Shub Labh

After a long time I returned to Havalgi early this year, back to the blue door and the quiet sky. The Bhima shimmered in the distance like before, and I watched the river with another's eyes this time around, renewing my memories of the old, and looking forward to the new.

When everything comes to an end, everything has to start anew. It is the way of the world.

To Annamalai in the Nilgiris - Part II

In the Nineties, I traveled to Tamilnadu to trek five days in the Nilgiris. The Annamalai Wildlife sanctuary sounded a mystical place to be in, and I was majorly into trekking India’s Wilds. It was a long journey this one, and traveling alone gave me time to reflect, but mostly to anticipate, and contemplate. I wrote a diary of my stay there, and of the time I spent trekking the Nilgiris, mostly short notes, nothing comprehensive. In these disconnected notes, I seek to relive my memories again. Needless to say, I don’t have many pictures from those days, a point-and-shoot camera loaded, and no extra rolls to spare, thirty-five frames to last seven days. I was in my teens then. How I wish now I had been meticulous in writing down everything I saw and heard. I didn’t, and I’m left with a scribbling here and there that I intend to publish as parts, and leave out some.

There were two more days to go before we packed our bags and turned our back on the Nilgiris, carrying her in our hearts to where we came from, home.

I was sitting on the low platform that ran square, extending outward from the two dormitory rooms that made up our base camp. It was approaching midnight. The skies were clear except for few stray clouds, and if you looked hard enough at the stars you could see the deep blue of the skies cushioning the starry promise of a joyous landscape, untouched by vaporous city lights and the determined pauses that separate uncertain city realities. There is always a strange silence in the dark. It is as if in attempting to see through the blackness I was searching for contours of shapes I could recognize, turning oblivious to the sounds that would otherwise disturb and jar in another setting, lending further depth to the silence in place now. I could have drawn it over me like a blanket and there would not be a bulge that could identify me. There is nowhere a human being can merge so easily and completely as when he is amidst nature at her freest.

The sounds of the jungle are different in that they are mysterious and evocative of an imagination rife with possibilities, turning the expectant mind into a mirror of its own hopes and desires, thrilling in its imagined fears and half expecting them to materialize. Turning my face in the general direction of the dense undergrowth, a short way off the edge of the platform I now sat on with my feet over the edge, drawn close by encircling arms, and chin on knees, I was almost willing a leopard or a tiger to emerge from the dark, featureless swathe I was trying hard to distinguish from the rest of the invisible landscape that swept over me without appearing to do so. I could neither see it nor touch it. I could only feel it in the invisible features of my knees and hands I felt with my chin, for reassurance that I was where I was, and that I was I. It was strange really to realize that were it not for my senses, there was no way for me to feel my own presence. I could go on living without being conscious of being alive.

To my left, round a small turn skirting the undergrowth lay the gentle rise of Topslip. Any moment, once the clouds inched past the moon, the now invisible swell would be bathed in the uniform silver of a silent night, pregnant with possibilities of the bush. Where I sat, tall trees threw their shadows together in invisible fingers, and my imagination skipped about merrily in the Corbettesque encounters I had readily transplanted into my widening circle of wild expectations. We had come across several instances of tiger pugmarks on our treks earlier in the day, even those of the leopard, but not the big cats themselves. It was the second last day of the five-day wildlife camp. Time had whirred quicker than my camera could capture it.

The Annamalai hills made for a permanent bearing on our treks. No amount of trekking seemed to bring them any closer, and it was in an open grassland, heavy with slush and where a herd of elephants had foraged not too long ago, leaving enough evidence behind, that the hills rising in the distance, glinting a deep brown in the mid-day sun, made me truly understand what it must mean to stand still and provide a permanent bearing to a passing fragrance of life, even if it smelled of elephant dung. Elsewhere, the grave marking the site where Hugo Wood, a British planter born in 1870, and largely credited with saving the Annamalai forests in his capacity as an officer in the Indian Forest Service in early 1900s, lay buried in solitude, and acquired the same permanence of the hills that ringed it, not far from where he lived, and died, becoming one with the land he cherished, protected, and nurtured.

His home lay empty on a rise up the short incline from his resting place, fronted by a gentle drop covered by a dense tangle of trees. It was surprisingly well painted for a house that lay abandoned in the jungle. I walked from room to room, gently turning doors that creaked as they swung free on infrequently used hinges, as if protesting our intrusion into their world. I had no face to go with the form of Hugo Wood as I imagined him doing the same. We were told that the house was used recently in a local film; that explained its relative freshness in the December of that year. It is a unique experience to come across an empty dwelling in a jungle, even if not as elaborate as Hugo Wood’s. But stepping through the outer threshold of this neat, almost majestic dwelling (the wild lends majesty to all that it embraces), with doors swinging freely on creaking hinges, made the experience mysterious in as much as it provoked thought.

