The First Storyteller

by Varun Gwalani

  It was not a very safe bridge, it must be said. It was wooden and rickety with only the sparsest of rope railings, and seemed in danger of imminent collapse. It did not look capable of holding my weight. So, because I tended not to trust objects that conveniently appeared and led over perilous heights, I decided to test it before I walked across. I took a nearby stone and tossed it onto the bridge.

  The stone went through the bridge as if it wasn’t there.

  I considered the bridge again warily. It seemed real enough, if not exactly solid. I gingerly approached it, carefully avoiding the sight of the bottom of the chasm and trying to ignore the feeling welling up inside of me as I placed a foot on the first plank.

  It was solid. I could feel it and it held. It was at that exact moment, as I touched the plank that the twisting, suffocating feeling returned, and worse than before. My mind fogged up, filled with incomprehensible thoughts and raging emotions. I backpedalled quickly, breathing as deeply as if I had been running for hours.

  I was absolutely sure now. The bridge was a test.

  I didn’t know what was going on or how I was going to cross, but my sense of confusion worsened as I neared it again. There was nothing to plan, or reason, or plot. I didn’t know what this was. I had to simply push onwards.

  I stepped on the bridge. The feeling was the same, but somehow the intensity of it had reduced. This was encouraging and I slowly put my other foot on the bridge.

  A punch to my chest. I gasped and tried to block out everything around me. A howling wind made up of numerous pitches of sound buffeted me from all sides, threatening to push me back or off. I gripped the ropes tight and pushed forward again, moving on to the next plank. The clamp on my heart tightened; a cacophony of voices rose from inside me, screaming, crying, and whispering. I tried to block out all the pain, all the noise and put one foot in front of another. I was surely on the fourth plank by then, but the end was nowhere nearer. I looked back to check my progress.

  It was as if I hadn’t moved.

  I was still on the first plank; the ground was as close to me as before. The exit was there, looking at me just as invitingly as it had earlier.

  I looked ahead, determined not to look back again. I took another step forward and this time I knew that I had made no progress. Since I had stepped on, a lump in my throat had been growing, interfering with my ability to swallow. Now, it had grown so large that I was finding it even harder to breathe. I started coughing, clutching the thin ropes so tight that I might as well have been wearing them out to breaking point myself. My eyes inadvertently turned downwards, towards the chasm.

  This time, I could actually see the bottom.

  Down below was a figure curled in the foetal position, with thin, sparse limbs and no hair. Its tortured wails suddenly rent the air. Sensing my gaze, it looked up... straight at me. Its face was twisted, shifting, and whirlpool-like. It straightened itself almost instantly into a disfigured, tear-stained face... mine.

  Instantly, everything stopped: the wind, the pain, and the wails, all of it. There followed a moment of dead silence, after which the creature opened its mouth and howled: An anguished cursed sound. I covered my hands with my ears, uncaring of the dangerous shift in my balance. I desperately wanted to blot the sound out. After a few seconds, I realized that I couldn’t, because the same sound was responding from within the confines of my soul.

  I wrenched my gaze from whatever it was that was below and stared up at the sky, panting. The howling ceased, and I barely had time to clutch the ropes again before everything else restarted.

  This time, however, I recognised the different pitches of the wind as different voices, screaming a variety of insults. I stilled myself and found that the cacophony of voices inside me was echoing the ones outside. Or was it the other way around?

  All these voices were screaming nasty, horrifying, disheartening words. That I couldn’t achieve my dream. That I couldn’t even cross this tiny bridge. That I was better off having jumped off the cliff. They were the voices of peers; of family; of the people who had been driven mad by the Forest and its twists and turns. Their words, their taunts and jibes clamped my heart; some of my vitality and spirit escaped my body with every breath that left it.

  I knelt, still clutching the ropes. Their voices were turning into cruel laughter, because they knew they were succeeding. But when I gritted my teeth and smiled, they stopped.

