FERNLIGHT: WHAT THE DRUM REMEMBERED

Author’s Note

 “Fernlight – What The Drum Remembered” was born from the friction and tenderness between two ways of knowing-science and spirit, diagnosis and divination, the stethoscope and the drum. Set in a fictional Himalayan village named Ari, the story draws from the lived realities of many such villages where modernity arrives wrapped in asphalt and promises, often erasing what it cannot explain.

Growing up amidst oral traditions, herbal remedies, and whispers of ancestral presence, I’ve long been haunted by the quiet violence of forgetting. This story is a gesture of remembrance. It honours the shamanic traditions of the Subba (Limbu) community, where healing is not only biochemical but spiritual, ancestral, and ecological. Here, medicine listens. It sings. It remembers.

In writing this, I did not wish to romanticise the past nor vilify the present-but to ask: What do we lose when we privilege one kind of knowing over another? What happens when a fever resists all pills but yields to a prayer spoken in the language of leaves?

This story walks the borderlands-between disciplines, between generations, between what is measured and what is merely felt.

Somewhere in the space between drumbeat and heartbeat, it hopes to find you.

WHEN THE RIVER WAS GOD

Before Ari had roads, it had rivers, silver-bellied serpents slipping through mountain ribs, murmuring secrets in the hush-hush tongue of stones. They were not merely rivers. They were veins. Memory’s bloodstream. Ancestors drank from them and vanished into vapour, leaving behind stories folded like prayer flags under moss and monsoon, stories too quiet to live in books, too stubborn to die.

Once, before penicillin and paper prescriptions, before men in coats with clipped consonants and imported degrees, medicine came not in blister packs but in bruised palms. Gathered from barks that bled when touched. From roots that curled like sleeping snakes. From prayers that needed no god but wind. Everything raw and aching knew where to go. The first healers were not men of manuals. They were listeners. To fire, to silence, to the way skin moaned under fever. They listened to herbs hum lullabies, to leaves whisper grief, to the shadow of illness long before it cast its shape.

Some flowers, divas of the forest, bloomed only when sorrow sang in the lungs of a child. Some ailments arrived not to be cured but to reveal something unloved. And when that child coughed, twisted, burned, the villagers turned not to glass cabinets or steel trays, but to the forest, to the drum, to the smoke, to the stubborn, untranslatable pulse of what had always worked before it was written off.

But valleys, like grandmothers and gods, do not remain as they were. They change. Asphalt crept in like a polite murderer. Trees fell with the sound of old songs being forgotten. The wind learned the sound of drills. The earth wore a hard hat. And all that was sacred learned to tremble in silence.

A doctor came to Ari with a white coat and a clipboard. He had been trained to believe in precise decimals, in symptoms that could be boxed and solved like algebra. He spoke of cures as though they were conquests. He did not bow to drums. He measured, he dosed, he diagnosed. And with each cure, he killed something he could not name.

Then one night-when the rain fell like a confession and his pride lay drowned in its own prescriptions, he found himself at the door of the very man he would once have dismissed as a relic. What happened after that cannot be labelled. It wriggled away from language, refusing the neatness of logic. It was not medicine. It was not magic. It was older. Quieter. A bone-memory buried beneath both of them, waiting to be touched.

This is the story of that night. Of what was lost. Of what remains. And of what may still return, leaf by trembling leaf.

PAPER EARTHQUAKES

The order for the dam arrived like a rumour disguised as progress. Just whispers in boardrooms and boots in the underbrush. Papers were signed in Tokgang, the capital. Lives in Ari were signed away not with resistance, but with resignation, folded between compensation forms and thumbprints still stained from ploughing. Most of Ari nodded and smiled. Asphalt was a promise. Rupees, a windfall. Electricity, the new deity, would no longer flicker and sulk during thunderstorms.

Farmers, whose backs had become maps of hardship, now raised their noses to the diesel wind with something like pride. Their lands were bought. Their futures prewritten in fluorescent ink. Their new hopes, now tied to humming wires replacing prayer flags across the spine of the hills.

But not all smiled. Some muttered like moss under forgotten stupas. Quiet, persistent and damp. They spoke of Lhasang-ritual winds-and spirits older than gods. Of the river that once sang lullabies to sleeping children, now gagged by girders and concrete. Chief among them was an old man wrapped in drum-skin past and memories stitched from shadow, Subba Bajey, the shaman whose dreams still smelled of sap and sulphur.

