Despite having lived in a boarding school for years, the night meal often triggered nostalgia, and something else mingled in there- a haunting.

The resplendent mountains outside the french window of the dining room were the diamond and gold studded mounds that stood helplessly dependent upon the housing and street lights to lend them a contour. Their majesty stood shrouded in dark, in the night hours, waiting to rise with the sun.

There was a stillness in the dead of air each night. Any existence on the mountains seemed to be confined to the brightly lit dining room, with school girls obediently nestled in twenty sets of tables of twelve. And the tinkling of the cutlery, the only permissible sound, was a comprehensible disconnect with the darkness and the suspension of life in the view outside.

With the dawn, daylight reformed the home-longing and the ghostly theories, as life sparkled brightly under the sun-filled day. Civilization seemed to spring up with the sun rays, bringing cheerfulness in the wake of human inhabitance around.

But there were some crawly moments of presentiment at the time between light and shade. Amidst an evening study hour in my classroom, where boarders worked on the homework on their openable school desks, I had to bring my artwork sheet from the school art room.

The stretch from the classroom to the art room was the span from the hilltop to a very steep walk down the mountain.

I unflinchingly made way through a maze of fragrances of jasmine and lemongrass shrubs on both sides of the passage within the school premises. Half way down, duskiness blended with soft clouds made the path dim and hazy. My mind distracted from the refreshing smells and the tingling coolness to the eerie sounds of insects and beings that only seemed to come to life at night. Stories of haunted mountains and ghosts on lonely paths swarmed up my thoughts, To jolt out of the consuming fright I scolded my mind out of believing the silly tales and what the senses almost began to see and feel around.

All of this now stands three decades behind, but I wondered if I was an over-imaginative schoolgirl- susceptible to cues or over-awed by the dark. The answer to my introspection trailed close behind- I’ve never been scared of the dark and I still feel the haunt whenever uphill.

It wasn’t the hill, it wasn’t the dark- it was the boundless mysterious nature around that brought in the realization of our subservient presence within the biosphere. Our sense of dominance as the top notch of the food chain stands defeated in the upheaved land- a land evidently shared by the flora and fauna, slighting the human habitation to a befitting share of our paltry existence.