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Standing around a roaring fire set in a steal industrial barrel with a dozen friends in the mountaintops of New Zealand. The flames flicker up into the starry sky to warm the snow-covered pine trees, creating an insulated canapé. Toasting our burnt marshmallows on the end of forest branches, you can hear the sizzling as they drip onto the crackling fire between breaks in conversations. There is something oddly cleansing about fire and the invitation it extends for sharing stories. John, a well-built Scottish man, starts up a recent travel story; “I’ve met a fire man! Locally he’s known as a shaman who’s more forest than man.” John went on to tell us about his encounter with a shaman who danced with fire high in the mountains in Southern India. How he would build fires of such height, beauty and energy, even the crickets stilled to watch. It was this very same night that I was introduced to Arjun, an Indian man whose warm nature and kind eyes made up for his lack in height. He quickly became one of my closest friends and it’s through this friendship, that 2 years later I jumped at his invitation to come to visit him. I found myself bouncing along a dirt track that was more potholes than road, in a beat-up old station wagon with 5 of his closest friends. We were making a 155km painstakingly beautiful drive from Madurai to a small village called Poondi. The mountain village is located in Kodaikanal Tehsil of Dindigul district in Tamil Nadu. Arjun’s friends commented that they had never before felt such lightness of air. Here the soil is so fertile it grows an abundance of crops that create patterns in the hilltops that extend far into the horizon. Although I was travelling with 6 other Indians, none of us could verbally communicate with the locals. They were kind and welcoming and so a huge amount of communication was done through the language of the world. Like many other parts of India, the region of Kodaikanal speaks a different language to the rest of the country, here they mainly speak Tamil. Our farm-stay consists of a wooden cabin draped in budding pink flowers, in a valley built up like a basin. A small lake mirrors the ducks that drift on by and the smell of eucalyptus fills the air. It was here I saw him, the fire man. One of the tallest people I have ever seen, and so thin he looked like a bone may snap like a branch. I have no idea if this was the same man, my friend John spoke about. He single-handedly fell a tree and proceeded to crop it into great stacks of wood using only an axe. The pure strength of the man and late into his 70s but somehow made it look effortless. I asked the younger staff why they didn’t help but they claimed he refused and every day he would go out, bless a tree and take only what he needed, no more. As the sun began to set, he came carrying the firewood one log at a time. Asking my Indian friends if it was ok to help, out of fear of causing disrespect. They looked at me with odd expressions but answered; “it is not necessary, but no, it will cause no offence”. After a lot of sideways and every which way nod’s, we shared the load to the firepit. We watched in awe as he crafted a fire of beautiful symmetry. He wore a dhoti tied at the knee but as he began to light the fire, he untied it, leaving it full length. He then danced around the fire, protecting it from the evening breeze. I have never seen such an intense concentration and this moment very much felt like a ceremony of thanks. The weight of this was felt around the group and it lingered well into the night where maybe the spirits were awakened or perhaps the cleansing nature of fire was to blame but more than one heart was mended with laughter that night. It was here I had my first encounter with the spirit of India.