Zara woke up to the first flush of light, peering out of the giant plasma bubble, as she lay damp, cradled in the wedge between the rock and the nine rock steps to the river on its eastern flank. It was early autumn. The night sky was giving way to the first ochre rays of the sun over the eastern horizon from behind the Peacock Ridge.
The western sky was still dark as the moon prepared to take its last bow behind the Moonshine Mount—so called because of the massive crest of snow atop a giant black granite that glowed in the radiance of the full moon, its feet skirted by the pink sandstone Ah!nandita Hills, kissed by nine similar steps climbing the far bank of the river.
The barren rock was too steep and too foreboding for humans to set foot on. Folklore had it that whoever climbed the rock and reached the snow-white peak would ride off to paradise where no human mind had ventured before.
Since time immemorial, that folklore had been a great temptation for mind adventurers and, yet, a great deterrent. So, they let the mountain be. For no one dare tread its uncharted path for fear of what might lie ahead.
It had been a different story with the mountain to the east, however, that stood a fair distance from the riverbank. Everybody came to the river from far beyond the Peacock Ridge—that glistened in the dazzle of massive gemstones that lighted up its crest by night—where the glamour of human mind revelled in the great metropolis, rolling the dice since the dawn of civilisation in hope and joy, fame and fortune, celebration and euphoria, rubbing shoulders with dejection and despair, fear and sorrow, and squalor and agony.
And so, it was from beyond the Peacock Ridge that countless souls found their way to the river, down the ages, and across age groups, in search of an answer to that eternal existential question in the mind of every living and in the memory of every dead who had left their calling card behind. And that question repeated itself in three simple words:
Who . . . am . . . I?
And with the eternal flow of that question, the river, too, flowed forever as the great divide between the dazzle of the body (as represented by the Peacock Ridge) and the barrenness of the soul (as represented by the Moonshine Mount).
It had been one long journey for Zara till she had got stuck on the wedge. No one quite knew exactly when she came to be perched here, in the cover of dark, to be eventually delivered.
And now, as the orange ball of fire rose to the east above the ridge, Zara lay warming in her bubble, looking up at the mellow early morning sky in wonderment. It had only been a while since she had let out a shrill cry of panic as the long dark shadow of fear crossed her face at the first wink of the light. Soon, however, that frown was replaced by a bewildered smile at the pleasant glow of dawn.
From where she lay, head south, Zara turned her face to the left, catching the flight of an unending flock of tittiri birds, sending ripples of their shadows across the river face below the Ah!nandita Hills. Zara laughed, turned skywards, looked west again, and laughed louder; she looked straight up to the sky, turned right to the sun in the eastern sky, and laughed still louder as the wind picked up her mirth and flew off towards the flight path of the tittiris heading north, the fading ripples of her laughter echoed across the sky. And those ripples mingled with the clang of a thousand bells that now rent the sky.
And Zara’s mind raced back to where she belonged.
Zara’s story was scripted first at the bottom of the glacier, at the head of the river, high up in the mountains, where, across a desolate landscape lay countless plasma bubbles, one heaped upon the other, one beside the other, packed by the zillions in unglued bonding, in the fearful darkness before dawn. Zara, a thousand times smaller than a speck of dust, lay there among a multitude of her likeness, one of many, waiting in silent stillness. Waiting and waiting and waiting.
And then, darkness crept upon darkness in slow motion, in warm embrace, in the frozen wilderness, and high up there in the valley, as emotion gave way to motion, and motion gave way to warmth, and warmth gave way to speed, and speed gave way to heat, and heat gave way to friction, and friction cracked the glacier.
That’s when the tongue of the glacier rolled over, licking its own bruises from the tension of its heat, melting. Melting drop by drop in a watery trickle; and so, the bubbles drifted from their moorings and slipped out . . . one by one. Growing, growing, and growing. First, a hundred thousand times larger to the size of a tip of the human hair, and then five times as big. Speeding, riding the torrent, one colliding against another, choking each other of breath, drowning one too many, ripping each other open . . .
. . . before stillness regained control once more.
Zara’s existential race had begun, among the multitude of her likeness. One of many, she alone would survive to see daybreak by the riverbank, having grown to the size of a mustard seed, round and perfect, a millimetre across.