1-Falling in Love – Being Hormonal.

 

 

 

BEING HORMONAL

 

A Journey to Badrinath — Love, Mysticism & Time

 

 

A Novel

 

 

 

 

"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience.

We are spiritual beings having a human experience."

 

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

 

Chapter One

Falling in Love — Being Hormonal

 

My name is Arjun. And I want to tell you something honest before this story begins: I was, in every measurable sense, a man running away from his own life.

 

The Himalayan Road to Badrinath does not forgive distraction. It demands every cell of your attention — the sheer drops on one side, the grey muscular river far below, the way the mountain simply swallows the tarmac ahead and dares you to keep going. I was driving too fast, and I knew it, and I did not care. Speed, at least, had the courtesy to feel like something. My life in Delhi had reached one of those stretches of highway that offers nothing on either side — no milestone, no horizon, no reason to accelerate or slow down. I was thirty-eight years old, comfortable and quietly desperate, and the mountains were the only remedy I knew.

 

The road curved around a steep bend and the rear wheels of my car lifted momentarily into the thin air, as they had on every corner for the last fifty kilometres. I had stopped being afraid of it. The adrenaline had become a kind of music.

 

Then I saw her.

 

She was standing on the narrow strip of gravel between the road and the precipice — a tall, golden-haired woman in a down jacket the colour of cream, her hand raised to flag me down with a calm authority, as if she stopped cars on Himalayan cliff roads every afternoon. Behind her, a sleek European SUV sat tilted against the mountain wall with the defeated posture of a machine that has finally admitted defeat. Two men with camera equipment stood near it, looking uncertain about everything.

 

I stopped the car.

 

She walked to my window and looked at me. Her eyes were the precise shade of  — a grey-green so clear it seemed to belong to a different atmosphere.

 

"Our car," she said, in accented English, gesturing at the stranded SUV with a mixture of affection and exasperation that suggested this was not the vehicle's first offence, "has decided that Badrinath is not on its itinerary."

 

I told her to get in.

 

Her name, she told me as we climbed the last stretch of road — the three of us pressed together in my small car, her crew members occupying the back with their lenses and cables — was Angelica. "Angel," she said, "is what everyone calls me." She was from Venice. She was making a documentary for Italian television about the ancient Silk Route, following the path that Marco Polo had walked seven centuries ago. She had the focused intelligence of someone who considers every place she visits to be a text waiting to be read.

 

I told her my name. She repeated it softly, as if testing its weight.

 

We reached Badrinath as the evening light turned the snowfields rose-gold.

 

—  —  —

 

The guest house was cold in the way that high-altitude places are always cold — not hostile, but honest. There is nowhere to hide from yourself at four thousand metres. The heater in the common room was doing its best, and Angel and I had somehow ended up on opposite sides of a small wooden table with two cups of tea between us while her crew ate dinner in the next room.

 

She wanted to know about the temples. I wanted to know about Venice.

 

What actually happened was that we talked about God.

 

I told her about Kriya Yoga — how the ancient science of breath and consciousness had flowed down through the ages from Lord Shiva himself to the sage Agastyar, one of the seven great sages who are said to have received the first breath of creation. I told her how Babaji, the deathless Himalayan master who had kept the lineage alive since the third century, was said to meditate in the very caves above Badrinath. How Adi Shankaracharya, one of India's greatest philosopher-saints, had re-consecrated this temple in 800 AD after receiving the same ancient knowledge.

 

"And how is this knowledge passed?" she asked, leaning forward slightly. She had a way of giving her full attention that felt like a form of generosity.

 

"Through the eyes," I said. "Through loving glances."

 

She looked at me. I looked at her. The heater clicked. Outside, the river roared its ancient indifference.

 

And then something happened that I have spent years trying to describe accurately. It was not dramatic. There was no thunder, no sign from the heavens. It was simply that the air between us changed its quality — became denser, warmer, more aware of itself. As if the universe, which had been running its ten billion year experiment in organised matter, had paused for a single heartbeat and said: yes. These two. Now.

 

She blushed and looked down at her tea. But before she did, her eyes had said something that her composed, professional manner would spend the next several months trying to unsay.

 

I was already lost.

 

—  —  —

 

The temple bells found us still talking. We looked up, startled, and discovered that the night had passed entirely without our permission.

 

"The morning prayers," I said, standing quickly.

 

She smiled — a real smile, private and amused. "Go. I will still be here."

 

I bathed in the Tapt Kund, the hot spring that runs miraculous and steaming beside the temple even as the snowfields glitter in every direction. The water felt like being touched by something older than memory. Above me, the peak called Neelkant — Shiva's blue throat, named for the moment when he swallowed the poison of the world to save creation — rose white and absolute against the dawn.

 

I thought about poison and love, and how the difference between them is often only the willingness to swallow.

 

—  —  —

 

After prayers, she was waiting for me at the gate of the guest house, already wearing her camera bag, already ready. In all the time I would know her, Angel was always slightly more prepared than the situation required. I understood later that this was how she managed wonder — by approaching it methodically, so it could not ambush her.

 

That morning it ambushed her anyway.

 

We walked to the cave of Vyas and Ganesha — that remarkable spot where the poet-sage dictated the entire Mahabharata while the elephant-headed god took it down in a single sitting. Angel photographed everything, asked precise questions, took notes in a small leather book. I watched her and thought about all the ways a person reveals themselves without knowing it.

 

Then she told me to stop the spiritual flirting.

 

I laughed — genuinely, for the first time in months. "Was I flirting?"

 

"You were comparing me to an ancient transmission of divine knowledge through loving eye contact," she said, still walking, not looking at me. "In my country, that is flirting."

