Saffron and Stone Down South in Kollur

I’m not sure if Kadavil Appu Kuttan is still alive as I write this. I’m not sure either if I can find out if he is alive, and I doubt if anyone can unless Appu Kuttan has returned home to Kerala to his sister Janaki’s house in Trichur, ‘near Guruvayoor temple’, or maybe to his younger brother Ramkrishna’s place not far from there. Appu Kuttan has no family of his own. He never married. However there’s just a chance that I could get some news of him if I were to return to the Mookambika temple in Kollur and enquire with the other sadhus there who’ve made the place their home and live out their days in the temple complex.

The younger among them go on pilgrimages like Appu Kuttan once did long before he turned 86 in the year I met him. But I’m not sure if I’ll be returning to Kollur anytime soon unless I make an impromptu decision to pack my bags and take off to Murudeshwar like I did that year when I went backpacking down south along India’s West Coast.


But I must tell you his story even if it is over three years old, not that there is much to tell because I was in a hurry to get back to the hotel in Murudeshwar that day since the last bus for Byndoor left Mookambika temple at quarter past seven in the evening. To get to Murudeshwar I had to change the bus at Byndoor for Bhatkal before changing again at Bhatkal for Murudeshwar. So Appu Kuttan and I spoke for barely an hour before I sprinted to the Mookambika bus-stand just in time for the 4.45 PM bus to Byndoor.

Kadavil Appu Kuttan told me nothing earth shaking in that one hour. Actually I had serious difficulty understanding what he was saying for, his native tongue, Malayalam, weighed heavily on his Hindi. Moreover, he was old, all of 86 years, and that added to the problem. But somehow, Appu Kuttan and I managed to talk to each other – an old man and a young backpacker trying to connect in a place that was neither’s home.

Earlier in the day I left for Bhatkal after lunch at the newly opened Kamat's eatery down the street from the Murudeshwar temple the village takes its name from, in the backdrop of the gigantic statue of Lord Shiva rising majestically over a narrow stretch of beach where fishermen set off for deep waters early each morning, and mending fishing nets at other times. Narayan Naik waits tables at the Kamat’s eatery and on learning that I was visiting Murudeshwar he said, “Tourists prefer Surmai and Pomfret fished off the coast around here. They don’t have a taste for Noglaa and Bangda.” Narayan of the ready smile was built thin and came from a nearby village. I finished the vegetarian thali, paid the bill and left the hotel. Outside, fisherwomen sat by the side of a rutted path that led to the temple behind me, selling fish from cane baskets lined with sliced rubber tubes sourced from used truck tyres. Glassy-eyed fish lay still in small pools of water in rubber tubing drawing interested customers.


After changing to a Kundapur bound bus at Bhatkal, passing Gulmohar, Copper pod, Cashew, and Casuarina trees along the route I got off at Byndoor and sat out twenty minutes at a wayside inn before boarding a privately owned bus for Kollur. A short way off Byndoor the bus veered left, off the NH17 that ran on 69 kms. to Udupi, Mangalore lay 60 kms. off Udupi. “Government buses do not ply to Kollur, you’ll get private buses though,” the Inn keeper had told me while we were discussing the Raghavendra Swami Muth, a local landmark. The stretch to Kollur from Byndoor ran 27 kms. through lush green fields, isolated homesteads, and past little or no traffic on the narrow winding road through dense forests in the Mookambika Wildlife Sanctuary, home to the dreaded King Cobra.

Narrow strips of wood ran diagonally across from opposite sides of windows of houses scattered along the route, forming diamond shaped openings encasing deep pools of black of the rooms. I could only imagine what must lie behind those openings, and of how the light might play out once the Sun came in through the windows. A brooding sky hug overhead, overcast and threatening heavy rain. Mist covered the mountains in the distance as a light drizzle fell outside. Vyavashaya Seva Bank disappeared round the bend as we drove through Yedathare in the hills. In a clearing by an Areca Nut plantation a group of village boys were playing Kabaddi. We passed a school, scattered houses, and a few shops before the jungle swallowed us again.

