Pakirappa stayed on the road for a while. He had been looking toward the twin hills he used to pray to. This time, Pakirappa was not folding his hands. He looked at the other hills nearby. He seemed dubious about something.
'What are you thinking?' Senan asked.
As Pakirappa said nothing, Senan thought he would be wandering in the Jeep that had been trekking up above the huge hill. It would take some patients to the Malakudiyas. Some natives or laborers would be driving the vehicle confidently. It looked like some toy Jeep moving through the mud path that separated the green vegetation on both sides.
'It's hard to believe that we had traveled to the Malakudiya tribals,' Senan said.
Pakirappa did not make any comment on it. He nodded in approval. Senan was engrossed in something else. The thin silver line stood still far away on the hill. It was incredible that it was flowing and had some kind of movement. It ran down the hill as a small stream and turned into the huge river that flows down the bridge through Aniyoor.
'Did you see anything there,' Senan asked. Meanwhile, Pakirappa had resumed his journey, and Senan had been walking with him.
'What's there up? Any bison? Sambar deer? Or something else?'
Senan insisted on an answer.
'Do you see anything so there?' Pakirappa asked furiously.
'No, nothing.' Senan said.
'Something will take place there tonight.'
'Where?' Senan asked.
'In one of those hills,' Pakirappa said, as though there had been many people on the road who may overhear them.
They all had a common boundary with the reserved forest. But they stood far away, facing the hill where Senan and Pakirappa lived.
'Dangerous thing or a usual one here.'
'It can be either or both. Who knows!' Pakirappa heaved, looking up at the sky. As they were passing by the toddy shop, he had been silent. When they reached the shop, Pakirappa turned back to ensure it.
He said, 'Don't ask about it to anyone. We don't know anything.'
'How do you come to know about it?'
'From the talk of the laborers on the 700 acres, they don't know I've heard it.'
Senan believed that nothing frightening or confidential would happen in any of those hills. For the first time, Senan was concerned about the existence of the hills, and eventually, he wished nothing to daunt them anyhow. Senan thought that Pakirappa had been scaring him about the unexplored wilderness for some reason.
Again, Neenkaraja came to Senan's mind. Neenkaraja would have also been caught in some confidential disaster in the forest. It could be anything like that or something else. However, Senan didn't imagine talking about it to Pakirappa then. Senan knew that it had been hard to take out anything about Neenkaraja from Pakirappa.
'You can see it if you watch those hills overnight. There can be some commotion over it. Then you'd know about it, most probably at night.'
'I'm not used to such wild forests at night. I'm frightened by nightmares, even behind the closed door.'
'Then don't close the door, the front door. We can it from our sit-out.'
Senan had to wait for the unpredictable.
(to be continued)
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Invincible Naga
Mystery / ThrillerSenan had strange encounters with snakes, both in dreams and real life, when he was employed as a laborer in a vast farmland in the deep woods in a remote village in the Western Ghats of Karnataka, South India. Later, he finds that the snake had bee...
