Each time I stand on this balcony, it feels like that first time twenty six years back. The details are different, I know. Today, my folks have chosen to stay at the posh hotel near the lake rather than at this Government guest house on the cliff. The man at the front desk says that this suite is never let out. ‘It is not right,’ he tells any listener. That suits me fine. I am a bit possessive about this room. Within, the air is musty and reeks of decay. But here, on the balcony, it is still the same. Clouds hang below, masking the depths and the valley. Then, we had stood together facing that void, hand in hand. She is not here now. But I can still feel her hand in mine.
I was fourteen. It was a tough year for my father and for months there was talk of canceling our annual vacation. But we managed this modest trip – to get away from home, to forget that place and the people there for a few days. The Guest House was run-down even then, with ageing staff, rickety furniture and chipped cutlery. We got this suite which has two bedrooms (for my parents and two sisters) and I got a camp-bed in the drawing-room. I was left on my own a lot. I did not fancy following my folks to the shops or to inane tourist grounds. I walked around town with the energy of the young that expects life to change with every step or scribbled honest doggerel in a notebook under the shade of trees or stood on this balcony with romantic daydreams of being a hero faced with the simple dilemma, to live or to die for love.
I saw her on the first day itself but that mature young woman in her late twenties on the balcony next to ours hardly caught my attention. I was busy with other characters in my head, enacting weird and complex drama, and she did not suit any of those roles. On the second day, I was lying on the rattan armchair when I saw her again. She had climbed onto the railing at the edge of her balcony and one of her legs was stretched out into the vast void. I looked at her expressionless face and it appeared as if it mattered little to her whichever way she stepped out.
‘Excuse me,’ I said without budging from my reclined position.
She turned around a bit startled and looked at me.
‘You are not thinking of anything silly, are you?’ I asked her.
She stepped down from the railing and I let out a sigh of relief. She raised an eyebrow at me.
‘That’s better. It would have been troublesome for me, otherwise…’ I offered an explanation with a shrug.
‘A bit too mature for your age, aren’t you?’
‘A bit lazy, I admit…why, what did you expect from my age?’
‘Romantic chivalry should not die so young…’ she said with a smile.
‘Ah yes, I have been thinking about that…’
‘It rarely goes well with thought…’
That’s how we met and the nature of our conversation hardly changed in the days that followed. I might have fantasized about having a torrid affair with this older mature woman but I can’t recall much of that. It must have paled into insignificance compared with the rest that followed. We talked about books, our folks, the people that mattered to us and the places we have seen or wished to see. I can’t remember any of that either. But I remember the discussion about the banshee on the rock in the river.
That place is roughly half-way down the hills to the plains. Two branches of the river meet at a large rock in the river and from there the rapids churn and merge before spending its fury in a short but broad waterfall. Tourists and locals throng the picturesque waterfall but give a wide berth to the upstream area near the rock. In those parts one can hear the wailing of a banshee, says folklore. There are tales of young men who have met a watery end out there, lured by a bewitching beautiful woman.
When I told my new companion about the tales I had heard, she asked me,
‘Don’t you know the original tale?’
She told me that the beautiful woman on that rock lures men to fall in love with her rather than leads them to the watery end. The men are then totally besotted with this bewitching ghost and try to be with her forever by ending their lives, hoping to return as ghosts. That ghostly loving beauty begs them not to enter those treacherous waters. It is her cry of sorrow that people mistake as the wailing of a banshee.
‘Are they joined with her as ghosts?’ I asked.
‘No, those true ones can never be ghosts. Only the ones that listen to her and stay away from those waters…they remain as ghosts…’
‘With her…?’
‘No…how can they be with her once they let her down…when they do not do enough for their love?’
‘Geez…that’s crazy…then, nobody can be with her…if they listen, they become ghosts who gave up on their love and if they don’t listen, they are separated forever…’
‘Hmm…that’s the curse she carries with her…’
I remember that I had her hand in mine then, standing on adjacent balconies, sharing that moment together before we let go. Since then, I have been here year after year but I have never seen her again.
My folks will make a trip to that rock today. They wanted to do it last year, on the twenty-fifth anniversary, but it was another bad year and they had postponed the trip. There, they will place a few flowers and probably say a prayer. I guess they won’t cry now about what I did out there twenty six years back.
