My first brush with death came not as a whisper in the dark, but as a sudden chill — a silent, bone-deep tremor that gripped my young heart. I hadn’t yet crossed ten, but already I stood at the trembling threshold between awe and fear, mesmerized by the world and yet haunted by the possibility of its vanishing.
From our veranda, the sky stretched like a living canvas—vast, moody and endlessly changeable. When the monsoon clouds gathered, they descended like thick velvet curtains, blurring the lines between heaven and earth. The monsoon transformed the world into something both mysterious and alive. The mango tree in our front yard would bloom with tender buds, carpeting the earth in fragrant promise. After the rain , their scent rose with the petrichor, heady and intoxicating, wrapping my senses in the quiet ecstasy of spring afternoons. And the sun—majestic and unhurried—climbed each morning from behind the hills, gilding everything in a soft, golden reverence.
But to imagine that death could take it all from me - the rains, the buds, the golden hush—was unbearable. That thought planted itself in me like a seed of shadow, and from it sprouted many sleepless nights. I would lie awake, wondering: could there be a medicine, a potion, some secret remedy to keep death away forever?
Our grandmother’s stories only deepened the mystery. She spoke of good souls taken into God’s heaven, and cursed ones doomed to wander the earth as ghosts—sometimes mischievous, sometimes lost.
I would ask grandmother “ Does the heaven get rainfall ?”
“ Why not ! The clouds keep on floating and it’s the wish of the rain God Indra, which decides whether , there would be rain on earth or not.”
“ But, have you read anywhere, good souls also can touch the rain in the heaven along with the Gods ! Make some paper boats to sail down the stream !”
Now, my grandmother would be annoyed and curtly ask to mind on her story, if at all I were interested !
Secretly, I thought: better a ghost than to leave this world. I would rather haunt the mango groves and watch the rain from behind veils of mist than surrender it all for a heaven without the fun.
Having resolved to become a ghost in pursuit of immortality—and firmly believing that only wicked souls could earn the distinction of ghosthood—I consciously chose to commit sins. The acts I engaged in were starkly against our family’s moral code. I killed a few unsuspecting ducklings with a hammer and often beat my schoolmates, fully aware that such actions were forbidden. Those were few sins I could figure out at the age of under 10.Yet, every time, I committed a mistake consciously, I used to repent and felt terrible. I realised that to attain ghost hood was more difficult than becoming a saint.
Another obsession of childhood were the hills. Sometimes, in the quiet moments between dreaming and waking, I imagined myself walking toward the Himalayas—like the wandering sages from the stories I devoured.
As the years passed and I grew older, my heart became ever more entwined with the dream of the Himalayas—their silent majesty, the quiet hill stations cradled gently in their embrace. They called to me like a half-remembered lullaby. Ruskin Bond, with his tales woven from mist and mountain air, cast a spell over my imagination. His words stirred something deep within me, something that longed for narrow winding roads, pine-scented breezes, and the quiet rustle of leaves in sleepy hill towns.
So it was no ordinary journey—my first ride on the Shatabdi Express from Delhi to Dehradun. My heart pulsed with heightened anticipation, each mile pulling me closer to a dream I’d nurtured for years. As the train rolled past Meerut and Roorkee, and slowly approached Haridwar, I found myself drifting toward the door, eager to greet the wind that carried the fragrance of the hills—crisp, clean, touched with the scent of wild grass and distant rain.
At last, the train came to a gentle halt at the Dehradun station. Finally, I arrived at Ruskin Bond’s Dehra !
One Sunday afternoon, I climbed the hills up to Landour where lives my childhood hero. As the ascend began, it felt like a landscape , strange yet intimately familiar. Through Those whispering pine trees and colonial quiet, when I arrived at the Ivy Cottage, It felt like wellspring of countless tales—the scent of old books, rain-washed earth, and ghost stories lingering in the dusk. It felt as though every rustle of the deodar leaves carried a sentence from Bond’s pen, every beam of filtered sunlight a memory of his childhood wonder.
Ruskin Bond wasn’t in Landour that day.
“He’s gone to Calcutta for a writers’ meet,” someone staying styaing at his home said with gentle finality.
I nodded, trying to smile, though something within me fell strangely silent.
So I missed my chance to meet the man whose words had walked beside me through childhood lanes. Yet the journey from Dehradun to Ivy Cottage—though void of his presence—became a memory gleaming with its own quiet light,a pilgrimage worth a treasure-chest of lifetimes.
But soon, the mountains began to blur in the rearview of fate. A letter arrived—an appointment, a new beginning at another picturesque town at the far east - Digboi, a verdant relic of colonial grace . The call was clear. Without hesitation, I decided to board the next train to Calcutta, the first step toward the far, fragrant East.
The city of Dehradun—so full of hills and whispers—seemed to mourn my parting. On my last evening, I wandered once more down the familiar lanes of Rajpur Road, the bustle muted by a sudden spring downpour. Rain fell in soft silver sheets, drenching streets, rooftops, the edges of old buildings. I found refuge in a vintage café, a warm cup of creamed coffee between my hands, and thoughts heavy with life’s uncertain script.
And that’s when she walked in.
She entered like a verse from an unknown song.
She shook off the rain like a poem casting away its melancholy. She folded her umbrella, slipped off the hood of her jacket, and let the rain-drops rest—uninvited but welcome—on her dark, glistening hair. She took the empty table beside me, a stranger by every definition, and yet—there was something timeless in the moment.
What was her name? Where had she come from? Was she beautiful in the conventional imagery ?
I cannot say! I do not know, either ! She wasn’t someone I’d ever meet again, and yet, in that rain-soaked hour, she was the entire monsoon in human form. A fleeting muse. A still frame of magic.
The café clock moved on, indifferent to my dawdling heart. By that time, she had already finished her coffee and cookies and left. I lingered a while longer, as if still lost in some intoxicating realm of thought. It was time for that spark of the moment to fade. It was also time to catch the last bus back to the hostel, to gather belongings and say goodbye—not just to the city, but to a version of myself I’d never quite be again.
I arrived at Digboi and joined Indian Oil’s Digboi Refinery—where forests hummed in harmony with flame stacks and the past slept under canopies of green.
But fate, ever playful, wasn’t done with me yet. Autumn came, and I found myself back in Dehradun, once again, this time for a professional training at the Indian Institute of Petroleum. We stayed at the sprawling Mohkampur campus, where the breeze still carried the scent of pine and half-forgotten dreams.
By then, life had turned a page.
Amid the rustling leaves and metallic hum of refinery schematics, I spent long hours by the lone PCO at the edge of the IIP hostel . I was into a relationship that promised to be stable with love and trust unbounded.
By the next year, I got married.
The wanderer found his fire. The wild soul, once desperate to outrun death, had finally made peace with permanence.The feral was gently, irrevocably, domesticated.
Nearly twenty-three years have gone by. By now, that lady in Dehradun is probably a mother to grown up children—if she ever married at all. But that no longer matters. Even if our paths were to cross again, her presence wouldn't mean anything to me.
What stays with me is a moment from the past—etched deep, vivid as if it happened just yesterday. The intricate colors woven to that moment haven’t faded. And perhaps these brief, inexplicable sparks give life its quiet magic—reminding us why it’s all worth living.
