Saturday 14 January 2017

An Afternoon Under the Mountains

I was powdering my nose in the afternoon light at the window, my tiny handmirror stuck into the window pane handle at a precarious angle and telling myself unhappily how the cold had turned my large olfactory appendage red like that of a clown's, when I heard the taps. Two sharp ones in quick succession and then repeated, urgent. At first I thought it was my handmirror threatening to leap off its perch in protest against the forced reflecting of the horror that was my large red nose. But as I peeked out of the window, I found the culprit peeking back at me.....a typical Roadside Romeo in smart gray and black, complete with the latest hairstyle, a tuft arising from the centre of his head dyed gray. Floored with so much attention in boring middle-age, I almost collapsed with thrill when my little admirer flicked his tuft at me and tapped once more on the pane with a tiny beak, a good substitute to a catcall. Rooted to the spot, powder puff still held aloft in hand, I gazed back at him in adoration, something he acknowledged chivalrously, tilting his gray feathered head and winking at me with one, tiny, beady, black eye. That done, he then whooshed away into the bright afternoon sun in a flutter of tiny wings, leaving me pining for more......!

This place is like this, full of magic, this place of mine under snowtopped mountains. And its this place's afternoons that are the best. Afternoons here find me gobbling down lunch and rushing outside to sit in the sun to soak up its heat greedily as if I were a cold blooded animal that needed to store this heat in my cells. There is a concrete, ceramic tile -topped bench on the grassy patch just outside my room, but I prefer a piece of flat stone that lines the pathway to my room. This stone, flat topped and quite comfortable to sit on, seems to be a piece of mountain granite left behind for some unknown reason when this area was cleared off to construct the colony. It's gray in colour and though some finicky soul has painted it white, the paint has peeled off in streaks, leaving the stone to resemble the snow streaked mountain top that must be it's brother. There's another piece of white paint streaked granite opposite this one and though larger, it's surface is a little ragged, appearing not too comfortable; and so I always sit on this other, smaller, flatter one.

On clear days, the sun's usually quite warm in the afternoons and in this biting cold, very soothing, almost like wrapping yourself up in a white cotton quilt. I sit on my granite throne and snooze, sometimes waking up to meditate on this and that and sometimes to gaze up at the mountains, the skies and at the grassy verge at my feet. Though birds call and mountain water gushes down the storm drains in chatterbox gurgles and the tiny cowbell hung on the porch of someone's home close by tinkles in each gust of wind, it's still very quiet here. I call it 'soul quiet', the kind of quiet that absorbs all your noisy, clamouring thoughts, fills both mind and body and then settles down comfortably at the bottom of your soul, leaving a peaceful silence all around.

The birds here are many, most of them tiny; a few, fluorescent sunbirds, most others, the sparrow-like Himalayan Tits, flicking their little black tails up and down in such profusion that you get dizzy simply by watching them. There is a Himalayan Gray Tit couple that probably has a nest on a tree just behind me and while watching them play hide and seek around it, my attention was drawn to the tree. It's an interesting tree: it's trunk a jet black and its leaves a deep olive green, branched like fan-coral, sprouting directly from the trunk. Looking at it, the contrast between the green of the leaves and the black of the trunk is something that really grabs your attention. Another funny thing about the tree is that it's leaves look as if someone has taken bunches and then stuck them with Fevicol at different niches on the trunk, arbitrarily, on a whim. I've been trying to find out what this tree is called but have failed till now. Maybe you could take a look at the photograph and shed some light on this mystery.


There are other birds too, like the black-as-sin rooks that sometime swoop down to sit on light posts and croon, their harsh caw caws sounding plaintive and even melodious in this rarified mountain air. I've also spotted the drongo, long, forked, graceful tail following obediently behind as it glides from tree to tree.

Then there's that little loner, the white capped redstart with its burnt sienna body, which fishes silently at the edge of the storm drain. I don't know why, but whenever I spot him, Tagore's 'एकला चलो रे' comes to mind, maybe because this little bird's demeanor is a kind of 'Me Dont Give a Damn; Me is My Own Boss!'



The sun is quite warm now in this mid afternoon and scared of its wrinkle causing rays, I turn my back to it, hiding my face. And in the shadow that I now cast, I shift my attention to the ground around my feet, covered with cropped green brown grass. I spot ants scurrying around, hundreds of them, some carrying white things in their mouths. Are these eggs, I wonder, that they are carrying away to safety because there's going to be rain soon? I ask the same of AccuWeather on my cell phone but the lazy 2G connection has no answer for me.
But I am glad I have taken my attention away from the trees and the birds to the ground, for to my delight I spot tiny wildflowers there, a lovely purply blue colour, blooming in profusion all over the grass patch. I take a closer look and find that though just short of 'microscopic' in size, they are perfectly formed, ten petalled, each petal ending in one or two graceful ladylike points. As usual, they are अनामिका for me, but I think I'll call them the 'Blue-Star' flowers for they are just that, blue stars on earth.


Thinking of stars, my mind swivels to the sky and I look up. It is a deep, piercing blue today and full of kites drawing great, invisible arcs high up almost near the snow line of the mountains. In contrat, the mountains are black-brown and streaked with green in places where pines cling to them in vertical clusters. Near their peaks is the beautiful snow, blinding white in the noon time sun. I had seen these mountains before the snow fell and I find that I like them better with the snow, not only because it's more beautiful but also because the snow softens them and, where earlier they had seemed implacable and terribly dogmatic, they now appear more understanding, as if the snow has coated them in a mantle of the wisdom that comes with age......!


These mountains, a part of the Outer Himalayas are pretty old, in all probability older than Man himself and I wonder: what do these wise old hills think about us humans that live at their feet? How like those little black ants in the grass we must be appearing to them, tiny, inconsequential......How they must be watching us, the ant people, living, working, playing, loving, dying....... watching in amusement, a little indulgent, trifle fondly and maybe even a little sadly: knowing the pointlessness, the pettiness and the futility of our little human worries, concerns, sorrows, conflicts and ambitions..............!

A musical twooot too too too breaks sharply my reverie. I look up in the direction of the sound and find my Romeo perched atop the pruned jacaranda, whistling at me again. This time, in the sunlight, I get a better look at him. He's some kind of a bulbul, only grey not black, a little larger than the bulbuls from the plains and instead of a red streak on his tummy, he has a bright yellow one. He's a Himalayan Bulbul, or a Pycnonotus leucogenys, as I find out later; but at this moment neither of us are much bothered about his Latin name. We are both busy, he whistling cat calls at me and I admiring his gumption and that cocky little tuft atop his head. 


And suddenly, I feel very nice and very content, being thus admired by this precious Bulbul, here in the golden afternoon, beneath this crystal blue sky, under these snow capped mountains......

Now, right at this moment, life's very good, I tell myself, and I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world............

And my Romeo echoes me, 'Yessss Sweetheart, life's good, twoooooot, troooooo, tooooo..........!'

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