Wild Berries

By Gudhal

“I don’t think we should be together,” the boy said. The two were sitting on a dingy stonewall overlooking the valley. Above them, above even the intertwined canopies of strange trees, black clouds gathered about and portended the coming of a long rain. Monsoon was prevalent in that part of the country, as were landslides and floods.

“I don’t think we should be together anymore,” he repeated. The girl had heard him the first time, but the iteration of those wretched words convinced her that the boy was not deliberating over some crude joke—he was, in all likelihood, certain of the idea.

“Why?” she asked him. The country around them was a weary country, with its sloping hills saddled upon each other and its green coniferous shrubbery spanning into a distance of about a hundred and thirty miles. From the valley below them, wisps of clouds rose like a dull procession of smoke to where the black clouds grumbled and roared.

“It’s about to rain,” the boy said and looked up. “We should go home.”

“Why? Why—why do you want to leave?”

“I like someone else.”

“No, you don’t.”

“No, I don’t,” he conceded. He looked around to see if a furtive onlooker was observing the two of them, but the only intruders he could perceive were the strange birds of that country. He set his hands on the cold stones upon which he sat and leaned on them. 

“Then what is it?’ she asked. Tears pooled in her eyes.

“We are different persons.”

“Different?”

“Yes.”

“But you said no like people can live together—you said,” she began to cry. “You said that we’ll live together forever. For all the seven births.”

“I don’t believe in reincarnation.”

“But you said that you’ll marry me.”

“I was foolish.”

“Why?” she said.

“Why was I foolish? I don’t know. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Okay.”

A great wind stirred the country and a bird gave a shrill cry from above them. Some distance behind them, at an elevation, an asphalt road coiled about a bare hill and through this road crept a city vehicle. Inside this trundle ferry sat a mother and her daughter, both marvelling at the country that swept past them at the hillocks bedecked with swirling trails of clouds, and at the smooth rocks which sat on the receding hillside like archaeological artefacts ordained by a higher authority to remain undisturbed and autonomous from all human engagements. The little girl asked her mother if fairies lived among those forests that she saw, and the mother said that they do, they live on wild berries and when you pluck one out, you’re eating a fairy. The little girl shrieked at the abhorrent notion and told her mother that she must not eat any wild berries. The mother kissed her daughter, and then they were gone.

“We must get going,” the boy said. “It’s fixin’ to rain.”

“Why?” the girl squeaked.

“Why is it fixin’ to rain? I don’t know—maybe because it wants to. Something that’s just supposed to happen.”

“Why are you leaving me?’

“It’s for the best.”

The two sat quietly for some time. He strained to remember their first congress—it must have been, he thought, a clandestine one, for the general idea of a romance favoured by the folks of that country was a matrimonial arranged, as a custom, by the suitor’s parents, and among his acquaintances he knew no one who objected of this method. He had, indeed, vowed to marry her, but he felt regret remembering all the occasions upon which he had made those frivolous claims to her—of loyalty and of love, of children and of a comfortable household.

“Is it because I won’t let you do it?” she asked. It had started to pour.

“Think whatever you want.”

“You tell me. Is it because of that?”

“I don’t know,” he said and watched the valley before him, cut into myriad fields and studded with solitary houses and cottages painted white and ladened with shingles and idols of rocks.

“We need to go. It’s raining,” he said.

“But you like the rain.”

“You’ll get wet.”

“I don’t care.”

He looked at her. A girl, a mere girl of seventeen learned only in the collection of firewood and the rearing of cows, a girl with whom he had once imagined creating a family. In her stark appearance and girlish caricature, he fancied the face of a woman, worn with age and wrinkled and haggard, but as pretty as it had always been. In that woman, he fathomed the ravages of childbirth draining her complexion and depressing those eyes which had been the very first objects of his fancy among the rest of her pliant features.

The rain came down heavily and the bower above them began to send thick blobs of rainwater down to their heads.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked, damp and cold.

“We are different people,” he said, and he thought of her as a housewife tending after a pair of children and her chores, and him as the father of the two rapscallions, censuring their silly charades and urging them to study; and then he imagined the quarrels between them, regarding ethics and finances and schools and insurances, quandaries familiar to all city-dwellers. Since the beginning of their courtship, for that was the light in which he used to see their relationship, he had often weighed the thought of moving to Delhi after their marriage. A rural life might be an ideal life, but it was still a primitive one, fit for only those who were content with tilling the many flights of terraced fields and grazing a handful of cattle for earning a livelihood, smoking, perhaps, a hookah in leisure and attending either religious gatherings or austere weddings as yearly amusements.

“You’re a simple girl. A country girl. Born among the mountains, bred among the mountains.”

“You are born and bred here too.”

He sighted a cab struggling past a murky path on the hill below them and then looked at the country again. “But I want to get out.”

“Then we’ll get out together.”

“No,” he gazed at the road on some distant hillock loping past thick undergrowth and the fuming mist of clouds and he wondered if he could traverse that road to its absolute end.

“You’re a cruel person,” the girl said, and the rain fell in a violent deluge.

“Maybe.”

He had a test tomorrow. On their wedding day, they would have been dressed in the traditional garb of red and white, as man and woman, witnessed by the gods and blessed by their grace to become husband and wife, and the attendees would have cheered for the two of them—shy figures ladened with heavy garlands—and erupted into dances of which he could perform none yet be induced by custom to participate in. He had a test tomorrow. He wondered what the city people saw in the briary trees and the peculiar birds of that country.

“We should be going home,” he said.

“Why are you leaving me?” the girl asked.

“It’s another girl. I like another girl,” he lied.

As they hobbled back down through the woods, the girl plucked a bunch of wild berries from a twig. The boy seized these little, green bladders from her palm and threw them on the nettled forest floor.

“You’ll be poisoned eating those things.”

The two continued their descent and parted at a clearing.         

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Gudhal is an undergrad from Delhi, India. He is dull at conversations. He is dull at pretty much everything. Though, in spite his trite self-loathing self, he believes that he writes decently every once in a while.

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