कुमाऊँचा कोळसा बनवणारा

कथा 2

The Flautist of Binsar

In the oak forests above Binsar in the Kumaon hills, there lived a retired schoolteacher named Mahesh Joshi who had built a small cottage at the end of a logging road, three kilometers from the nearest village. He had chosen the isolation deliberately — forty years of teaching children in crowded government schools had left him craving silence. The forest gave him silence. Or so he thought.

On a night in late March, with the rhododendrons just beginning to bloom red against the dark oak trunks, Mahesh was reading by kerosene lamp when he became aware of music. Not a radio — there was no electricity at his cottage. Not a passing traveler — the logging road had been abandoned for fifteen years. A flute, playing a melody in a raag he could not identify, though he had studied Indian classical music for decades and knew every standard raag by ear.

The music came from the direction of a clearing approximately two hundred meters from his cottage — a flat stretch of ground where the oaks gave way to grass and the stars were visible. He had walked to that clearing a thousand times. He knew every stone, every fallen branch, every deer trail that crossed it. He put on his shawl and walked toward the sound.

The clearing was moonlit. The music grew clearer with each step — a bansuri flute, definitely, but played with a technique he had never heard. The notes bent in ways that a bamboo flute should not permit. The melody circled and circled, never quite resolving, each phrase building on the last in a spiral of increasing beauty that made his throat tight and his eyes burn.

He reached the clearing's edge and stopped. He could see no musician. The grass was empty, silver-white in the moonlight, undisturbed. The music came from the center of the clearing but there was nothing at the center — no figure, no instrument, just sound emerging from empty air, as if the clearing itself had learned to sing.

Mahesh sat down at the clearing's edge. He did not enter the clearing. This was not a decision based on folklore knowledge — he was a rationalist, a science teacher, a man who did not believe in spirits. He sat at the edge because something in the music told him to. The music was not for him. He was permitted to listen. He was not invited to approach.

He sat for perhaps an hour. The music played without pause — no breath marks, no rest, which was impossible for a human flautist and which his rational mind noted and then set aside. When it stopped, it stopped mid-phrase, and the silence that followed was so total that Mahesh could hear his own heartbeat in his ears.

He walked home. He did not sleep. He sat until dawn, and when the light came, he found that he was weeping — not from fear or sadness, but from something he could not name. A feeling like homesickness for a place he had never been.

Mahesh heard the music eleven more times over the next two years, always on clear nights, always from the same clearing. He never entered the clearing. He never saw a musician. He told one person — his niece, a journalist in Delhi, who visited him in 2014. She asked him what he thought it was. Mahesh said: 'I taught science for forty years. I believe in evidence. The evidence is that something plays music in that clearing that no human could play. I do not know what it is. I only know that it changed me. After the first night, I became a person who could cry. I had not cried in twenty-seven years. The music returned that to me.'

Mahesh Joshi died in 2019 at age eighty-two. His niece visited the cottage afterward to collect his things. She walked to the clearing on a March evening, near the anniversary of his first encounter. She heard nothing. The clearing was silent. But she found, at the exact spot where her uncle used to sit, a small pile of dried marigolds that had not been there when she arrived. The petals were fresh — perhaps a day old. Mahesh had been dead for three months.

कथा 3

The Musician's Curse

This story circulates among sarangi players in Varanasi and concerns a musician named Ustad Rafiq Khan who was considered, in the 1970s, one of the finest sarangi players in North India. His talent was extraordinary — audiences wept when he played, and other musicians openly said that listening to Rafiq was like hearing music for the first time and realizing that everything before had been noise.

In the winter of 1974, Rafiq was traveling by train from Varanasi to Delhi for a concert at Kamani Auditorium. The train was delayed for seven hours outside a small station in Uttar Pradesh — a mechanical failure that the railways could not resolve quickly. Passengers disembarked. The station was at the edge of a sal forest, and Rafiq, carrying his sarangi case, walked into the trees to find quiet.

