The Great Downpour

Chapter XV

Chapter XV

Day One

Nanda opened her eyes to a dawn sky with fading stars. It was raining even now, though not as strongly as it had rained the previous evening. It took her a few moments to realize that she was in the wilderness. She tried to remember how she came to be here. There were fleeting memories of being swept away by a strong current of water and drinking in copious quantities of water before she had passed out. I do remember that we were ten of us on that bridge, plus the two peons and the Principal’s dead body. So where were the rest of them?

She ached in almost every part of her body. Her dress was torn at the knees and also at her midriff. Caked blood on her left elbow looked so ominous that Nanda almost screamed at the sight of it. She tried to raise herself to a sitting position and experienced excruciating pain in her left leg. I am hurt – looks like a sprain! She slowly helped herself to her feet. She was on the bank of a river. Nobody else was about. A large outcropping of rock had hidden her from the opposite bank, which was almost 35 to 40 feet away. The water sped along at a neat clip. She could see carps and trout in the water. It looked so divine and wonderful, one could forget one’s own worries amidst such a beautiful landscape.

Nanda’s throat was parched. She took some of the river water in her cupped palms and brought it to her lips. It tasted sweet and good. She sat down by the edge of the stream and began drinking more of this water. Having taken her fill, she got up again, feeling a little rejuvenated and refreshed. I must find my friends. We should all be moving upstream, following the river till we reach the entrance to the Park. She wondered how far it might be. It must be over 5 kilometres, she mused to herself. Or else, the Park people would have come to rescue us yesterday itself, she thought logically. She held her left rib-cage against her side with her right hand and began to move forward. She started calling out the names of her friends one by one. Sandy! Bhairu! Naaz! Mummy! Chand! Sunny! Seeta! Rats! Farhad! She kept up the name-shouting intermittently for as long as she could do it. She was hungry, and she knew that once the sun rose high in the sky, she would not be able to move as fast as she was doing now. Also, she would not be able to shout like this.

Her slow walk led her past one gentle turn in the direction of the stream. Earlier, the sun was to her left, but now it shone on her back from her left. The bank was a bit slippery at the turn, and Nanda had to walk carefully to avoid being thrown back into the water. On either side of the bank were huge trees, some of them perhaps over a hundred years old. If I find something that is edible, I will be able to gather more energy. Shortly after she had had that thought, she smelt the smell of jackfruit. The jackfruit tree is a large deciduous tree that bears huge fruit, but the fruit hangs from the stem and the lowest branches that are still over 30 feet from the ground, and Nanda knew there was no way she was going to climb that high! She began looking around. She saw some berry plants, but none looked familiar to her. They can be poisonous. I should look for something else.

She must have walked more than a quarter of a kilometre upstream by now, when she suddenly spotted a moving figure over a 100 metres away on the far bank.

“Yoo Hoo! Who’s there?” She called out, but the wind direction was in the reverse, towards her, so the voice did not carry. She screamed again, and this time, the person saw her and began coming towards the bank. It was Rati Lancaster!

“Hi, Rats! How are you?”

“As well as can be expected under the circumstances, I suppose!” called back Rati.

“Is there any way you can come to this side?”

“No, but let’s search and see if we can come up with something!”

The two of them started walking in step with each other. Rati looked disshevelled and haggard too, Nanda noted with some concern. The far bank was suddenly interrupted by lots of rocks, and Rati’s progress slowed down. Nanda picked up a small stone and flung it into the water. It hit with a plop and then sank. Five or six large bubbles came up. This gave the impression that the water was at least 10-15 feet deep, and Nanda gave up the idea that she could simply wade across to the other side.

Rati slipped once or twice on the wet rocks and had to re-attempt the distance. After two such stumbles and slips, she gestured to Nanda that this wasn’t going to work and that they must tackle this problem from a little bit downstream.

