The only thing left of him is the label or, more precisely, his name. Other things surrounding him is foggy. No one knew where he had come from but everyone knows where he went. A few thing about him sticks in my mind. My knowledge of him is physical, or rather earthly, though. To me, he didn’t know as much.

This fellow of my age, or may be my elder by a year or two, lived too short but too full. He made the most of what we call life.  We lived in the same place over a span of three years. I was born there. He’d set his feet on the soil. I behaved as if I owned the place. He’d give a sardonic smile. He owned the whole globe or nothing!

Don’t know what picture Kabila had of himself or if he ever had one, everyone but him took this grown-up boy for an insane. They’d have put him in a looney house, but for the thing he did no harm to no one. He went by the name Kabila, I doubt anyone knew his real name, though.

Hardly anyone knew the roof he slept under and the stove he cooked his food on. He was both diurnal and nocturnal. He was as close to the hooting owl and howling jackal as with humans. He’d make queer noise or funny sound with his mouth to draw birds and creatures to him.

The cryptic Mona Lisa smile was his unfailing trademark. This angular face boy, with cheekbones protruding from underneath his facial skin, lived and then went to final sleep in one and the same dress – a brown color close neck knee-length shirt with side pockets and a faded grey cotton trouser. The two piece hanging on him all the time, when he walked the earth and when he had fallen into eternal sleep.

Kabila would be right there by the roadside tea shop every morning sipping at his tea from a steel tumbler, quiet, self-satisfied smirk on face, keeping himself to himself. He’d pull the wooden seat out of the tin-roofed tea shop and sit on it cross-legged all by himself. Hardly anyone would go near him and nearly none would get into a conversation with him. Throw a question at him and he’d throw it back, “You know the answer”.  His answer is cold and crisp but has lots of fire underneath it. Tangle with him, go red in the face! No way to outwit him!

His range of knowledge about things of general interest would blow anyone’s mind. Kabila could tell you the total population of birds and their types nesting in the wood as well as the casual visitors and migrant population of birds, so had his mental arithmetic about living creatures roaming the wood. His calculation would vary depending on the season. He’d tell you everything you need to know in one breath. He also had huge deposit of knowledge in his memory about crops varieties, vegetables, herbs, wild plants alongside the therapeutic value they inherited. He’d tell you what vegetable serves what health purpose and which of the wild plants remedy a particular problem. But then, it was hard to get him talking. He’d seldom if ever talk to anyone. He’d keep himself to himself.

People stayed away from him for two obvious reasons, I guess. Firstly, they took him for insane and hence didn’t want any hassle by getting into tangle with him. Secondly, there was no way they could get round him, nor could they outwit him in any branch of learning, and hence, treated him as someone not to trifle with. He was beyond the abilities of most of them.

Was Kabila really insane? No way to know it as you can’t enter somebody’s head. So, why did they call him mad? There was as many story as story tellers.

One story goes, he was orphaned in his infancy. Kabila’s father was a boatman living in a hut made of thatch and clay by the riverside. They’d earn their living by ferrying people across the river. One monsoon the river saw ferocious flood. The swollen river swept away their anchored boat. Alarmed at their boat being snatched his panicked parents did the reckless thing of jumping into the swollen river in the hope of salvaging their only means of survival. Cruel flood took no mercy on them, swallowed them up. Their drowned bodies were found washed ashore down the stream. The loss of parents left the little boy traumatized. He couldn’t come off it.

The other story goes, he was snatched from his parents at a tender age by a mystic or a tantric. The tantric put him under hypnosis and took the boy to the thick of wood. There he lived with him in a cave for a good two years. The tantric reportedly had this dark secret of observing human sacrifice. He used Kabila as a bait to get hold of young boys and girls for sacrifice. The boy tricked the tantric into letting him go and thus escaped from the cruel clutch of the mystic. The mystic upon realizing that he had been duped cast a spell on him and that cost him his mind.

Yet other story goes, Kabila was abducted by a were-wolf and subsequently forced to live with pack of wolves in steppes for quite a while. There he acquired the skill of communicating with wild animals by mimicking them. He lived like a brute. He returned to human society but couldn’t adapt to its ways. So, he’s different from others. Stories surrounding him don’t end here nor does the interest to get to the bottom of the truth? No way to know it, though.

The sight of him with that trademark smile would give couple of thoughts to my head. Does he have anything in his head for others to read and figure him out or is it totally empty? Is being empty is being mysterious? Is he impenetrable? Is everyone impenetrable and thus mysterious if they go thoughtless?

I had natural affinity with Kabila for obscure reasons. This quiet man, himself to himself, with that cryptic smile of him would find warmth in my presence. His expression and gesture suggested something to that effect. He’d put a hand around my shoulder, communicate with me by gesture, and offer tea. He’d do a small shallow talk, not on matters of substance, though. Once or twice he had invited me to follow him into the wood. I have an eye-witness account of his interaction, communication and his comradery with birds, reptiles and mammals in the wood.

But again, people called him insane not for nothing. There was a dark side of him. He’d do things that were outright taboo to others. He’d perhaps find joy in violating the taboos. An owl perched on head or a monkey whispering words into his ear or a cobra coiled around his neck were not the only reason for calling him insane. He’d do some downright weird and funny things and for this he’d choose the time when everyone is in bed, dead to the world.

At the dead of night he’d ram the clapper of a half-ton bell against its inverted wall, hanging from the wooden frame outside the temple of deity, send ear-piercing noise resounding through the village jolting people out of bed. He’d take midnight bathe in natural pond with nothing on body in hard winter. Kabila is often discovered crashing out on crematory sites by the riverside. Sometimes, women worshippers caught him climbing down a Banyan tree providing roof to the temple where he had spent his night.

There was no explanation for his behaviors.  He wouldn’t a say a word nor would people question it.

Kabila once took me to a ramshackle, abandoned house, a den of poisonous snakes. The house was full of creepers, plants and wild grasses growing inside with cobwebs hanging here and there. I stepped into the house treading carefully for fear of unwittingly trampling on a harmful foreign thing and running into trouble. Kabila assured me against harm, asked me to nerve myself and make no sound and that he would take me through something spectacular. And then, he made frightening hissing sound with his mouth. I watched in horror at the ugly sight of a pair of beautiful black cobras, something between three and five feet long, coming along dancing rhythmically out of nowhere. A look at the venomous reptiles brought my heart into mouth. I pressed my hand against my lips to fight down accidental noise.

Kabila grabbed the lethal reptiles shyly coiling up around his feet with his naked hand, drew them close to his lips and kissed them, and then adorned himself with those deadly creatures placing them around his neck, like scarf. He had tamed them in no second as though his magical touch had sent some hypnotic power into their bodies and put them under hypnosis. I stood frozen with fear, trembling in my shoes. He asked me to feel and fondle the dangerous thing. I was averse to the idea, but couldn’t pluck up courage to say no. Kabila held my trembling hand and passed it over the silken body of the reptiles.

In one other episode, he had made some arcane noise with his mouth and that had brought pack of wolves to him in the wood. I had run miles away like wind at the sight of savage wolves.

Kabila is no more. He is gone. Where did the insane go? There is no one unanimous answer to the question. Once again, there are as many stories shrouding his disappearance as the story tellers.

Some say he went the way of his parents, jumped off the cliff into the swollen river and swallowed up by it.

Others say, he went back into the wood and reunited with the wolves. Yet others say, the mystic got him back.

To me, he didn’t go anywhere because he was nowhere. I wonder if he could ever die, for he had never lived.