 

"In my country," I said, "it is simply a description of documented yogic practice."

 

She glanced at me then, quickly, and looked away. But I caught it. A small, helpless smile she immediately retired.

 

We walked on to the Vasundhara falls, where the mythical Saraswati River is said to begin its journey underground toward its secret confluence with the Ganga and Yamuna at Allahabad. The waterfall fell from such a height that it dissolved into mist before it reached the pool below, and the mist hung in the air like something that hadn't decided yet whether to be water or cloud.

 

Angel stood at the edge and looked up at it for a long time without speaking.

 

"In Venice," she said finally, "water goes everywhere. Under your feet, through your windows. You grow up thinking water is the most ordinary thing in the world." She paused. "This is not ordinary."

 

"None of it is ordinary," I said. "We just get tired."

 

She turned to look at me then — a proper, considered look, the kind you give someone when you are revising your initial assessment of them. Then she took off her shoes and waded into the shallows of the pool, and the mist settled on her hair like a veil, and I thought: I would remember this moment for the rest of my life. Whether anything came of it or not, this moment was already mine.

 

—  —  —

 

She disappeared behind the waterfall.

 

I waited. One minute. Two. Called her name. Nothing but the thunder of the water.

 

I waded in after her.

 

Behind the curtain of falling water was a cave — not large, but complete in a way that suggested intention rather than accident. There was a hammock of woven grass, a ring of stones with the remnant ash of a fire, and a hot spring that kept the interior warm and steaming. The walls were covered in something that was not quite moss and not quite paint — spiralling patterns in ochre and charcoal that seemed to shift when you looked at them directly.

 

Angel was standing at the hot spring, her shoes in her hand, looking at the walls with an expression I had not yet seen on her face. Not the methodical attention of the documentarian. Something younger, and less defended.

 

"Who lives here?" she whispered.

 

"Someone who was waiting for us," said a voice behind us.

 

We both turned.

 

He was old in the way that mountains are old — not decaying, but accumulated. Lean and upright, wearing the saffron cloth of a renunciant, with eyes that held the particular quality of attention that belongs to people who have spent decades looking inward and have found something worth looking at. He was sitting cross-legged beside the cold fire ring, and I could not have said, even a moment later, whether he had been there when we entered or had arrived between one breath and the next.

 

He was roasting potatoes on a small fire he had somehow already lit.

 

"Sit," he said. "You must be hungry."

 

We sat. We were, in fact, very hungry.

 

—  —  —

 

The Yogi — he offered no name and we did not ask — spoke to Angel about Darwin and Genesis and the Bhagavad Gita as if they were three translations of the same original text, which perhaps, I thought, listening to him, they were. Angel challenged him point by point, her journalist's instinct insisting on precision, and he answered each challenge with the patience of a man who has heard every objection and finds each one interesting rather than tiresome.

 

The fire crackled. Outside, the waterfall performed its ancient commentary on impermanence.

 

I was warm, and fed, and in the presence of something I could not name. My eyes grew heavy.

 

And then I went somewhere.

 

I travelled back to the time of the Great Flood, when the sky was a different colour and the ocean covered places that are now mountains. I met a man called Manu — Noah, by another name — who stood at the prow of a vast ship with seven sages gathered around him, their eyes not afraid but fierce with purpose. They carried within them the entire compressed inheritance of the world before the flood — every science, every story, every secret — and they were going to plant it again in the new earth like seeds. They were not survivors. They were gardeners.

 

I moved forward in time. I stood in the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates, and a woman with dark eyes and the smell of apples about her led me into a garden where every fruit contained within it the geometry of the infinite. An apple is a world, she said. Look at its seeds. Each one contains the memory of every apple that ever existed, and the blueprint for every apple that ever will. She was not offering me sin. She was offering me the understanding that creation is recursive — that God makes worlds the way worlds make worlds: through love, through desire, through the simple unstoppable fact of wanting to continue.

 

I stood at a stargate near the ancient city that would become Baghdad, and beyond it was a light that was not light — a presence that organised itself into meaning the way music organises silence. I came out through another gate in the Himalayas and found a man sitting in perfect stillness with a cobra coiled at his neck, and he looked at me as if I were a letter he had been expecting for several centuries.

 

I watched civilisations rise and fall with the calm rhythm of breathing — the golden age, the silver age, the age of iron, and beneath it all, always, the same thread: intelligence meeting matter, love meeting time, the divine insisting on expressing itself through every possible shape of being.

 

A hand on my shoulder.

 

"Arjun."

 

Angel's voice. Her hand.

 

I opened my eyes. The Yogi was watching me with an expression of mild, ancient amusement. The fire had burned low. The Yogi gathered his few things with the efficiency of a man who has never accumulated more than he can carry, and looked at both of us with a warmth that felt like a blessing even before he spoke.

 

"Come back when you need to," he said. "I will be here."

 

We walked out through the waterfall and back into the ordinary world.

 

I do not know what Angel was thinking. She was quiet on the walk back, her hand occasionally brushing mine on the narrow path, neither of us acknowledging it or moving away. The mountains were turning purple in the evening light. The bells of the temple drifted down from above.

 

I felt, for the first time in years, completely alive. Not the artificial aliveness of speed or distraction. The real kind — the kind that comes from touching something true.

 

Whether it was the mountains, or the Yogi, or the visions, or the way her shoulder had felt warm against mine in the cold cave —

 

I could not say.

 

I did not need to say.

~ ✦ ~

~ Author's Note ~

Some stories are not fully understood the first time through — and that is as it should be. A story is a present, wrapped. What you find inside depends on how, and when, and who you are when you open it. Take your time. The mountains are patient. So is this.