extent of taking work leave, and the therapist was just not being returned calls anymore. Things had been changing.

Outside my window, a new tree had come up and was growing leaves than losing them; maybe it was the approaching spring. I made sitting beside my window a poor urban-man’s replacement for sitting at the top of the world. And when I looked at myself in the mirror, I at least did not feel offended anymore.

College resumed, so did long-distance running, and movie dates and social media accounts. I could feel how monotony, no matter how despicable, sets the rhythm to our lives and disrupting the order of that brings absolutely everything to a freeze. So I just started to fit into my daily routine, and tried my best to hold on. And the best part, whenever I go to the terrace I do not think of the fall anymore. I just sit at the edge, legs dangling and sometimes, start crying.

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