Sahyadrica

I woke up to the merry laughter of birds, the melancholy music of rain, and a green aura, deep and longing, creeping onto the walls of the room and draping it in an indescribable glow. I spun my head seeking the source of the light and felt its warm glow upon my face, to which I stayed in my place, absorbing all the energy that emanated from the green fields filtering the early sunlight. Home The morning carried a pleasant breeze from the sea, the scent of which is peculiar only to the Konkan region. The sun glanced through a fissure in an otherwise uniform grey cloak of nimbostratus covering the eastern sky. I found myself standing in front of piling fields of bowing rice heavy with raindrops. Rice Thin streaks of smoke rose from the few scattered houses. Behind the house we live in runs a stream inundated by a makeshift dam – a useful source of water for the villagers – from where echoed the beating of clothes. A leopard killed a cow and dragged its prey behind the d...

It rained for the entire day on August 28, and a little more on the next, and has been for the past three days. Mumbai region received most of its share of rainfall on August 19, a day when I went to one of the most treacherous pass in the Ghats to trek on one of the most treacherous forts I’ve been on this year. It is raining as I write, but August was nothing like August rain is supposed to be, even if it was better than July. The region is still facing a deficit by more than 30% (September 1, 2012, Times of India ). Yet if you go a few hundred kilometers from the city, the paddy fields are saturated and bathed in an aura of a rich lemon-green. The monsoon outburst of life, natural and planted, is at its peak. Bagadwadi bathed in monsoon To call it an explosion of life is akin to the theory of the formation of our universe, the Big Bang: that single moment of an “explosion” that took us by surprise even after it has been approximately 13750000000 years since. Life, when ...