I had a sadhu for company in the bus. He sat to my left and remained silent the entire journey, never once turning to look at me after I slid into the seat beside him. Leaning my head against the backrest of the seat in front I looked past the sadhu through the window at the vegetation flashing past as the bus rumbled on to Kollur. Somewhere deep in the jungle Agnitirtha and Sauparnika flowed, regenerating life far beyond their banks, and steeped in history they carried downstream echoes from centuries ago.

Kollur lies on the banks of the Sauparnika at the foot of the Kodachadri hills where Adi Sankara, the pioneering Hindu philosopher, is believed to have meditated on his travels across India. It was known as Maharanyapura in the Skanda Purana before changing to Kolapura after Kola rishi, the sage advised by Lord Shiva to worship Shakti, the lingam that is believed to have appeared on its own (swayambhu) in Maharanyapura, promising him that in due course Mahalakshmi would manifest from Shakti. After Vagdevi, the Goddess of Speech, struck the demon Kaumasura dumb or mooka, eventually killing him to end the reign of terror he had unleashed on the ascetics of Kolapura, including Kola rishi, the goddess came to reside in the swayambhu lingam in the temple and came to be known as Mookambika. In due course, Kolapura changed to Kollur.

The bus pulled up into the Mookambika bus-stand shortly after and I got off and made for the temple. It was Onam and large numbers of devotees from Kerala and elsewhere had traveled to the temple to offer prayers. Clad in pale white saris with gold borders, flowers adorning their hair, women waited by the side of the road that ran by the temple. On nearing the Mookambika temple I saw the stone structure and the golden gopura through the entrance, rising against the backdrop of Kodachadri hills in the distance. As I walked past a group of workers laying the courtyard floor anew and entered the main temple, a priest hissed at me, “Take off your shirt. Take it off.” I took off my shirt and joined the queue of bare-chested male devotees inching in a single file between ancient stone pillars.


Later I walked across the courtyard to the other temple entrance that led out the perimeter wall enclosing the courtyard. On my way out the high wooden door I passed two stepped platforms flanking the passage to the entrance I had just exited. Elderly sadhus in saffron sat conversing on straw mats spread out on the red oxide coated platform. Some of the sadhus were deep in sleep, their worldly possessions stuffed in bags that doubled up as pillows. It was while he was spreading the cardboard mattress on the platform, possibly preparing for a nap, that I first saw Appu Kuttan, a solitary figure in deep pink lungi that came up to his ankles as he bent over the platform to adjust the cardboard mattress.

Introductions in place, Appu Kuttan allowed himself a gentle smile on seeing me taken aback after he had just told me that he had served in the British India army. On demobilizing in 1948, and without a job he began drifting, not becoming a sadhu until he had turned sixty. “I didn’t get any job after my discharge from the army so I became a sadhu,” he said matter-of-factly as I crossed my legs and sat across from him, warming to the conversation. He lit up a beedi and sat cross-legged on the edge of the nylon mat, the beedi stayed firm between his index and middle finger. Recalling the good times when he earned a ‘good salary’ while working in Aurangabad where the “Quartermaster also worked”, Appu Kuttan soldiered for the British Indian Army for eight long years during World War Two, serving in Singapore for a year where the British Army retreated under the Japanese onslaught, and six months in Rangoon where the Allied Army led by the British fought the Japanese to a standstill in the jungles of Burma before routing them in the same jungles, then in the mountains and across the Burmese plains, possibly handing Japan their biggest land defeat until then, and largely orchestrated by Indian soldiers in their thousands, fighting alongside the Burmese, the Karens, and the Kachins.

“I did not swing guns on the battlefield,” Appu Kuttan recalled. “I served in the 37 Field Ambulance Unit on the frontlines. We took our lunch in the trenches, sheltering from Japanese planes on bombing runs.” At this juncture he raises his hands, imitating the Japanese planes swooping down to drop their loads behind British lines. Allied troops were battling to keep China’s overland supply route through Burma open while Japan sought to cut it off. The Burma campaign began disastrously for the British in the December of 1941, with thousands of Indian soldiers in the British India army losing their lives to the Japanese and disease, malaria being rife in the swamps. By mid 1945 the tide had turned, and the Japanese were in full retreat.