By day, he coaxed reluctant fields with tired hands. By night, beneath banana trees and stubborn embers, he entered his other world-a trance-world stitched with incense and syllables no textbook had ever learned. He spoke in tongues carved before writing began. Walked across lifetimes wearing only silence and ash. The smoke remembered him. The wind paused when he passed.

The new gods had arrived dressed in cement and carrying warranties. Their gospel printed in blueprints. Their hymns composed in the low growl of bulldozers. And the earth beneath Ari shivered; not with earthquakes, but with the ache of things being rewritten.

He had nine children, maybe more. Grandchildren spilled like monsoon corns-uncountable, loud, beloved. His hut breathed herbs, sweat, and myth. Once, children believed he could summon thunder with his voice. Old man, old mug-oversized, dented, dull aluminum, cradled like a quiet secret. They said it held stories. Or potions. Or the breath of a shaman long gone. They saw him always there-stone slab, sun overhead. “Soupy Bajey,” someone laughed-and it stuck, like gum beneath a school desk.

The new gods had arrived dressed in cement and carrying warranties. Their gospel printed in blueprints. Their hymns composed in the low growl of bulldozers. And the earth beneath Ari shivered; not with earthquakes, but with the ache of things being rewritten.

ARI FORGETS 

Ari did not forget all at once. No. It unremembered progressively. Like water evaporating from a grandmother’s brass pot-quiet, daily and invisible, like a lullaby forgotten between generations.

Children came home from distant schools with gelled hair and homework in English. Their tongues tasted of plastic. Their eyes scanned screens. They no longer bowed to elders, only nodded mid-scroll. ...Even lullabies had passwords now.

It wasn’t a storm that changed the village, but drizzle. Endless, maddening drizzle. Not enough to flood, just enough to soak memory until it warped, until the names of trees began to slur. The wind, once pine-scented and sharp like childhood truths, soured with tar and turbine dust. The clang of monastery bells gave way to the hiss of hydraulic beasts that fed on hills and spat out highways. The oxen, Lalay the Red and Taray the Starry, were sold one dry afternoon. In their place, Scorpios and Thars: chrome-plated beasts with blinking eyes and growling stomachs. Villagers now spoke of ‘ground clearance’ with reverence once reserved for rainfall and rituals. Prayer had new punctuation-horsepower, torque, fuel economy.

Children came home from distant schools with gelled hair and homework in English. Their tongues tasted of plastic. Their eyes scanned screens. They no longer bowed to elders, only nodded mid-scroll. The forest spirits once behind banana grove became bedtime distractions, less frightening than lag or low battery. Even lullabies had passwords now.

And then came the white cube. The free clinic. Surgically sterile. A geometric god with a red cross on its chest. It hummed with refrigeration and ambition. Inside, it smelled of antiseptic and lavender sprayed from a canister pretending to be a flower. Villagers, who once offered ginger and goat’s milk at the shaman’s door, now stood under tube lights, holding tokens and prescriptions like modern talismans. No smoke. No chants. Just lines. Clean. Ordered. Clinical. The young doctor had soft hands, and a softer voice. He touched pulses the way a tourist touches relics, respectfully, but with disbelief. And in the corner of the old hut, Subba Bhajay’s drum waited. Waited until waiting became dust - waited like an old song denied its tongue.

THINGS THAT DRIZZLE AWAY

That morning, the mist didn’t settle, it sighed, slumped low over the valley like a mother too tired to weep. It slipped between leaves and limbs, wrapped itself around memory, smudged the outlines of the living and the dead. The trees blurred. Faces blurred. Even the gods, their stone mouths rimmed with lichen, seemed to unravel at the corners, as if sorrow itself had grown damp.

And in the thick of it, like a full stop placed at the end of the wrong sentence, stood Subba Bajey. His eyes, traitorous things, had begun to retreat. The world he had once deciphered—etched in bark, in wind, in the way smoke swirled upward-was now a page half-smeared. Faces lost their borders. Branches bled into each other like ink dropped on a sleeping poem. But worse, worse than the vanishing of sight, was the silence that rotted within him.

