Behind the Eclipse

by Pramudith D. Rupasinghe

  ‘A human voice,’ he whispered.

  ‘Uncle?’ I asked with a palpitating heart. I did not want him to bring another tragic news to me.

  ‘He should be safe?’ I added rather to convince me than to ask him a question. The man was carefully listening to the sounds coming with the wind as if to capture a clue.

  ‘I do not hear anything anymore,’ he looked at me.

  ‘Watch out! We have to take care of us as well,’ he told me in a very low voice. His attentiveness and consciousness in the bush were unbelievable. He reminded me the stories of Oldman who spent half his life in the wild and finally sacrificed his life to the wild.

  ‘Death is everywhere here; you need to have good eyes, good ears, and fast thinking to survive in the wild,’ the man said while he was waiting to hear a clue about what might have happened on the other side of the shore.

  ‘Ah… It was clearer this time,’

  ‘Again,’ he tapped on my back so as to get my attention.

  ‘You know, the frequency hints me about the predator.It should be a leopard. The wind is blowing hard, and still, it is heard from a distance. That means it is not very near.’ He looked puzzled.

  ‘What is next?’ My words jumped out loud.

  ‘Sh, Let`s move back to a place where we can cross the river,’ he started rushing forward searching for a point from where we could get to the other side of the river. The more we walked, the more the banks detached from each other, and there was no sign of the violent river slowing down.

  ‘No,’ It was not too far this time.

  ‘We’ve got to hurry up,’ the man said. His forehead wrinkled; He had started sweating as if we were caught in the rain in August. He looked restless.

  ‘What was going on?’ I sensed the real danger my uncle was facing. As a young child, I thought that he might have been attacked by a wild animal or an evil spirit, but I did not have enough experience or knowledge to spectate the cause.

  ‘In a moment, we will find a rocky area in the river where we might be able to cross,’ the man said with a sigh of relief.

  ‘Still, we will have to swim a bit,’ he added, showing his wrinkled forehead while walking like a baboon that was chasing its prey. I just followed him full of vague feelings not only about my uncle but also about our own safety.

  We reached an area where the shores of the river were not much distant from each other, and the waters were shallower even though they were rougher than other places. As they hit the rocks that had hopped up from the river, they were like elephants that were bathing in the river.

  ‘Let`s cross here,’ the man said in a low voice which I interpreted rather as a sign of no certainty than an act of vigilance.

  Mossy rocks were like eels; if the foot landed in a slightly imbalanced manner, fatalities could be possible.Though the waters were shallow, there were signs of the presence of crocodiles. Remains of a freshly killed deer-cub were still in the reddish waters between the rocks.

  ‘We got to be careful here; crocodiles are plenty,’ he warned.

  My mind was preoccupied with the kind of things that might have happened to my father who was fighting his last battle in life. Had he known what we were going through, he would definitely have come to save us.’ Am I going to leave him in the same way as he did with Oldman?. No way, I cannot’. I could not imagine letting him go without proper funeral rituals. I could not believe to be doing that.

  ‘Wait till I go to the other side,’ the man gave me his machete and one end of the piece of rope he was carrying. He started to top on the rocks carefully. I was waiting for my chance till the man reached the other side of the river.

  In a few minutes, he stood on the other side of the river safely; my waiting came to an end.

  ‘Come here! Hold the rope well and walk carefully!’ He said boosting my energy and moral. I gripped the rope and stepped on the first rock. But the underlaying fear kept on bubbling in me like the boiling water inside a teapot. Moving one step was like giving up the whole life for a moment. I felt tremors in my hands; slight trembling in my legs; audible palpitation of my heart and, above all, I started sweating as if I was soaked in salt water. After a few minutes which was felt like a decade, I found myself safely on the other side of the shore where the man had been. It was a great sensation of reunification. The three of us were on one side now, but we did not have more details about my uncle except the fact that he should have been on this side dead or alive.

  ‘I do not hear anything anymore,’ the man had just said when we heard the voice of a man nearby.

  ‘Oh…the Creator!’ He is still alive.’ His face was bright with happiness when he thanked the Creator.

  ‘We cannot judge the distance accurately, yet as the voice is coming from where the wind is coming from,’ the man stopped for a while and started thinking.

  ‘We will follow the voice against the side of the wind.’ He took the machete into his hand and gave me the rope and a piece of wood. He cut a long stick for him.

  ‘We are in an area where there are a lot of animals, especially, the wild boars and leopards.’ His words brought my memories back to what we encountered in the bush when we went in search of the brother of Oldman.

  ‘Hold the stick in your right hand and the rope in your left.’ Poro was mortification but, day by day, I had come to realise that Poro was full of practical lessons for life that one would not learn anywhere else. Poro was the bush university where we were taught all life skills of survival.

  ‘After Poro, you will return to your village as a man.’ My father`s words started echoing inside my ears when a sharp pain pierced through my heart which dropped out as a tear from my eyes and ran down my cheeks while I was trying to imagine how he might be struggling to retain his life. Probably, he might have already left us. I could not but sob like a little girl.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Ah,’ we heard again.