  Their laughter still rung in my ears, and I grinned wider. I took a step forward, and this time I knew that I was moving ahead. The urgency and pitch of the voices increased, trying to push me backwards with the mere force of their vitriol. Instead, their words were pushing me forward. Their cruel voices and cruel words reminded me of what I was not, reminded me that that was not what I wanted, to be bitter and without purpose.

  Slowly, the voices faded away, and I was halfway across the bridge. The end was actually in sight now, and I felt confident that I could make it across safely.

  Of course, that was when the pain started again.

  It only took me a moment to realise, however, that this pain emerged from the inside, rather than the outside. The urge to end it all, to jump from that bridge grew stronger.

  A voice, soft as velvet, started whispering from just inside my ear. The voice was my own, the voice of my deepest fears and darkest doubts, urging me to finish this pain now, to save myself from all the pain that was to come.

  In the thrall of my own voice, my eyes glazing over and my vision blurring, I grabbed the rope railings and pulled them.

  With a loud noise I could barely hear, they tore off at the ends and hung limp. There were no railings and the bridge started rocking. I collapsed, hugging the planks weakly, some part of me still fighting to hold on. The voice seductively convinced me to look down into the chasm, where I saw the figure once again, but this time it was standing, its hands outstretched to reach me, a hungry look in its eyes.

  The dim light shone on the eyes of this figure. To anyone else it would have seemed appropriate for such a faint light to fall on such an ugly figure, but to me, that light was more than I had ever seen in my life; even if it was reflecting such ugliness. Right now, the light was worth whatever ugliness I had to see. The creature blinked, and it started clawing at its skin, screaming as it burned him. He picked up a hammer to throw at me, but I had already stood up.

  I walked the final stretch carefully, without untoward incident. I actually began to make progress towards the end, and I stepped forward with a growing excitement.

  Because it would’ve been too good an opportunity to pass up, there was a shift in the breeze once more and a warm glow spread through my insides.

  “You’ve suffered so much already, my child. You don’t need to go on.” I froze as the voice of the Storyteller, full of power and love, filled my mind. My hands clenched tight. “Can you imagine the suffering that you will have to face further? You can still go back. You-”

  “You’re not real,” I whispered, my voice almost breaking. Almost. “If you were real, you would remember how they treated me. How they despised me. How you were the only friend I ever had, and the day you left me, my time was ending either way. There is no back. Coming on this journey gave me the opportunity to listen to your voice one more time, even if it was a lie. You always said that a story was a lie that aimed at higher truths. Well, if this is a lie, I’ll walk on that lie.”

  I took another step forward. Then, another. I did not hear the voice again. My heart broke. I made the final step onto the other side.

  A great lightness came upon me. The wind blew gently in my face, and far away, I heard a bird singing. I could finally breathe again. I took a few deep breaths, and a wild headiness rushed over me. I whooped and jumped into the air, fist raised. I landed back on my feet, grinning.

  Suddenly, I felt an intense heat upon my back and a loud crackling. I whirled around. The bridge and chasm wasn’t there anymore. The only thing that indicated that I hadn’t imagined it
all was the crack running the entire length of where the chasm was. It would be back, I instinctively knew. And I would make that step, just as I had made this first step in a journey of a thousand steps.

  4

  Leave Behind

  Imagination had bloomed into reality. What had once been a story was now in front of me.

  Ever since I had known about the old ways of Time, of the mechanisms of the death and resurrection of day and night, I had spent my days as a child staring at the dawn, willing it to move; begging it to change, to reveal itself in its full glory. Along the way, I lost hope; I lost the will to keep believing that it would change, that any of it would change.

  Then, I changed.

  Since I decided to embark on my journey, that childish hope within me was renewed, that I would see that sun completely, that maybe, just maybe, it would mean that life had changed.