The voices, the ones that once braided themselves through dreams and trees and the murmurs of the stream, had left; leaving no footprints. Just the stillness of an uninhabited home gathering dust from earlier times. He lit a sugandh bala stick and watched the smoke rise like an old song remembering its tune. Then he reached for the black coat, the one that held the scent of first cries and last breaths. The one that still remembered what he no longer could. He drew a red vermillion line down the middle of his forehead. Not out of devotion. But as an argument. A wound. A prayer wrapped in defiance.

Umbrella in hand-splintered, loyal, ridiculous in its age-he walked. One foot, then the other. The shuffle of old truths across new terrain. Down the slope where new silence now squatted, fat and indifferent. Past the peepal grove where once nagas bowed to unseen things. Where bees hummed secrets and marigolds danced in pollen dreams. Past the stone where his father once left rice for wandering souls. Past a moss-eaten stump that had once been a drum. Toward the wound. Toward the desecration. Toward the place where forgetting had been poured in concrete. The dam site.

The hills had been sliced open, peeled like fruit. Their green skin ripped away to reveal a trembling, grey flesh beneath. Machines, yellow-bellied, iron-throated, crawled across the open wounds. Their breath was smoke. Their hunger, stone. Their sound, a jagged anthem that split the morning wide open.

And there, at the edge of all this ruin, stood the new deity. Not carved from rock. Not born of spirit. But poured and riveted and scrubbed. The clinic, a cube of white.  Outside, the line of villagers coiled like spilled yarn-eyes dull, knees creaking, hope folded and re-folded into registration slips.

Subba Bajey stepped into it as one stepped into a foreign shrine. Reverence curdled by suspicion. A boy with chewing gum and too much time flicked his chin toward the queue. “Line ma lagnus, Bajey.” Get in line, Grandpa. Inside. Stillness. Sterilised. Air that didn’t move, didn’t breathe.  Of shiny scrubbed off the memory floor. A silence not natural, but imposed.

The nurse wore white. Her cap perched on her head like a monument to discipline, unsmiling and stiff. She asked questions with fingers, not with eyes. Tapped on forms as if summoning the dead. Name? Age? Not who you are. Not where have you come from. Then she led him to the man in the white coat. The doctor sat behind a desk colonised by paper. A stethoscope curled around his neck like a well-fed pet. His smile arrived on schedule-efficient and uncurious. “Your eyes are troubling you, Bajey?”

Subba Bajey said nothing. Because language had fled where the voices had gone. Yes, his world had gone soft. But not only from the eyes. From everything. From bones. From breath. From belief. The doctor hesitated-for a second. His pen hovered, briefly, as if caught by a word he couldn’t translate. But then, like a cursor skipping a corrupted file, he looked away and scribbled something meaningless. “Check his optical power. Fit him for glasses.” Then he stood.

“My daughter is sick. Fever. It won’t break.” His voice cracked like old porcelain. “I’ll leave early today.” Fifteen minutes later, Subba Bajey emerged. A frame of black iron clung to his face. Two lenses. A new way to see. And suddenly, the world was not smoky anymore. The pines again wore their needles like jewelry. The hills remembered their curves. Even the gods, still carved and weeping, had sharper mouths. But something had gone missing. He could see them now. He could no longer feel them. The voices. The flicker. The whispering trees. What the lenses revealed, they also erased. What had sharpened his vision had dulled the invisible. It was the same surgery all over again. The hills had lost their skin to light. His eyes, to clarity. And there, in the crisp afternoon light, the curse of clarity settled upon him like ash.

KNOCKS AND STORMLIGHT

That evening, the rain fell like remorse. Not the tender drizzle of monsoon lullabies, but the kind that clung to roofs and ribs, heavy with ancestral grief. It fell sideways, with intention. Lightning carved the sky open, ripping seams stitched long ago by gods in gentler moods. A rain that didn’t fall but, accused. It spoke in silver syllables, the tongue of unsettled spirits.

The wind howled like a warning. Tin roofs lifted at the edges-hesitating, trembling on the door of flight. Banana leaves slapped against themselves in nervous applause, as if they too feared being chosen by the moment. Shutters banged like forgotten oaths.

Inside the hut, dinner was quiet. The rice clumped together in exhausted solidarity; white grains locked in mute protest. The fire, a once-faithful companion, refused to bloom. Only coughed, sulked, smoked. The room breathed smoke and fatigue. It was the kind of night where time crouched in corners, afraid to move.

