Sahyadrica

The river           I cannot express how resolutely you treasure your keep, yet share willingly with those who seek it. That time I walked by your shore, the fish casting shadows in the clear waters flowing over a broad valley, a warm breeze brushed my face, and I smiled. Heaving my rucksack up on my shoulders again, I looked back to the mountain we emerged from, and I imagined that time I looked down from the mountain slope at the white waters bend around two mountain folds. My knees screeched with every step downhill, but the view from between the thick canopy, the feeling of a falling altitude, kept me at it. That mountain, covered in green of every shade, and dark, looked unscalable, unescapable, unconquerable – that is how you keep your secrets, I thought as I smiled walking over polished boulders. How do I begin to unravel what you taught me, you who are a time-bender, soul-mender, mind-wrapper, life-giver; you who speak through so many voices, appear in...

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...