“We took many Japanese prisoners in Rangoon,” Appu Kuttan said, a smile breaking on his lips at the memory as he exhaled after drawing deep on his beedi. “Japanese Officers were made to sweep. They would ask us for Goodbye cigarettes,” he said. “Eighteen of us in the Army company did not smoke, so we gave the prisoners our stock of Goodbye cigarettes.”

On joining the army at the “age of 18”, his first posting was Pune, then Aurangabad, before he was sent to Shillong for a year where he was entrusted with the logistics of distributing ration to Army Companies. “Gaadi leke ration ke liye chalo,” he recollects Karunakaran, a driver from Thiruanantpuram, telling him one day at the army camp. From Shillong he marched with the army to Rangoon serving with the 37 Field Ambulance Unit before leaving for Singapore for a year. I turned my head for a brief moment in the direction of animated voices behind me before quickly turning to Appu Kuttan.

“Capt. Lakshmi Sehgal of the INA was arrested in Singapore and held in our prison camp for a day,” he recollected, his eyes lighting up at the memory which I took to be less for the arrest as for her presence in their midst. As he spoke of her I couldn't help noticing his voice rise up a notch in what was otherwise a phlegmatic undertone that sometimes shook, struggled and faded. His age showed up in his voice, again.

Long before Lakshmi Sehgal, born Lakshmi Swaminathan in a Tamil brahmin family, joined the Indian National Army, she was putting her medical education to good use among the poor of Singapore after leaving India for Singapore in 1940, and after the British army fell to the Japanese in the ill fated Singapore campaign in World War II, she served the Prisoners of War, a significant number of whom were Indians. It was inevitable that she came in contact with the Indian National Army headed by Subhash Chandra Bose, born in an affluent Bengali brahmin family, then actively recruiting Indian POWs from the British Army to staff the Indian Liberation Army. The Japanese were only too happy to see this happen. And when Subhash Chandra Bose arrived in Singapore in July, 1943, and raised the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, a women’s regiment, the mantle of Colonel fell on Lakshmi Sehgal, fighting the British on the side of the Japanese.

Appu Kuttan turns back the years. “Lieutenant Colonel Satchidananda Swami commanded us in Singapore and Major David reported to him at the time. Now Swami Satchidananda lives at Anandashram in Kanhangad in the Kasargod district of Kerala.” Known as Anantasivan in his pre-monastic years, Swami Satchidananda came to the Ashram on being urged by one of his former colleagues (possibly Sam Rose) from the Army in 1948, the year Appu Kuttan returned from Singapore and was demobilized from the British India Army soon after India’s independence.

Pauses punctuate his recollections. Never once in the entire duration did he take his eyes off me. When I ask him if he visits his native state Kerala, he replies, “Aata hai, Jaata hai. Time doesn’t pass there. But here (at the temple), time passes. We (the sadhus) talk, and time passes. We sleep by ten in the night.”

After visiting temples all over India, and barely surviving malaria after the Badrinath yatra, and living at the Krishna temple in Ujjain for six years, and six months in Goa 'in between' where he claimed “some Malabari people know me well there”, Appu Kuttan eventually made Mookambika temple his home the last nineteen of the twenty five years as a sadhu. He sleeps in the temple shelter after he left the pujari’s (a priest) house on being asked to pay a monthly rent of 450 rupees, money he didn’t have. “I get meals twice a day at the temple here, and a paratha (a type of bread) from a shop nearby, and then I sleep here,” he said.

A short distance away to our right, under a makeshift tent that kept out the September sun, twenty-odd artisans chiseled away in a random yet rhythmic melody of chisel striking stone, fashioning largish stone slabs that four youth loaded into their handcart before carrying it through the door and into the courtyard where workers were laying a part of the floor anew. Then they came back for more, laughing and joking as they pushed their handcart to the rhythmic clicks of metal against stone in the time that Appu Kuttan and I sat conversing while the clock ticked to the beat of those soothing metallic clicks at a place that history had seemingly rented out for posterity.

As I prepared to leave, I motioned to the camera indicating that I wanted to photograph him. I barely noticed him smile under the white beard. While I readied the camera he told me that he was filmed along with another sadhu in Trichur when he was visiting his sister sometime ago, “TV ne pakda,” he said. I took a few pictures, cautious not to run through the three film rolls I had carried along for the trip. Then I shook his hand and swung my legs over the platform, onto the floor. After sitting there facing Appu Kuttan and the wall behind him, it took my eyes a few seconds to adjust to the glare of the Sun beyond the shade of the platform.

