Come Walk With Me

At midnight, under the brightest moon of summer, I went to the circus. The vast tent was dark. The band instruments had been put away, the tiger cages were covered with tarpaulins and the clowns and acrobats were asleep.

It was as still as a cloud, and very little like a circus. But that did not matter. I had come to see the elephants.

I had seen them during the day, shifting anxiously from foot to foot shaking their heads as if to dislodge unhappy thoughts. They had seem driven mad by the noises of the crowd. Now, in the dark, they were different. Seven lay sprawled on the ground, like shadowy boulders given over to the trust of dreams. Three stood swaying over them, their trunks making gentle tracings on the sides of their sleeping comrades. After the confusion of the day, they seemed at peace with the night illuminated with a quiet wisdom. And that was what I longed to share with them.

In such night-time moments, I became an explorer. " I have been one acquainted with the night", wrote American poet Robert Frost. "I have walked out in rain and back in rain.... I have out-walked the furthest city light". The night is one of man's last remaining adventures. If job and family were to keep me from exploring distant mountains and deserts, there are still the unmapped regions of the night to wander.

Night's gifts are out of the ordinary, ecstatic, and always unexpected. On a warm summer evening, I have turned to see a full moon, huge and orange as a pumpkin, grinning over a near-by ridge, bursting with mirth and spilling its dazzling light over the hillside. It made me laugh out loud, thrilled me with an exuberance of discovery I had thought only a child could feel. I have stood in the mountain meadows with jackals singing around me, until the howling and yipping of a dozen wild voices made me feel like a jackal in spirit.

I have been a night-walker since i was a boy. The risks of darkness, despite frightening the crap out of me, challenged my imagination even then. Tradition holds that night is another country, edged with danger, a metaphor for evil, death or ignorance. Night is where the devil waits, witches cackle, where beasties scurry and hide and there be all sorts of monstrous, faceless things that go bump in the dark. But to a boy, these adventures are one with Never-never-Land!!

Resuming night walks as a legalized adult, I found that grown-up anxieties had given a new edge to the adventure. The flapping wings of a mourning dove were enough to chill my bones. So, now my night walks into the hills near my Kannur home, I carried a torch and a stick, timorously arming myself against the unknown.

But gradually I dispensed with my bubble of light, and climbed higher; one night, looking down on the dazzle of the city, far below, I began to see how sad is all that energy burning in the night.

The sadness of city light, the hard, staring glow of neon lights, made the night less fearful to me. Outdoors, in the dark, one gradually outgrows the sense of risk, and then the night becomes something kinder and more generous, a meeting ground of reason and emotion, a place where mind and soul can work together.

But by day, we put away feelings, and are wonders of reason. But we feel we must be more. We have complexes and powerful emotions. Reason and feeling ought to work together. I suspect that their natural meeting place is in the dark.

But night is a puzzle that reason cannot adequately answer or emotion can entirely rule.The ancients linked the night with poetry, magic and madness; we know only that there is something in us daylight leaches out. The dark need not make one fearful; it can make one reverent. At night we are closer to our spirit natures. So night walking is a quest for spirit. And I believe that I have caught fleeting glimpses of the quarry.

Summer nights are a good time to hunt. Near my home, the moon bathes the dry brown grass in almost enough light to read by. Walking the hills at night, one must trust as much to nose and ears as to eyes, which ties you to the creatures of the night. An owl flashes across the sky, as bright as quicksilver, and you can feel the concentration in his eyes, taste his longing for mouse. A sleeping dove bolts from a bush, terrified by the nightmare of your approach, and your heart flies off with the bird. At such times, one is not a man, not a spirit, but something in between: a movement, a thought, a feeling. It is at once comforting and exhilarating.

To those who haven't tried it, I say, come walk at night. Begin in your own backyard. Go from there to safe rural roads, ideal in moonlight. Take your bubble of light and your trusted mighty walking stick along at first, if you must; you'll soon discard them. For all that is required to seek night's adventures and gifts is an open heart and a desire to understand (and probably for beginners, some guts and bigger nuts). At night, wrote Henry Beston, "A new door opens for the human spirit".And when I stood besides those elephants that night, I am sharing the ponderous dreams of giants, sharing the peace of the night