I felt that if I put my ears to the walls and listened long and hard enough they might whisper of days long gone by, maybe I might even hear voices that lived and died here. Looking up, I wondered what shadows must have played on the walls and the ceilings in the nights the tigers roared their presence in the vicinity, maybe stepping in the veranda for a sniff and a stroll. What sort of a life might its inhabitants have lived in in so isolated a place? Did it make of them quiet folks, given to prolonged silences that echoed the melodies of their hearts? And what melodies might these have been? I wondered what might Hugo Wood have been like? He was a teak planter alright, and a forest officer dedicated to preserving the Nilgiris, but living in the wondrous setting of the Annamalai hills, what changes must nature at her bountiful best wrought in his soul, and who were the people whose lives he touched? Did those who served him love him as a master? Did he read books and gaze at the faraway hills in the distance? Did he love the land he had made his home, far away from the shores his ancestors had left to seek their fortunes in India? Or was he a lone ranger coming ashore to a land none of his ancestors had ever set foot on? If so what must have drawn him to this patch of Southern India? Was he fleeing his demons, finding succor in the heart of the Nilgiris? I could only look around and wonder, and imagine. In its silence the jungle hides many noises, and in its noises it hides its silences.

We were told that sightings of a mother bear with cubs had been made in the house a few days ago. To the back of the house lay low squares with missing ceilings, in an unbroken stillness of the moment when the last of Hugo Wood’s servants had ceased to live there. Silence has its abode in myriad settings; not necessarily in the permanence of a visible landmark or in the remembered memory of a moment lost to time.

To Annamalai in the Nilgiris - Part I

In the Nineties, I traveled to Tamilnadu to trek five days in the Nilgiris. The Annamalai Wildlife sanctuary sounded a mystical place to be in, and I was majorly into trekking India’s Wilds. It was a long journey this one, and traveling alone gave me time to reflect, but mostly to anticipate, and contemplate. I wrote a diary of my stay there, and of the time I spent trekking the Nilgiris, mostly short notes, nothing comprehensive. In these disconnected notes, I seek to relive my memories again. Needless to say, I don’t have many pictures from those days, a point-and-shoot camera loaded, and no extra rolls to spare, thirty-five frames to last seven days. I was in my teens then. How I wish now I had been meticulous in writing down everything I saw and heard. I didn’t, and I’m left with a scribbling here and there that I intend to publish as parts, and leave out some.

It was the sort of hill you would fancy rolling down its length for the sheer thrill of it. A bloated belly of a hungry land, bereft of the edges, notches, valleys and ridges characterizing the Nilgiris elsewhere in the Annamalai wildlife sanctuary. If it were flat, minus the gradient, kids might have loved to have it for a park. I almost half expected it to burp the first time I saw it after getting off the bus that had groaned all the way up the Annamalai hills from Pollachi, on its way to Parambikulam in Kerela. They called the hill Topslip.

To get to Topslip, I took a bus to Mangalore from Goa, then a train to Coimbatore. From Coimbatore I rode the forty kilometers to Pollachi by bus, before changing over at Pollachi for a bus to get to Topslip in the Annamalai hills. The bus took over an hour to cover the 12 kilometres from Pollachi to Topslip. It was the second of the four buses that plied passengers from Pollachi to Parambikulam via Topslip. On reaching Pollachi, I learned that the first bus for the day had broken down. It left me with an unenviable task of spending what was a bright cheery morning in the bus-stand asking, “Does this one go via Topslip,” to anyone who looked remotely like a Tamilian each time a bus pulled up into the bus-stand.

All the signboards were in Tamil. Each time a bus pulled up into the slot reserved for the Pollachi-Parambikulam bus, I turned to a different passenger each time for help in reading the signboard, lest I irritate the same person all the time; it was a busy bus-stand. Fresh steaming idlis served on Plantain leaves at a small, busy hotel a short way off the bus-stand rested easy as I kept my eyes peeled out for any bus that seemed to suggest from its demeanor that “I’m the one you are waiting for. Come on in now.” I hardly moved from where I waited, for, each time I needed to go anywhere, I had to lug my entire luggage with me, and I was fearful that were I to miss the bus, it might mean more waiting to do.

In the restaurant where I had my breakfast, fairly late in the day for one, there was hardly any space in the narrow passageways separating columns of small tables minus the trademark Sanmica tops. Plantain leaves and Sanmica make for strange bedfellows. It didn’t seem to bother anyone particularly as they stepped over my luggage to get to empty tables on their way in. It was no different on their way out. It must have been a happy morning for some reason since most people in the restaurant seemed cheerful; maybe it was the steaming idlis and dosas that did the trick. Their good humour rubbed off me, and I had settled in nicely, tucking in the featherweight idlis and searching for a mental toehold in a vibrant mesh of voices speaking an alien tongue. Eventually, the bus arrived, and I very nearly would have missed it if I had given in to my temptation for an extra plate of idlis. Fatigued from asking umpteen people to read the Tamil signboard on each arriving bus, I had looked on silently as this one came in, thinking “this cannot possibly be the one,” as if the bus to Parambikulam would be any different from the lot I had seen all morning. Seeing me make no move to get in, a fellow passenger who had heard me ask others for assistance with Tamil signboards caught my attention with a wave of his hand.

