I remember that evening; India had won the T20 world cup. Everybody had reason to frolic and the Mess hall atmosphere was charged with excitement. Our routine almost slipped from my mind.
“The ground is still wet from today’s rain. You guys still want to go for a walk?”, said Ashish.
Pratham, who lives next door to me, joined in. “This kind of weather makes me sleepy, man! Lets skip the night trail today.”
I had to hustle them for 15 mins and they finally relented. All the members of our club, around 12 in all, assembled outside the hostel gate. Torch in hand, we started towards a new path that we had spotted in the day.
The first half an hour passed normally. The rain had stopped in the afternoon, but the sky was still cloudy, with intermittent sparks of lightning. The cloud cover made it a moonless night, so we walked close together to avoid getting lost.
After some time, two people lost interest. One more guy had stomach trouble and had to drop out. These three turned back, and we moved on.
I could see that Pratham was highly tempted to join them! Nevertheless, he continued with us.
We kept moving, and headed towards the lake we had heard so much about. We stopped to admire a cluster of mushrooms. They were flourishing in the humid weather and constant rains.
We crossed two intermittent streams, formed due to the heavy rainfall. But there was no sign of the lake.
Ahead, we came to a fork in the road. One lead in the same direction, while one moved at a direction exactly perpendicular to our current path. We were perplexed.
I was of the opinion that we should change our route. “It’s been forever guys. Obviously, we are going the wrong way!”
One of the other guys was contradictory. he thought we would lose our way. Finally, we split into two groups of Six and Three. Me, Pratham and Ashish were together. The smaller group would try the new path, and if we got lost, we would retrace our way back to this point and meet them ahead.
Saying this, we wished each other luck, and I led my brave comrades onto the new dirt track. As we progressed, we noticed that the jungle was getting more dense. The path was overgrown with grass, and stray branches kept slashing against our body. We could gauge that this route was not used often by people.
The route started sloping downwards and we had to tread carefully; the mud made us move slowly to avoid sliding into ditches along the pathway. These ditches which had tall hedges growing. The hedges were all in disarray; nobody had been maintaining them.
Suddenly I saw Ashish lose his footing, and slip. Pratham reached out to grab him, but Ashish fell through the hedges. Pratham turned around, his face apprehensive.
The hedge was lined with Pink Bougainvillea…..