Never Never Land

The Internet has arrived at The Dacha. I don’t access it much—I’ve got out of the habit, and the connectivity is consistently patchy in any case. It intrudes. But it also confirms the world that is waiting at our doorsteps.

I’ve begun working on a new novel, abandoning all the earlier unfinished ones. A story is emerging, but stories tend to get confused with other stories. A straight narrative with a clear arc of actions and consequences is clearly not possible. Especially not here, in Never Never Land.

Autumn has arrived and dug its heels in. The trees have changed colour. Red and yellow everywhere. The night sky is clear. The days are awash with brilliant sunshine. The evenings are cold but tender.

It has snowed in the high Himalaya. The familiar peaks greet me every morning, before the cloud line begins to veil them.

The magpie watches over me as I sit in the garden and read from the book of folk tales that Peter Paul Singh translated into English from the German. Or was it from the Russian version? Stories circle like the murmuration of birds in the sky, so many of them, and yet, often, the same stories.

There was a story Badi Amma used to tell me, of the girl who lived with her ancient grandmother in Never Never Land. I searched for the story in Peter’s book, but couldn’t find it.
There was another story that Badi Amma would tell me, about a snow-white crow that would dance across the sky in the high mountains when winter announced itself. It was the harbinger of a harsh and bitter winter, that bird, of snowstorms and avalanches, and people would tremble with fear when they saw it. That story was in the book. I read and re-read it.

Crows and ravens and magpies, they are all corvids, clever and astute. They can recognise faces and hold a grudge. They can make tools and hide their food. They mate for life. They have funerals for their dead.

I dreamt of a white raven, but then it became a magpie, my magpie, and flew away. Owls hooted all night. Dogs howled and bayed at the moon. Moths fluttered behind thin curtains.

The weather has changed again. Rain and hail and sleet for days on end. A helicopter has crashed near Badrinath. Buses have disappeared into ravines and khuds and rivers are in spate. The electricity comes and goes. The Internet keeps us alerted and updated to the havoc around. They call it climate change and global warming and sterile words like that, but it is more than that. It is the wrath of the gods.

That is what Badi Amma told me, and I believe her. ‘Uttaranchal, our Uttarakhand, is the Dev Bhoomi, the land of the Gods. That is what they call it in the Manas Khand, in the ancient epics. Now, the Mountain Gods are impatient beings—they like solitude, they don’t enjoy being jostled around. So they have decided to push away the tourists and the greedy builders who are polluting our Dev Bhoomi. They will push them over the cliffs, they will bury them under landslides, they will drown them in the overflowing rivers.’

‘If they still don’t understand,’ she added, ‘they will set the forests on fire. They will reclaim our sacred land and make it green and young again.’
I had never seen her so passionate about anything before.

She was not the only one. Pooran and his wife Parvati returned from the temple in the next village whispering to each other. They looked troubled.
‘What’s the matter? You look worried,’ I said to Parvati.

Pooran replied on her behalf. ‘A holy man had come from high in the Himalaya to visit the temple in the next village,’ he said. ‘He told us the Gods are going to depart from these mountains until humans mend their ways. They will send ghouls and spirits to drive the humans away. A noble bear will be crowned King and rule over hill and dale. Only seekers and righteous people shall be allowed here—the rest will be tipped back like garbage to the plains below. It has happened in Joshimath already, the sadhu said, and it will happen everywhere.’
It sounded dire, but also reassuring, depending on the perspective from which you examined prophecies.

Now Parvati took over from Pooran. ‘We had heard of Shivji’s Tandava—now we shall witness Devi Bhairavi’s dance of destruction! The Goddesses will not go away—they will guard the secrets until the Gods return.’

It sounded confusing but somehow comforting. Parvati looked at her watch. ‘I have to marinate the lamb chops,’ she said, ‘and make khichdi for Badi Amma! The Gods will not descend to help me in the kitchen!’

Extracted from Never Never Land by Namita Gokhale. Published by Speaking Tiger Books, 2024.

Lonely, middle-aged, at a personal and professional dead-end, Iti Arya flees the towers and bright lights of Gurgaon for The Dacha, a remote cottage in the Kumaon Himalayas where she had spent perhaps the happiest years of her childhood. Over the course of that single monsoon in the hills, in the company of two grandmothers—ninety-something Badi Amma and Rosinka Paul Singh, aged one hundred and two—and a mysterious girl who may be her sister, Iti will make peace with her approximate life and quiet desolation. She will witness the vanity of youth, but also its vulnerability and tenderness; the indignities of age, and also its courage and consolations. She will submit to life and the eternal spirit of the mountains.

With Never Never Land, Namita Gokhale shows, again, why she is one of India’s most original and daring writers, with an extraordinary understanding of the human condition.