He walked for perhaps ten minutes, following a forest path, until he found a clearing. The moment he entered the clearing, he heard music. A stringed instrument — not a sarangi, not a sitar, not anything he could name. The tone was impossible: each note contained harmonics that no wooden instrument could produce, as if the sound were coming from inside his own skull rather than through the air.

Rafiq was not afraid. He was a musician. He recognized mastery when he heard it, and what he was hearing was mastery beyond anything the human world had produced. He opened his sarangi case, rosined his bow, and began to play along.

This was his mistake.

The moment his bow touched the strings, the other music stopped. The silence was violent — a sudden absence that felt like a physical blow. Rafiq's own notes hung in the air, thin and inadequate and shamefully human. He stopped playing. The silence continued for perhaps thirty seconds. Then a single note came from somewhere in the clearing — one sustained tone on the unknown instrument, so beautiful and so complete that Rafiq's hands went numb. His bow fell from his fingers. The note held for a long time — impossibly long, longer than any lung or any bow-stroke could sustain — and then it was gone.

Rafiq picked up his bow and walked back to the station. The train was repaired. He reached Delhi. He performed at Kamani Auditorium that night. The concert was technically flawless. But Rafiq knew — and the other musicians in the audience knew — that something was different. The transcendence was gone. He was still skilled, still precise, still better than most. But the quality that had made audiences weep — the quality that made his music feel like it came from somewhere beyond the human — was absent.

Rafiq played for another fifteen years before retiring. He never regained whatever had been taken from him in the clearing. Among sarangi players in Varanasi, the story is told as a warning: you do not play music in a Kinnara's clearing. The Kinnara's grief is not a duet. If you try to join it, you do not add to its beauty — you reveal the poverty of your own. And that revelation cannot be unfelt.

Rafiq never spoke of the incident publicly. But he told his student, a young sarangi player named Mohan Lal, in 1989: 'I heard what music is supposed to be. After that, everything I play sounds like a child banging a pot. The Kinnara did not curse me. It showed me the truth. The curse is knowing.'

कथा 4

The Honeymooners at Corbett

In February 2008, a couple from Lucknow — Deepika and Sanjay Mishra — were on their honeymoon at a resort on the edge of Jim Corbett National Park. The resort offered night-safari drives into the park's buffer zone, but the Mishras had opted out — Deepika was nervous about tigers, and they preferred the balcony of their cottage, which overlooked a stretch of forest where barking deer came to graze at dusk.

On their fourth night, at approximately 11 PM, both of them heard music. A stringed instrument playing from somewhere in the forest beyond the resort boundary. The melody was slow, sweet, and profoundly melancholic — Deepika described it later as 'the saddest love song I have ever heard, played on an instrument that does not exist.'

Sanjay assumed it was another guest playing music. Deepika pointed out that the sound was coming from inside the forest, not from any cottage. They listened for perhaps twenty minutes. The music did not repeat or loop — it developed, phrase by phrase, with the structure of a composed piece but the spontaneity of improvisation.

Both of them began to cry. Not from fear — from emotion they could not explain. The music seemed to speak directly to something in their relationship — to the vulnerability of being newly married, to the fear of whether love would last, to the loneliness that persists even inside partnership. Deepika reached for Sanjay's hand. He was already reaching for hers.

The music stopped at approximately 11:40 PM. The silence was physical — a weight settling over the forest. The barking deer had stopped calling. No insects sang. Even the wind seemed to have withdrawn.

In the morning, Deepika asked the resort manager about music in the forest. The manager — a local man who had worked at the resort for twelve years — looked at her carefully. 'You heard it from the forest? Not from another room?' She confirmed. He was quiet for a moment, then said: 'That happens sometimes. Guests hear music from the sal forest on still nights. There is no one in the forest at night. The park is closed. There are tigers.' He paused. 'Old people here say it is a Kinnara. A spirit that plays for its lost wife. They say it has played in these forests for a very long time.'

He told them it was considered good luck for newlyweds to hear the music — a blessing on their union from a being that understood love at its most devotional. Deepika and Sanjay have been married for eighteen years. They return to the same resort every February. They have heard the music twice more — once in 2012, once in 2019. Each time, they say, it felt like a renewal. Like something in the forest was checking on them.