  I saw it now, like Hope itself, blazing in the sky, rendering one unable to look at it directly. It was still low in the sky, but it was full and complete with its soft glow, capable of upward movement and brighter light. I don’t know if I had ever prayed as reverently as I did it in that moment. It was as if I was in the land of God itself; and I could feel my heart almost grow in my chest at the thought of more miracles.

  The glow of the sun seemed to suffuse itself into everything I saw. The trees, the grass, even the thorns and weeds glistened with a purity that was devoid of sin. The air was clean, replenishing me with every breath. I marvelled at the multitude of these magnificent miracles; my descriptive skills running out after I ran out of many more words beginning with “m”. I was mad, and what I was doing was madness, but I loved this madness and wanted to live in it.

  But miracles gave way to monotony, as is always the case. The Great Man might multiply food or produce it from nothing, but he would still have to eat it after. The sun did not move any further. It stayed suspended in the sky, in that position; no matter how long I stared at it. I needed to figure out the practicalities of calculating time and how to regularly satisfy my basic necessities. I developed an arbitrary measure of time (as all measures of time are), which I called a “sleep-cycle”, the time from which I woke up to the time which I slept once more. This meant that I walked at my own pace, eating when I was hungry, sleeping when I was tired; without any outside instruction that had always decided the routines of my body.

  The Path, too, did not seem to have a pattern to it. It always appeared to be forming itself, so that when I looked further on it was there. I couldn’t shake the strange feeling that the Path knew me. It was never- ending, a constant invitation forward to invite me to myself. It had the same texture as the surrounding grounds, only coloured pale-white. Out of curiosity, I checked once in a while to see if the road back was still there, and shuddered every time I saw that it was.

  I decided to depend solely on the supplies I had brought with me, for a time at least. The surrounding wildlife was unfamiliar to me, and I avoided berries and plants that looked edible for fear of poison. I was content with digging into my own supplies and waiting it out till I found something I was sure of. I even avoided the water, which looked safe, but was likely contaminated with minerals that would be harmful to me.

  Despite the wondrous splendour of the Forest and all that it contained, thoughts of the Coast, of the Storyteller, of the only life I had ever known, still filled my mind. They were ever-present, in the memory of salt for every breath I took, in the taste of the farms with every bit of food I ate. I was never far from a reminder that I had made a potentially disastrous move; that I had given up all forms of stability, that I had decided to plunge into a new river, with currents such as I had never even dreamt of before; and the nagging, growing uncertainty that I would drown.

  This uncertainty took root in my mind, and grew every sleep-cycle until I awoke to a thick clump of impenetrable trees. Midway through scrambling to my feet, I froze; my body bent double, my hands at awkward angles. My eyes were glued to the ground, more specifically to the fact that it was only ground. The Path had disappeared! I looked all around me, perhaps to see if I had merely misplaced it. There was no sign of it, only thick trees. I started to dig, the wild thought filling my mind that I had slept for so long that the trees had grown around me and the Path had been buried.

  After a few frantic fruitless minutes, I stopped. I took a few deep breaths and calmed myself. There was a way to fix this. I needed to find a way out. I heard a soft rumbling sound and turned to find that a way had opened up through the trees to the left. I squeezed past the narrow opening, and scurried down the thin road till I found myself surrounded by more thick trees all around in me a circle, and openings in different directions.

  I was in a maze.

  I tried to stifle the panic rising fast within me as the rumbling noise began again. I had no idea which direction I had come from, where I had to go, how I was supposed to get back to my Path. I walked in a random direction, only to hear the rumbling sound grow louder with every turn I took until I was back in the crossroads, the trees thicker and the openings narrower.

  The panic could not be contained anymore. I started running down the closest possible openings, uncertainty growing, always coming back to the crossroads where I had begun. The openings were getting smaller, a feat I did not think was possible, and my options were growing limited as ways closed off. Soon, there was only one way left, and I bounded through it quickly before it closed off, setting off in a sprint as soon as my feet touched the ground again. They flew across the grass, only coming to a stop when my torso had an embarrassing collision with a dead-end.