So they retraced the distance that they had come and proceeded further downstream. At one spot, the river narrowed to just 12-13 feet. There was a large tree-trunk here that bent all the way from the far bank to the near bank from Nanda’s perspective. Its free end was just six and a half to seven feet off the ground.

“Do you think you will be able to climb this tree and come on this side?”

Rati shrugged her shoulders and said, “We have no choice, do we?”

“Okay then, go on, climb it!” Under the continuous egging on by Nanda, Rati finally climbed up the trunk till she was at the top of the curve. The hard part was next. She would have to balance herself and hang on to the sturdy branches while hanging suspended above the rapidly moving water as she moved ahead.

She began to inch forward, with sharp cautionary screams from Nanda till she had crossed over and now hung seven feet above Nanda.

“Jump! I’ll hold you!” said Nanda.

“No, I don’t think you’ll be able to cushion my fall …”

“Don’t look down … just close your eyes and jump!” reiterated Nanda.

Rati threw her small canvas tote bag that had miraculously survived the travails of the night and Nanda grabbed it skillfully. Now it was Rati’s turn to jump down. She took God’s name, crossed herself and left her grip on the branch. Down she went sailing into the outstretched arms of Nanda. The two of them fell together, scraping their hands and the backs of their elbows further.

“Ouch!” said Rati as the pain in her rib-cage intensified and caused her to immediately stop breathing for a few seconds.

Nanda correctly surmised that Rati was injured. She looked around. There was no one. She carefully laid Rati down on the ground and opened up her dress till Rati’s chest was exposed. There was an angry bruise with marked swelling just below her right breast.

“You need a doctor and urgent medical attention. If you have indeed broken a rib or ribs, then there could be further problems.”

“I know, Nands,” said Rati. “Since we … ouch … can’t do anything, let us try and splint my chest if we can.”

“How?”

“Just look around for vines or hanging roots of banyan trees. They should be all right. I have a sharp cutting knife in my tote bag … use that to cut the vines and roots. I will wait here …”

Nanda could see the sense of what Rati was talking about. She is so cool and clever about all this! I wish I was like her …

So lost in thought was she that Rati had to snap her fingers to break her spell and bring her back to the real world. She panned out and reached the verge of trees. Locating vines was not so difficult but climbing them to cut the threads from the plant took all of Nanda’s wits and bravado. At one point, she was about to give up as she fell thrice while attempting to detach a sturdy vine from its stem. Down she would go, all of five feet. What kept up her morale though was the fact that she always fell on thick grass, so that there was no real injury to her. It is much like my Harry Potter games at the cyber-café. Potter falls, loses life, game re-loads, Potter re-tries the same jumps! She smiled at this thought and kept at it till she had about 3-4 metres of vines in her possession. She went back to Rati and helped to wrap the vines tightly around Rati’s chest. Rati allowed her to go around 3 times. Then, she stopped her, saying that the vines were cutting into her skin and eroding her delicate nipple-tips.

As much as she did not want that last statement to affect her, Nanda found herself fantasizing how Rati must look like with her pearly white breasts exposed.

I must be going crazy to think like this, she thought. She put such thoughts firmly out of her mind as she cut short the extra vine and threw it away. She helped Rati to dress up once again and then to get on her feet. Rati opened her tote bag and took out a completely messed-up bar of Cadbury’s Dairy milk chocolate.

“Here, have some,” she said, offering half of the bar to Nanda. The latter gratefully accepted the offer and they ate up the whole chocolate between them within a minute. They looked at each other and laughed for the first time.

“Ouch … that too hurts!” said Rati as they weaved their way back upstream. The sun went overhead, but they continued to plod ahead, wondering whether they would find anyone else or reach the base first.

***

Three kilometres further downstream from where Rati and Nanda had met up with each other were three other players in this drama of the forest. Two of them were human. They were Chand and Seeta. The third was a very hungry leopard, which had already smelled potential food. She (it was a female) had never eaten human flesh, but she was carrying her brood inside her, and she needed to eat fast.