Sahyadrica

Where the mountains will hide your sorrow And the rivers guide your spirit The river that flows by the town I live in has many lives, many avatars, many names, many stories, many legends, many worlds. The town I associate with has its own legend, of great gods fighting over the love of two, spilling blood into the river, giving it the name the City of Blood. So goes the story, one of the many, as the river traverses from the high reaches of the Himalaya, gushing down the plains is a vast braided expanse, a river taking a hundred forms, no, a hundred-thousand. But it is not this river that carried me here. It was another, much smaller, much lesser known. This river I speak of is yet to speak to me, but I’ve learned that without it the air doesn’t move, the ground doesn’t breathe, the rain doesn’t fall, the elephants don’t walk. And indeed, hell hath no fury like its floods. Rivers, small or big, carry stories. They are its memories. The difference lies is how we perceive them. O...

A view of the outer Himalaya - the Shivalik, upwards from the city of Ramnagar in Nainital. As fate would have it, I would wound around the same road across groves of jamun in the marshes and stands of sal in the lower hills, by the same shop I fondly remember meeting a lovely she-dog with light-brown eyes who immediately liked me in return, and up the mountain roads like I did seven years ago, mesmerised by the endlessness of the forests of the Himalayan foothills, across wide riverbanks of the Kosi – the same river that many have, in another age, journeyed afoot, from the trading Shauka families covering many miles across the Transhimalaya to the terai plains, to Harrer and Aufschnaiter, two mountaineers who escaped from the Dehradun Internment Camp when the World War II started, following the Kosi at first, all the way to Lhasa. It was sheer coincidence that I read Harrer’s account Seven Years in Tibet as I crossed Kosi every day. I was in the Shivalik Range of the North-western O...

The road wound around shoulders of a number of mountains, past terraced fields ripe with wheat, and dived into valleys where bridges could not be built, and from this mountaintop to that it went, offering vistas of the Shivalik – the outer mountain range of the Himalaya –, where scars of landslides are seen everywhere, and only a handful shrubs take hold of the crumbling crowns of these ancient monuments. We stopped on the arm of a mountain that protruded into a gentle slope, at the last village on the mountain, for a meeting and a little ceremony of distributing solar lanterns to the residents of Amotha, 1290m from the mean sea level. Amotha Village lies under the crown of one of the Shivalik mountains Standing atop the edge of this Shivalik, I took a deep breath and inadvertently closed my eyes. The sun shone gently to my east, and a distant rumble of clouds rolled over beyond the mountain, coming from the way of the snow-clad Himalaya that lay further north. a path cuttin...