  The man stopped and looked at me.

  ‘He should be somewhere very near,’ he said.

  ‘We have to wait till the next time we hear his voice to locate him, right?’ My question looked rational. The man smiled and nodded his head in acceptance.

  We stopped for a while and kept on waiting till we heard the voice again.

  ‘Ah,’

  It was not more than a couple of meters from us. In the absence of the wind, it was easier to speculate the distance. We turned towards the exact direction where we heard him and started heading towards that side. Thick ground cover made it hard to walk in the bush. The more we went in, the thicker it became. The wetness on the ground made it hazardous to walk because such places were paradises for snakes. Some places were completely wetlands where one could easily drown to death, and, sometimes, crocodiles could wait for a trapped prey.

  ‘Are you there?’ We were rather scared than surprised at hearing the call. It was just behind me. Involuntarily, my head turned towards the direction from where the voice was coming. Hearing a human voice in dark mangrove forest in which stagnating water and mud had nothing but an infinite depth was impossible to believe because no conscious person would ever go there.

  ‘Where are you?’ The man asked a bit louder. The silence shook us a bit.

  ‘Either the man is not here or…,’ the man said in a voice filled with fear.

  ‘Or what?’ I asked even though I was able to sense what he meant.

  ‘Evil splits are everywhere in the bush. They trap people by misguiding them in the thick forest.’ As he kept on describing, my body hair started raising like sleeping-grass leaves that rose one after the other when the sun came out in the morning. I could remember what my uncle was saying when he returned from the river the last time. For a moment, I kept on thinking merely about evil spirits and tried to link it with the disappearance of my uncle in the bush.

 
He was very stubborn. He did what he wanted, but he was not birdbrained to choose an abundant and dangerous path in the bush disconnecting him completely from the team. My thoughts started challenging one another making me lost in my own mind.

  The man had given up the attempt, and he hinted me to come back to him which I noticed slightly because my mind was preoccupied with the evil spirits that were haunting in the wild, waiting to take our lives.

  ‘We go without uncle?’ It was not an internally posed question; yet an unconscious emotional reaction to the perceived danger.

  ‘With him of without him, dead or alive, we will go back,’ he said in a firm voice which was very clear. He wanted us to be safe and take no more risks. I saw that there was nothing else to do except what the man told as I felt that losing the focus in the wild would result in fatalities. I was about to say that I was ok to go back and I heard the voice again just near the bush behind me.

  ‘Again,’ I said.

  ‘I heard.’ The man walked a few steps towards the mangrove bushes and bent towards the cluster of routes that stood like the teeth of a crocodile.

  ‘He is wounded and drowning,’ the man screamed startling me.

  ‘Uncle?’

  ‘Yes, he is the one,’ the man said.

  ‘Take the rope!’ He pulled the rope from my hand and knotted one end tightly around a bigger mangrove tree nearby. I was not even sure whether the man who was inside was my uncle. Nothing but a head, fully covered with mud was barely visible. It looked like we reached in the very last moment. If not, he could have disappeared in the mud. The man took the long stick as a support for him to walk on the routes. He reached where my uncle had been trapped; carefully laid down on the roots to reach the man who was stuck in mud. I was curiously waiting to see the miracle the man was trying to make. It was my first time to see a rescue mission.

  He started digging the mud around my uncle. I wondered whether we were trying to dig the hole to help him come out. After a few minutes, he took the other end of the rope and pushed it in the mud from behind my uncle’s head. Then he took it out from the front. It became apparent to me what the man had been doing. He located the armpit from the right side, tied the rope and then, took it around the piece of stick he had in his hand. Again he did the same thing from his left side.

  ‘He will no longer sink,’ the man scratched his forehead with his dirty hand and released a sigh.

  ‘Is he my uncle?’ I asked without my knowledge.

  ‘He should be the one,’ his reply was honest because no one had time to check who’s who it was. But, both of us assumed that it ought to be my uncle.

  ‘Ma-Begin, help me to pull this,’ the man asked me to support him to pull the rope.

  ‘We are pulling now, try to relax your legs! Be relaxed!’ He was trying to encourage the one who was stuck in the mud to do his part in rescuing himself.

  ‘Pull carefully!’ The man`s hand looks broken,’ the man said to me even though I did not see a millimetre of his hand.

  We pulled him until his chest was visible but he was still unable to lift his hands to hold the rope or the stick to which the rope was attached to. There should be something wrong somewhere in his hands. Probably, an animal might have attacked him before drowning. Maybe, he must have been running for his life and fell in a snare, or an evil spirit might have hit him and hidden him in the mud. All sort of wired assumptions started haunting in my mind even though I was supposed to concentrate on the rope and adjust the knot at each inch the man made out of the mud.

  Finally, after a lot of efforts, we were able to pull the upper body of the man almost out of the mud. Then only I noticed that one of his hands was broken and it was hanging like a dead snake. The man was exhausted on top of his injuries, and his head was not stable on his neck.

  ‘Is he dead?’ I could not resist my curiosity, and it turned into words.

  ‘No, no, he will be ok,’ the man replied as if he had checked his pulse.

