Sahyadrica

Her aangan is a reverie of astral flowers  Spiral, elliptic, of mystical shapes and hues, cryptic   The haze of winter morning acts as multi-level drapes to nature’s opera, unfurling a new act fronted by trees every short distance I traverse. Wood smoke wraps around villages like blankets around our shoulders. A tiger calls, and a tigress returns his call, their duet resonating in the cold morning air for miles and miles.  A universe at her doorstep, constellations on her sleeve  She tiptoes under star-clothed trees    The rustle of van tulsi reminds me of a Kathak dancer, her ghungroo chiming with every step I take. Tiny, dark, heart-shaped seeds once contained inside the cup of the mature flower are sprinkled on the pugdundee like confetti. Odd, cold December rains swell them up like little puffy snow balls scattered on bare sandstone substrate. The fluttering sky blue beings rabble ‘round her  Whispering the secrets of the universe I pick a few sepals, pour a few

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

In the wee hours does he wake daily,                weary and dazed – under woodsmoke haze To the eerie howls of jackals,                             he strolls And visits yonder fields of paddy,                      with a sickle in hand – frail and tanned To reap the crop ‘neath the hills of Maikal. Enshrined by the cragged silhouettes,               old and somber – by the flicker of ember Under darkest sky with a tinge of blue,              he feels His hands hack the wetted spikelets,                 cold and thin – cracks on skin As dawn breaks to clear the hue. The rustling ears fall to the moist earth,           every grain godsent – on a lifetime spent And he gathers the golden seeds,                      he prays This is wealth that for him is worth,                  for the future – of nature and nurture For it is all his family needs. His day ends with a mountain of tasks,            countlessly weighted – earnestly devoted ‘Til the Maikal shad

Not five feet from an Indian Almond ( Terminalia catappa ) tree abuzz with insects is an open gutter. The sewer runs along the corners of houses, its soiled waters shadowed by an avenue of jamun ( Syzygium cumini ), kadam ( Neolamarckia cadamba ), and Indian almond trees. The almond and jamun trees are blossoming, their pale, snowy-flowers arranged as a whorl around slender, soft-green branchlets stick out from under a flush of broad dark-green leaves, liberating a strong sweetish aroma into the heavy summer air. This is in the middle of the city. Every time I enter or leave my office, I hear the trees abuzz with insects. Sharp, short buzz of insects hopping from one flower to another, lapping up the extremely sweet nectar contained in bowl-like flowers. The gutter is riddled with tubiflex worms. When I was a kid, my father would purchase live tubifex worms from aquarium stores for his fishes, and occasionally weird worms would come with it. The one I have a distinct memory of was

There is a cosmos in every tree, Galaxies blossoming in empty space, Worlds sprouting like leaves. A tree once told me: “ If your place is among the stars, boundless and free, By my roots and ‘neath my shade, I promise thee – In this age or the next –  Is where you will find peace .” The fellowship A conflicted love story of a little wasp is all it took. Of the countless spore-like seeds, one went down a bird’s crop, and came out the other end only to be adopted by a half-a-century-old Peepul tree. Two Bargad leaves sprang to life from one of the many crevices of the Peepul, which stands to the north of a busy police thana . To the west of this new companionship lies a large water tank with a small stone-temple built right under its shade. The land, owned by one malguzar , was primarily a forest slowly being turned to farmlands. After his demise, it would be named Kamta Mal – the village of Kamta Prasad the Malguzar, and a small hamlet where this tree and her companion live woul