Sounds at night

Have you ever been camping?

I have gone camping once. It was school time and it was a bag of mixed experience. No fault of the place or the school though, completely mine.



This was around the time when I used to wake up at night and watch movies on DVDs. There was no strict restriction on watching movies, although my family preferred that I should spend more time outside in the ground playing sports. However, the horror genre was kept out of my hands, my parents had to do some real hard work to make me sleep alone in my room at night and they were not going to risk it.



Little did they know, things would take this turn and that after everyone fell asleep, I would come down to the drawing room and in low volume I would see, yes, the out of reach horror movies. Why is this important? Because this was a time when most movies had a group of people going camping or for any other reason a bunch of people were going to the jungle, where then they would fall in trouble facing a creature, ghost or whatever horror personified thing that could be put in there.



I slept fine at night, the horror didn’t bother me, I had begun to feel that I was one of those people who weren’t afraid of anything, of course with exception of turning up in school without having done the homework.



So, when my school took us on a camping trip, one look at the camping site near a small stream surrounded by hills and trees, and I realised the reason I wasn’t scared, my room wasn’t a jungle or anything out of the city landscape, but this, right here, here it was, the place where my fears were.



There were others with concerns as well and I am glad I wasn’t the only one. But no one had as deep an imagination as me, the lightweight synthetic material of the tent wasn’t going to stop anything from coming in and I still cannot remember who assigned my sleeping space near the tent side wall. The first night I slept light.



However, the next day to answer someone’s query the camping instructor confirmed the presence of tigers but also that they didn’t come out to this region or a place crowded by people. In my mind I thought ‘what’s stopping a tiger’, the same question I had in the tiger safari when the driver stopped the tall but open jeep claiming that a tiger was nearby, and they just had a wooden stick for security purposes.



So for the next two days at night I could hear sound of all kinds, whether it was from out there or was it just in my mind will always remain doubtful.



I haven’t gone camping since, I would like to at some point of time, but I have been quite busy after school with one thing or the other, everything holds its importance to be experienced after all.

Written by Anuran Chatterji

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