  It was a moment that I wanted the man to talk; at least to make a noise whatsoever just to convince myself that he was alive. Seemingly, he was unconscious or dead, but the man, who accompanied me, believed he was not dead which I had to believe because he had lived more years than me after his Poro.

  ‘Let`s help the man to come up a bit more.’ After a short break of regaining energy, the man was ready again.

  ‘Ah,’ the voice was clearer this time, and he slightly lifted the head. It was him. It was my uncle. He was alive; though seriously wounded, apparently, with fractures which might remain as mystery till he could say something concrete.

  Rescuing was the job that we had to do rather than worrying, waiting, thinking or discussing. The causes were not relevant for the moment. Cause belonged to the past whereas our present action may determine the future.

  ‘Let`s pull more and adjust the knot!’ It was the usual order from the man. He was trying to pull him towards the routes of mangroves that were strong enough for him to hold. I was pulling the rope with all my energy when a monstrous sound came just behind me. I was not given time to take a breath. I saw the man flying in the air. My uncle was just hanging. It was the last time I saw uncle; then a dark moving piece of rock appeared in front of me and started rolling towards the man who came with me. He was already on the ground. The beast was huge and just like a piece of rock; a real monster that I had never seen and heard of. It hit the man with its long teeth and then took him into his strange snake like nose and threw in the air again. This time, he fell next to me just like a jackfruit eaten by giant bats.

  ‘When you see something strange in the bush, you need first to think of your life.’ Oldman told me before Poro.

  There was no time to be thinking. I could not but trust my legs and run for life. I ran, ran and ran for a time that nothing on earth could count. I ran tirelessly like a rabbit until I stopped hearing the horrifying noise of the beast that I had never seen. Then I stopped for a second to breathe assuming that the monster had gone but I could not even release a single sigh of solace. A huge piece of moving rock appeared just a few dozens of meters in front of my very eyes. I felt that I was in a death trap of an angered demon.

  ‘Sometimes, devils and witches appear in the skins of strange looking animals.’ I did not remember how many times I had heard such things when Oldman was relating horror stories. The sudden unforeseen appearance of this strange beast matched exactly what Oldman had told me and I was sure it was not an animal that everyone else ever talked about; therefore, I believed that it was a strong evil spirit which had taken the marshy land into its possession.

  ‘Every single drop of water in the bush is possessed by spirits,’ many people were saying when my elder sister drowned to death in the river while she was fetching water when I was very small. All the things I had heard about ghosts and evil spirits started appearing vividly inside my shaken mind conquering my every single nerve cell with an intense fear which rather froze me than made me run for my life.

  I assumed that the beast did not see me. It ran passing me like an arrow and disappeared into the bush just leaving a path of chopped under cover and broken branches.

  After a moment which prolonged in an infinite line of time, I felt like having been awakened from a nightmare I had been experiencing though it was the horrible reality I was going through in real time. I started hearing palpitation of my own heart just like a rabbit hearing the murderous cry of a red-tailed hawk. The piece of country cloth I was wearing was already wet without my knowledge. I wanted to escape before the return of the beast, but the trampling sound of the bush hinted me that the escape was almost unlikely.

  Being a young man who had not given a belly to a single woman yet, I was not ready for death. I walked through the valleys of death and woe, and now I saw the shadow of my own death. Just a single ray of light that reflected in the eye of the beast would be sufficient enough for the
dice of life to fall into the hole of death.

  ‘Trying is always worth even if you would not succeed,’ whenever boys failed in doing some activity during Poro, the old man used to tell us. It was hard to forget certain things that the wise and experienced people had advocated who lived enough on this rough earth.

  I started running again into the thick bush in such a way that the beast would not be able to reach me. After a while that retained for an unknown time, I entered an open plane where I saw a stream of fresh water. I suddenly felt weak. My head started spinning as though I was going to faint. I could remember reaching the water and everything went blank in a few seconds.

  The next day morning, I found myself in a village where the people spoke a different dialect. All I knew was that I was in a hut in the village which was on a mountain. The green valley and the stream I tried to cross were clearly visible from the place where I woke up. Neither my legs nor the hands were movable. A sharp pain and an irritating sensation ran all over my body. I felt myself more like a corpse than a living human being. There were herbal plasters all over my body, and some men and women kept on looking at me. They talked to each other, but I could not understand a thing except their sympathetic stare. One old man among the crowd reached me having noticed that I was awake.

  ‘You are from where?’ He asked me with a kind tone in Kissi. I was surprised at what was happening.

  ‘Wounds are plenty,’ he added looking at me very carefully.

  ‘You may stay here till they heal fully,’ he said while pouring some green liquid on my wounds in the leg. I could barely lift my head as there were also bruises on my neck. I looked at my feet which were swollen like two sweet potatoes.

  ‘You must have been running in thorny bushes,’

  ‘Many parts of the skin is torn; flesh had come out,’ the old man kept on telling in very clear Kissi.

  ‘You are Kissi?’ My curiosity to know how he was speaking my language surpassed my pains.

  ‘I too came just like you,’ he said.

  ‘Just like me?’