  I sat against the trees, groaning. I had suffered a nasty cut to the head, as well as several scratches across my body. Grateful for something familiar to do, I dug into my medical supplies, cleaning and bandaging whichever wounds I could. I felt better as I sat there. I decided that I should rest and figure out what to do next. Conserving supplies was of paramount importance, because there was no telling when I would have a chance to gather more; but to be fair, I wasn’t gathering many anyway.

  I looked around me. There was no way out of here that I could see. Despair started to creep in as the rumbling grew louder. Every bite I took released a fresh wave of indecision, pulling me under farther and farther. The rumbling grew; every time I blinked, the trees were closer. So, was this going to be it? Trapped because “the walls were closing in too fast.”? Really? It was too soon for such an obvious death. There were better ways to die even back-

  I froze, eying the half-eaten fruit in my hand. I wasn’t back there in the Coast, though. I was here. And I needed to be here.

  I stood up, slinging the pack off my shoulders. I kept only the medical supplies and buried the rest. It could all be replaced. It needed to. There was a low, content rumble and a wall opened. I walked towards it.

  Walking itself is an act of leaving behind, every step releasing a burden that had been picked up with the last step; every step moving you farther away from what you were to what you will become. I walked back to the Path, leaving the burden of some of my memories behind.

  5

  Lovesong

  It was the sunshine. That was the best part of the sleep-cycle. I couldn’t tell why. It just was.

  My journey had begun not too long ago and I was still struggling to adjust to this new lifestyle. But then there was the rare sleep-cycle, found more in the early part of the journey, when I had no trouble, and when I knew everything would be fine, in its own way.

  My Path continued onwards. That sleep-cycle everything around me just seemed to stand out in greater relief; the tiny cuticles on the tiniest of leaves, the rough bark on the trees; with lines that dated back to the dawn of time, watching travellers go by.

  I stopped and touched one of these barks, running my hands through these grooves. The thought occurred to me that some of these might be man-made, and indeed some of them seemed too irregular to be natural. Only human beings carved their feelings, their initial
s and self-worth into nature in such inelegant ways. There were no hearts, thank goodness, but there were faded marks here and there. There was even a crude eye-shaped symbol drawn somewhere. There must have been so much wisdom, though, in these hands. They had been travellers too, people who had dared to dream and live. Maybe, they had wanted to make their mark, literally. I considered doing the same, tracing my finger over the grooves. A surge of power rushed through me, not controlling, but liberating. Every part of my body was flooded with the joy, the determination, the dreams and hopes of all those before me. It was easily the most beautiful thing I had felt.

  I moved on, leaving the tree untouched, because I was not worthy yet. I had not done enough yet. I needed to do more. I needed to be more.

  Everybody does. It matters, however, what they do, and whether they even know what they’re doing. They become so numbed to whatever it is, love, life, their work, to a point where they just become the hard shell of the tortoise without its body. If that gatekeeper of emotion, vulnerability, was killed, neither the sinner nor the saint could enter.

  That sleep-cycle, I truly felt like I knew how to feel again. I was always aware, sometimes too self-aware. Most people avoided the burden of self-awareness by choosing not to explore their own thoughts for fear of what they might find. But that sleep-cycle, for once when I could feel everything, when I knew that my knee was bending, my leg was rising, then falling and stomping the ground, little pebbles entering the sole of my shoes; when the wind blew into every inch of my skin; when I could imagine in my head every pore of every leaf opening, exchanging the stale air for the purer fluid ones that was only possible in greenery; it wasn’t a burden. I could see the trees and the Forest without being overwhelmed. I could appreciate the beauty of nature, of myself, without feeling guilty of committing the cardinal sin of “wasting time”.

  I looked up when I heard a high-pitched chirp emanate from a tree close by. It was a bird sitting on a wire-thin branch high above. Listening more closely now, I gauged the voice to be a low, wounded voice.