Sahyadrica

Phapha sat on the dashboard of the car, clueless of where he was going. He sat in a position that meant he was exhausted, scared, and unsure of what had happened and would happen. When the car came to a halt, he made no move. He was picked up by two hands cupping his wings, and was placed carefully on the table. He wore the fully-adorned plumage of myriad shades of blues, with subtle hues of crimson sprinkled on the brown-streaked neck – the shades and hues typical of the elegant Neelkanth , the Indian Roller, Coracias benghalensis . The only noticeable characters were a shorter-than-usual tail, and yellow gape flanges typical of a fledgling – a teenager of the birdlife – whose curiosity is greater than fear, and who’s more eager to spread wings than stay nestled. He sat in the same manner when he arrived – the pose he retained until he found a suitable place to perch upon – and looked at us intently as we observed him for any injury. He appeared healthy but incapable of flight: ...

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...