It was an island in the middle of the ocean. But at the same time, it wasn’t.

It was
underwhelming to call it an island. I think a more accurate description of it would be a mouth
of some sort, with its long craggy cliff faces surrounding- its rotten brown teeth,
overpowering the tremendous crashing waves that endlessly pounded against it.

Crash. Crash. Crash.

The teeth remained baring and unfazed. A hissing white foam was the only punctuation
between yet another flurry of frantic, aqueous screams.

But beyond the towering teeth, lay what the mainland locals called ‘The Jungle’. A misnomer,
for sure, as it was more of a lush forest than a jungle. A jungle had tigers, lions, snakes and
other beasties, but ‘The Jungle’ was still and the ‘The Jungle’ was silent. No noise uttered
from the island’s throat, not a rustle or a branch cracking. It was perpetually mute and all
sound was final once you clambered past the teeth. The locals had a legend about ‘The
Jungle’ , but not one mighty and ancient like Hercules or Apollo as it seemed to be more
recent in the grand passage of time. It could not be older than 10 or 15 years old but upon
my first time hearing of it, it came across to me as absurd in the progressive ‘paradise’ we
live in. They say ‘The Jungle’ bears the most delicious and strange fruit from its gnarled,
wise trees. Eating the fruit gave even the most devastated and desperate person utmost
tranquillity and clarity in their life. So much, that the people who found the fruit never left the
island, as they have no more worldly desires to pursue neither human attachments to
treasure. This fruit seemed to encompass all the Buddha’s teachings on samsara and how to
break free from it. The pilgrims to ‘The Jungle’ had ascended and cast away their mortal coil.

Naturally, my curiosity was piqued and the next few nights were restless with questioning
thoughts.

But how?
But where?
……..
WHY?

I tossed and turned- the interrogating voices were brutal in my head, echoing in my skull.
Again and again and again and AGAIN AND AGAIN…!
Enough was enough. I grabbed my raincoat and rushed outside to the beating drums of the
sky; the rumbling thunder. Rain splattered my body and it saturated the plasticky coat that
draped around me and I felt the cold water seeping through the fabric and mixing with the
hot sweat on my back in an abnormal and unnerving cocktail. I hurried over to the port, in
search of a ferryman.

I had to know what was there. Did the fruit exist? Was it a legend? I didn’t know and I didn’t
care about the specifics, and focused only on ‘The Jungle’. A blinding bolt of lightning
fragmented the inky black into pieces, with the moon purveying the entire scene like a
hawk’s eye. I looked around for boats. The normally crowded port with people pulsing
through it in their singular mass of flesh and their judgemental thoughts was now deathly still
except for the infinity of the ocean and the piercing tears of the overcast that seemed to be
as cosmic and as endless as the sea.
That’s when I saw him, the cloaked ferryman with his garland of intricately carved amulets
and charms around his neck. His face was ghostly pale and sunken to the point where the
edges of his skull popped out from the screen of mottled skin. He lifted an emaciated hand
and pointed a bony index towards me as the baggy arms of the cloak crawled up his arm,
revealing yet more damaged skin. His fingers were decorated with wrinkles and two intricate
rings sporting deep blue and black gems. The sea and the sky seemed to sit on his fragile
fingers and it beckoned me closer. He opened his chapped lips and a rasp came out of it,

“You seek ‘The Jungle’, traveller, don’t you?”, he husked. I silently nodded, internally
awe-struck by the stillness this shaman of the night enforced upon his surroundings and the
fact that he had uttered my exact thoughts.
“My son, are you sure you want to enter ‘The Jungle’?”. I hesitated for a moment, but steeled
my nerves and nodded, but this time with conviction. He gazed into my eyes and the
darkness of his iris seemed to penetrate my soul. I clambered into the back of his long row
boat and he moved his oar with his stick-like arms in a perpetual rhythm as he hummed an
oddly mournful tune to himself. It was slow, and steady, but tainted with solemnity. I glimpsed
the jagged teeth in the distance, now reduced to blurry spires of black. It was only then did I
notice that the storm had dissipated and the roaring upheaval of the waters had been
transformed into a calm, moonlit mirror. I felt my eyes droop with the realisation of
sleeplessness, and as much as I tried to fight it, I succumbed to my own circadian rhythm.
***
When I woke up, it was still night. But it was not a true night, but an induced one I came to
realise as there was a streak of daylight behind the rowboat. We seemed to be bobbing up
and down in a flooded alcove that blocked out most of the light. The ferryman stared into my
eyes one last time, and gave a sad but knowing smile before dropping me on the rocky edge
of the alcove and turning his boat out. He rowed himself out before assimilating back into the
empty horizon, returning to civilization. This was my final goodbye to him. I would never see
him again.

I turned back and stepped onto the long grass in front of me, just outside of the alcove. The
dense foliage above me obscured any chance of sunlight penetrating, casting a boundless
twilight, held up by the proud, scarred with knots, tree trunks.

I finally stepped into ‘The Jungle’.

Trudging through the undergrowth, suffocating paranoia engulfed, the snaking wooden
appendages of the trees that beckoned to me only worsened the claustrophobia. I looked for
the fruit on the branches. The very object of my deepest curiosity frustratingly eluded me,
and I wanted to scream in anger. But I didn’t. I dared not disturb the stillness, a non-existent
hand had cupped around my mouth and curled its fingers around my lips.

I looked up. I saw the fruit, hanging limply from the great, thick tree branches. It came in a
plethora of colours, ranging from pale to brown to dark and then back to pale again. It
wasn’t fear that engulfed me, but a peculiar new emotion that I had remembered
experiencing once before, in days bygone. I craved this emotion like a drug. I remember
seeking it desperately, but it all made sense now. I now knew what this emotion was. It was
tranquility. A calm sea, not a raging one.
The fruit had limbs and a torso. Feet, arms and legs and a shadowed, blank face. The fruits
of wisdom and eternal peace surrounded me. The fruit hung from their fraying stems of
tattered rope.

I smiled like the ferryman, one final time, then began to tie the noose…