And then, a knock.

Not loud. But loud enough to split the moment. A knock threaded with desperation, soaked in storm. At the door stood the doctor. Eyes hollowed out by nights without sleep and days unanswered by science. He cradled a bundle-small, fevered, and still, “My daughter, Arati…” His voice cracked like the wood beneath their feet. “She hasn’t slept in days. The fever won’t break. I’ve tried everything-IVs, antibiotics, even homeopathy. Nothing speaks to it.” The doctor looked up. Not as a man of medicine. But as a father. A pilgrim. A broken reed floating toward the last island. Words swollen with salt, with failure, with faith in the unfathomable.

“You’re my last hope.”

There it was. The moment that undoes certainties. The moment humility tastes like rainwater caught in trembling hands. The man who wielded thermometers now offered his daughter to a shaman.  A surrender by stormlight. And something stirred inside Subba Bajey-not pity, not pride. Recognition. A knowing that traveled deeper than belief. A memory older than doubt. He stepped aside.

THE DRUM REMEMBERS

Inside the hut, time thickened. It clung to the beams like an old shawl-smelling of smoke, salt, and stories that refused to forget themselves. Time dripped like sap from memory's wound. The girl lay limp, cradled by straw mats and cracked earth, fever shimmering from her like a second skin, like a curse inherited. Subba Bajey knelt beside her. Not as a man, but as a threshold. A gate between the seen and the known. He whispered the names of his lineage, “Hee hee…Nembang, Lingden, Muringla, Thebe…come close now, come near…”

Names not uttered but summoned. Names that curled in the smoke and found their way home. Names that were doorways. Names that were drums. Names that echoed like hoof beats across forgotten ridges. He dipped his fingers into a bitter paste-timur and chiraito, crushed with ginger, nettle, and memory. A salve brewed from the bruises of the earth. With three slow arcs over the child’s chest, he traced an invisible mandala: “east to west, root to sky. The path of return.” A map not drawn, but remembered. Then, the Sinam, drum carved from lightning-felled wood, its skin stretched with the hide of a winter-killed goat-a beast that had once known the dark was beckoned.

Dhang! Dhang! Dhang!

The beat did not rise; it returned from song lines buried beneath the floor of the world. A rhythm older than breath. He closed his eyes. His breath slowed. The air thickened. When he opened his mouth, it was not speech that came, but a forest remembered in sound: the first grammar - before alphabets - language made of bark and blood.

“With titepati ash and datura bloom, I cross the night, I carve the room. From nettle’s sting and kurilo’s root, I gather the girl from where shadows loot. Yuma! Mother of Mist and Mourning, part the veil where her spirit lingers. Let my drum be the bridge. Let this root be her tether. Let her name find its mouth again.”

The fire caught. The shadows came. They didn’t haunt. They remembered. They gathered in corners and hovered in cobwebs. Old gods. Tired grandmothers. Still listening. He scattered millet husks in the four directions. He blew across her brow, gently, as if blowing dust off a forgotten name.

“Arati… Arati… Arati…If your soul walks lost, follow the red thread. Come down the fern-path. Return by footfall. Come where fire waits and breath remembers.” He placed three Simbu-river stones wrapped in nettle twine-beneath her mat.

“To steady the boat,” he murmured.

“To anchor the part of her that wanders.”

Then, silence. Then, trembling; not from age, but from arrival. The kind of stillness that wears the scent of dawn. The Sinam shifted its rhythm rounder, slower. A rhythm for returning. His feet tapped. His chest rumbled. His tongue, dry as old bark, found its thunder. And then, “Yuma… Yuma…Mist-mother, Wind-walker, wake the hills that sleep in her chest. Bone by bone, breath by breath-return the child who forgot her feet. Ancestors, gather. Under fern, above fog. Carry her soul across the dark river. Do not let the fever keep her.”

And then, a bead of sweat. Small. Salted. Sacred. It slid down her temple, like the first monsoon drop on parched stone. Her fingers unfurled. Her breath found rhythm again. A flutter of life, feathered and shy. In the corner, the doctor wept. Not loudly. But like a man remembering the lyrics of a lullaby he once knew; before he was taught to forget them.

