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...

The Bumbun hide overlooks a small man-made meadow with two trees at its centre, encircled by a wall of tropical wood and foliage. This brown moss-and-fallen-leaves-covered hideout is a window to this little opening in the rainforest. The two central trees contain rope-tied salt bricks to attract animals into the meadow. At six o’clock in the morning everything is pitch dark. I peer into the darkness, my mind stuck on my colleague’s narration of a rendezvous with a lone elephant the morning before. He saw the tusker emerge from the wall, gripping at the tender grass blades as he made his way to the salt lick, took a few large chunks out of them, and disappeared into the wall. It has been nearly a decade since an elephant ventured by the Bumbun hide, we’re told. 6:36, 6:42, 6:53 at the Bumbun hide The sky gradually turned a soft blue. If there were a scale to measure the seamless and smooth transition between night and day, it would have to be called by a new name. The scale i...

It does not take long for a murmuring river to turn into a raging cascade, yet it is no match to the prowess of the tall terraces of northern Western Ghats. The rapids are strong to make crossing the river difficult, but not enough to complete the journey to the foot of the mountain. It falls, only to rise in countless little fractions of its former self as mist, dancing to the tune of the winds orchestrated by the mountains themselves. It is only when the waters rage on, fueled by the south-west monsoons, do they spill down the amber facades of the Ghats, touching their feet as they reform their ancestral channels. Walking the leopard's path, with an inverted waterfall to the left, and other two forming Kalu river downhill The range officer pointed to a high precipice from where a river came crashing down, and he said, that’s where we’re headed. Under a shroud of torrential rains, we could glimpse at the full glory of the fall whenever the clouds dispersed. To the right of...