Paamay

The para-glider landed twenty meters from where Nisha and I sat numbed by the heat rising from the ground. The glider sprinted on his imaginary runway, finally gathering stillness from his momentum. The lake shone bright against the glider's silhouette. Part of the fields had been razed to make space for the paragliding. Nisha said we should come back after graduation to try paragliding from Sarangkot.

I pictured myself, gliding down to the basin of fields, packed with ripe wheat, with the lake reflecting the afternoon.

The mountains towered suddenly where the lake ended, creating a natural dam. I cast a long glance at the wheat fields. They looked like someone had spread thick blankets of gold over the land. The sun and Paamay. They seemed to affect one another. Ghoretos, meant for horses to trot on, slashed the rice fields into two. We would cycle along it in the evening, back to the lakeside town.

The fields ran down gradually in a slant to meet the waters. Where the plantations ended, the hills rose untamed, a miniature of the beginning of several such episodes. The hills on both sides of the lake made Paamay look like an abundant bottom of a gorge.

Where the fields ended, the lake began. It made it look like the fields had actually just emerged from the lake! At the edge of the water, water-lilies floated. A woman, rowing in a saree, the colour of rhododendron stopped briefly to pick one. Her oar made ripples in the water as the boat glided away.

Nisha stood up astride, her arms resting on her hip. Rested on my side, my head on my left palm, I caught a fragment of the sky through the triangle between her arms. Cirrus clouds scribbled the azure. It's brilliance blinded me, till I saw bubbles floating.

She pointed toward the circular huts, some fifty metres away from us.

That's Maya's village.

The village had some ten huts, possibly one-roomed huts. Their roofs were thatched and walls painted in red clay. A man hung from a hammock fastened between two pillars near the huts. His limbs dangling in air. Nisha said she wanted to be him, smoking marijuana.

I told her I already felt intoxicated.