BETWEEN WORLDS

By morning, the storm had uncoiled and slipped away-a naga slithering back into the grass of dreams. It left behind no wreckage, no declaration-only the sound of dripping leaves and a river that ran clear, cold, and newly reborn. The kind of river that had just washed its face in the mountain’s mirror and remembered its name. A river that spoke in currents that were once prayers.

Inside the hut, the girl slept. Peacefully. Fully. No longer curled in fever’s grip. The illness had loosened its fists and drifted elsewhere. Her breath moved not with fear now, but with rhythm. The sound of a promise kept.

The doctor sat beside her, eyes still stained by sleeplessness. He bowed. Not as a man. Not as a professional. But as a believer, with knees, not just words. His posture bent with the weight of unsaid things. “Thank you,” he whispered, his voice scratched raw by awe and storm light. “What I couldn’t see… you did.”

Subba Bajey, spectacles slightly askew, smiled - a smile born of stillness. The kind that belongs to moss. To old stones. To memory. His smile was a slow thing, like the tide coming in after years of absence. “I saw nothing,” he said gently. “I just remembered.”

The news tiptoed through the village. One by one, like children sneaking out from under a scolding, the villagers of Ari returned with offerings. Chiura. Flowers. Questions. He didn’t campaign. Didn’t scold. Didn’t chant sermons about the old days. He only said: “There are many ways to heal.”

Sometimes he sat outside the clinic, on the low stone ledge warmed by the sun, sipping his thick, smoky black tea, the kind that held the aftertaste of firewood and childhood. Old man, old mug-oversized, dented, dull aluminium, cradled like a quiet secret. The doctor joined him. Sipping his own darker, more bitter brew. Not tea. Memory. They talked. Of dreams. Of diagnosis. Of herbs that whispered, and hormones that screamed. They argued gently, like wind rubbing against stone. They agreed on more than they admitted.

One day, the doctor reached into his canvas bag and pulled out a small jute pouch. Placed it into the shaman’s palm like a prayer folded in caffeine. Inside: roasted coffee beans. Warm. Oily. Aromatic. Alive. “A gift from my home,” he said. “From the hills of Coorg. We used to say it wakes even the sleeping gods.”

Subba Bajey lifted the pouch to his nose. It smelled foreign. Yes. But not unfamiliar. The soil recognised the soil. The way a river recognises a cloud. The way a drumbeat finds its echo in the chest of a stranger.

And then one day, as unannounced as sunlight, his granddaughter came to him. Sharp-eyed. Quiet-tongued.“Bajey,” she said. “Teach me.” He looked at her. Saw the drum in her already, coiled behind her ribs like an inheritance. He handed it to her. Not like an heirloom. But like a question. A promise written in skin.

WHAT THE DRUM HEARD

Long after the girl’s fever faded, after the doctor’s boots forgot the softness of Ari’s earth, after the river began to remember its own voice again-the drum remained.

Not loud.

Not proud.

Just there.

Like a stone that once carried fire.

Like silence that had learned to listen.

It sat in the corner, half-shadow, half-memory, still dusted with millet husks. Not used every night. Not needed for every ailment. But ready, like breath before a word. Like the hush before a hymn. Subba Bajey no longer played it. Sometimes, his granddaughter did. With fingers not yet weathered, but remembering. Fingers that carried the scent of smoke and syllables.

And when she did-when she drew the red line, lit the leaves, and called the old names-the valley listened. The fog paused. The dog stopped barking mid-dream. Even the clinic held its hum a little differently. As if it, too, remembered it was once a hut.

And somewhere between marrow and monsoon, between science and soil, the voices began to return. She sang in the old tongue, translated only halfway-because some things must stay misted. Some truths do not wish to be caged.

“Sambho Yuma, Sambho Nawa,

Mist-mother, come walk the fern-path.

Samyo lungna, samyo lewa,

Tie the wind. Tether the breath.

Namla thebe, nawa phenduk,

Bone and root, return her name.

Hee hee… Yuma… hee hee…”

And when the last note faded, the drum said nothing. It had already spoken. Spoken in the pulse of rivers. In the hush of herbs. In the place where logic bows and memory begins. And the village, for once, did not explain it away. They only listened. They only remembered.

Fern by fern. Breath by breath.

What the drum remembered was never truly forgotten.