“It is this one. It goes to Parambikulam via Topslip,” he said in ‘broken’ English. And I almost hugged him in relief.

The Annamalai Wildlife Sanctuary, famous for the Nilgiris mountain ranges, is one of Tamilnadu’s prime ‘sanity’ spots, a hot favourite for campers and trekkers alike. It was Christmas time when I made the trip. I traveled alone from Goa in the Christmas vacation to attend the five-day wildlife camp in the sanctuary, organised by WWF-Tamilnadu and open to Higher Secondary schools and colleges with active Nature Clubs. I had finished with Secondary School the year before.

After getting off the bus the first memorable sight that has stuck in my memory was of this quaint little hill. It could be that after passing through dense vegetation all the way up, tense moments and all when the bus had threatened to roll backward in face of some sharp gradients at irregular intervals, the very sight of this ‘clean cut’ gentle hill was almost like chancing upon a matronly pensioner in a Last Chance school for juveniles who didn’t fit anywhere else but here, and the pensioner, who fitted everywhere else but here. It is not easy to forget the hill then, nor the pencil-thin whine of the bus-engine as it squeezed out the last imagined whiff of power in inching up the incline past tricky bends. I cannot forget them both.

The grassy area that sloped down made up only a part of the hill; the rest of the hill was consumed by cottages that ran along its upper reaches, and along its periphery. If anything lay beyond these white match boxes, I didn’t know of it.

Topslip is a small hamlet in the sanctuary, located at a height of 800 metres above sea level. A narrow path led up its gentle curve; on either side of this intruding ribbon stretched lush green grass, exuding an almost Zen-like calm, belying the true character of the Nilgiris. The steamy vibrancy of wildlife lay tucked away in a mesh of shifting shadows hiding ways of life unchanged from the time they first appeared on the planet. Hide and seek was more than just a game out there; it was the essence of the play nature had initiated – hide to seek, seek to hide.

From the top of the hill the view carried only a short distance away after passing the lone squat structure, our base camp, before coming up against a phalanx of green, made up on the outside by an uneven row of tall trees, and setting off a stark contrast with the grassy, treeless foreground marked by a touch of ‘civilization’ that encircled Topslip with cottages at the top, and a road at the bottom that ran on to Parambikulum. Looping up from our base camp, past the road that ran its length along the base of Topslip on its way to Parambikulam, it almost seemed that the hill which rose in a gentle curve, given its manicured feel, was left unfenced and cleared of mysteries, so that man could feel safer where he could not hide; it was so out of character in the midst of the undercurrent of a roiling ‘civilization’ of the ‘other side’.

After getting off the bus we, by then I had learnt that some of my co-passengers were participating campers, were met by the organizers. We heard the news that a man had been ‘taken’ by a Tiger a few days ago, and that another man had his face opened up by a Sloth Bear recently. Then, we were introduced to a tribal who was to be one of our guides on our treks deep inside the jungles. He was dark, small, and wiry, and wasted no time in hitching up his lungi to show deep gash marks that had healed to a messy looking memory. We crowded around the exposed inside of his thigh, the Sun hard on our backs.

“A leopard got him there, but he managed to get away. He was one of the lucky ones,” said one of our wildlife instructors as the tribal rolled down his lungi, having made his point and taken in the appreciative nods and murmurs. And he stood by silently, looking at us looking at him. He’d earned our curiosity and possibly awe, more surely our respect.

And, though I thrilled in the unconventional introduction we got, and couldn’t wait to get into the thick of it, I had looked up the placid Topslip and wondered if all this could be true as my eyes swept the grassy knoll of calm demeanor and an inviting embrace of the openhearted. Harpreet and I succumbed to the invitation that evening, before the trekking schedule unfolded to its occasionally excruciating character and length.

It was only after a forest guard shouted at us both to get off the green, grassy belly of Annamalai that evening as we lay on our backs in the middle of the gentle roll, watching the skies and the general activity below on the road a short distance from where we lay, near the Base camp, did we realize that this was where the bisons came to graze. At least this was one of the places frequented by a herd.

“You are not allowed to step on the grass around here,” he called out to us at the top of his voice, both hands describing rapid quarter arcs, taking in the contented green bulge that had seen erstwhile British loggers roll logs down from the top of the hill, to be picked up below for loading; hence the name Topslip.

“Human scent gets left behind in the grass,” he explained as Harpreet and I prepared to get up, dusting our backsides as he came up in our direction at a brisk pace. He was built wiry, a trait not uncommon among the older forest guards. "And it can make the bisons wary. GET OFF. GET OFF."