Lost Mountain
by ANURADHA PRASAD
Christine Shan Shan Hou, Take a Closer Look, collage on paper, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
LOST MOUNTAIN
ANURADHA PRASAD | JULY 2023 | Issue 25
The forest is damp and cold. Darker and more intimate than the open meadow I have just left. The meadow overlooks peaks dusted in snow. Light hovers above like a blessing. Apples cling to bare limbs: cold hard stony fruits full of juice. Magpies are everywhere. They sail. Their prized feather tail, a streak of blue, behind them. Above them, the white stout bodies of Himalayan griffons endlessly circling the sky.
Only a slant of light filters through the thick hush flung over earth by the old-growth deodar and horse chestnut trees. They enclose me, gather me up and into them. There’s a strange, bewitching gravity that does not draw me down but forward, toward something central. The forest is light with autumnal colors. Fading ferns, yellow and green, are all I see as my feet find their way over jutting hard roots, making natural footholds to my rootlessness. I have never rested long enough to grow my own roots. I cherish it and despair in it.
With me are a mountain sprite and a mountain goat. I am a mere human, a day-old kiss still pressed on my mouth. I want to be sublime like the forest. I am only a little stoned. A mad flurry erupts, breaks the enchantment. A magpie shrieks and beats her wings wildly, alerting me to a nest in the hollow of a tree I never saw. My voice, ringed with wonder, is not assurance. To her, it is an impending tragedy.
There is the sound I love. Water beckoning. The water swings over the cliff like a frayed braid of hair, white and foamy. I can catch its misty spray. The dark and clawed-out face of the cliff is time itself. I want to lay a kiss at its feet.
I take the hard route and make a bridge out of a fallen tree. It is a giant. It’s bleached beige, too soft, patched with moss. I crawl. I slip. I grab a cut in the body. My hand sinks into crumbling, rotting wetness. I can’t go back, only forward. Or fall into the steep cut of land beneath me. This moment is my life. There was a trodden path I could’ve taken. A sturdier trunk I could’ve walked.
I cross over to the other side and flop beneath a tree. The canopy opens to the shrill blue of sky. My fingers, now resting on soil, felt the depths of a tree. We were for a moment one being, dead and alive.
The sprite finds a butchered green barbet: all feathers and no body. The intelligence of the body awoken by longing turned scales to feather. Terrestrial became aerial. To earth again, rest in peace. Or, we could play the hand drum and resurrect the bird to wholeness, make a new being of it, of feathers and no body but metal breath, music. Perhaps I could wear these feathers, fly instead of float, a dandelion heavy with seed for whom no ground feels like home.
I imagined the peoplelessness of these woods would help me inhabit myself better. Return to the core of being and make myself over again. But I am heavy with gathered selves. They come from the world. They stampeded over the other me before I knew to make me, these fine victors. It is what it takes to survive. Their colors have turned but they don’t fall like the broadleaves around me: quick, light, easy. If I lose these overgrown selves I carry, maybe I can rest, trust what is true to take root.
I am heavy, so heavy.
I am the shrieking magpie.
I am the flock of barbet moving like the diaphanous scarf of dancing Isadora.
I am Qwana, a mountain who came to me seven years ago.
Qwana was a runaway mountain. A young mountain, she was restless, bored, curious. She no longer wanted to be a place for lovers’ trysts, a mountain lion’s prowl, humans gathering wood and berries off the sparse groves of bushes and trees on her back, and the occasional adventurers who left unchallenged. One day, in a huff, she gathered herself into human form and left. She felt only a twinge of pity for the mountain lion now downgraded to just a lion. Still covered in brambles, she reached the edge of the forest. Across her was a clearing where a commune had made a home.
I left her standing on that threshold without knowing I had crossed over. I had already left my wilderness when I heard the first whispers of her footsteps emerge. In a living room embalmed with mandarin scent, I raised a flute of champagne to a false kindness. The mirror inverts: good is made bad and bad good. I smiled hard. Sincere in effort. I smiled over rustling wilderness and shrieking magpies. Hear it, hear it. In my throat. In my belly.
A woman stood by, covered in bramble, tapping her foot, impatient.
I knew Qwana too would cross over. Disillusioned by the commune, she goes further into the world. Even as innocence gives her the strength to reach into the world, it shows her too much of it, turns to ash. Eventually, she returns to being a mountain. No longer young, but a grand one, craggy, a beast of a mountain, besieged by blizzards. Benign, she is not. Malevolent, she is not. No longer for lovers and berry gatherers, she is now the goddess of deep longing for those who long and whose hearts yearn, who seek feathers where they have scales, who know roots only in rootlessness.
The paths in her forests, tender and narrow, disappear and appear, so that her pilgrims are perpetually losing themselves and finding themselves. She offers paths to summits no one knew they had in them. Her own remains untrampled. If lore is to be believed, it is guarded jealously by an old-as-time mountain lion who never lets her out of sight.
I remembered Qwana again like so many other lost things when I stepped back into myself, to this crowded home that is my body. Qwana had risen from depths within myself, from the friction of leaving and arriving. She could be my way finder, prophecy, fate, saint, root, who knows.
Here in the Himalayas, I hope to find her again, coax her to return to me. Where else would I find her but here where fragmented land drifted, chased a sea underground, slammed into whole land, folding into an accordion of mountains, mostly land, a little bit of sea whose depths are now heights, light over their face like a blessing. The pain of being born out of seeking, of finding hold is the mountain I tread, lightly.
I lie on this earth. I am a tired old tree. A tree with borrowed roots. I may have shed a leaf. If you find an amber leaf, a little crunchy, a little worn, will you remember me?
Anuradha Prasad is a writer living in Bangalore, India. She holds a Master’s degree in English Literature. She writes short fiction, essays, and poetry. Her work has appeared in Sleet Magazine, Literally Stories, The Bangalore Review, Borderless Journal, Muse India, and Usawa Literary Review.
Christine Shan Shan Hou is a poet and artist of Hakka Chinese descent. Their publications include The Joy and Terror are Both in the Swallowing (After Hours Editions 2021), Community Garden for Lonely Girls (Gramma Poetry 2017), and “I'm Sunlight” (The Song Cave 2016). Their artwork has been exhibited at White Columns and Deli Gallery in New York City.