With a short wave of his hand he saw me off as I got down from the platform. By now we had attracted the attention of other sadhus sitting on the opposite platform, his ‘other family’ far away from a home he never really had, and with no one to wait for him in the night and wonder where he was if he got late, Kadavil Appu Kuttan had made the sky his roof and the earth his home. Freedom would come from fires entrusting him to the winds, scattering him where he had once walked, and in the rivers he once prayed to, before carrying him to the ocean, back to where some people say life began.

The Remains of the Day

The rail bridge over the Zuari runs parallel to the road bridge. From the window I watch vehicles speed over the bridge in the direction of Panjim (the capital of Goa), but soon we leave them behind as the Mandovi Express puffs her lungs out and lunges forward on her run north along the West Coast. To my left, a fork in the road splits into two, one ascends the bridge while the other runs on to Vasco, passing Sancoale on the way.

I trail my eyes over the spans to my left, held up by six visible pillars, and then linger for a second where both ends of the bridge disappear into a mass of green trees. For a moment I imagine I’m watching a tree bridge held up at both ends by dark green, leafy pillars. I count fourteen pigeons keep pace with us. Time goes still as the behemoth rattles over the bridge against the placid backdrop of the Zuari, only the metal girders flashing past in quick succession confirm our progress across the waist of the Zuari before she flares out into buxom curves, distancing Marmagoa (also spelled Mormugao) taluka from Tiswadi along the contours of an open mouth; the Marmagoa bay. To the south of the bay lies Marmagoa taluka. The city of Vasco sits on its lower lip. From Velsao where I visited Philip’s place sometime ago one can see planes take off and land at Dabolim airport.

In the late evening as we stood on the beach, facing the Sun go down on a fishing trawler returning ashore with its catch of Mullets (shevto in Konkani), Philip pointed out the darkening silhouette of the landmass to our right, jutting out into the sea and obscuring the Marmagoa harbour on the other side. It reminded me of a giant table rising from the sea where the gods sit down to early dinner, watching the Sun go down as a reluctant twilight prepares to bring the curtain down on the day. Unlike buses, or for that matter, trains, there is nothing to tell where planes are headed. A road or a railway track point in a definite direction, a peg in the Earth, a fixture, a steady, identifiable landscape. Up in the sky there is none.

We pass over the Sancoale creek that abuts Sancoale, a small village before Chicalim on the way to Vasco. From the time I first heard Sancoale pronounced ‘Saanq-Oooaal’ as a kid, I hung on to the notion that the sea must have spoken the name using a conch, rolling its tongue to be heard over the lapping waves – ‘Saanq-Oooal’. This was way before I visited Sancoale. It still evokes the feel of a faraway place; somewhere you will never visit but never stop imagining what it must be like to be there either. Eventually I did visit it three times. On one of the trips, Jaggu and I rode the long afternoon from the hinterland, lugging cameras and heading to wherever our fancy took us, even if it meant free-riding sixty kilometers in the blazing Goan Sun. Any place was good enough if it promised memorable photographs, a rustic wayside inn to stop for a pao-bhaji and empty roads to free-ride with the wind in the teeth. And Sancoale in that one image of the whitewashed façade of the Our Lady of Health church, only its front wall now survives the fire of 1834 and the vagaries of age ever since, standing against a deep blue sky, almost defiant in its centuries-old ruins, and marked by refugee-like barrenness of overhanging branches of a nearby tree, stands fixed in my memory like a rusted spear tip in fluorescent blue jelly.

Facing the façade I looked up and traced my eyes along the uneven laterite contours, wondering what must it be to stand alone in a reminder of an age long past, and for a purpose long replaced. Wisps of clouds broke through the branches, setting off the façade in patches of discontinuous deep blue skies. I knelt to take pictures while Jaggu looked around. Skeletal branches cast weak shadows around my feet. A few metres to our left a narrow strip drew up short into the flanks of the estuary. Here the Zuari flows into the Arabian Sea.

A narrow canoe lay anchored to a wooden peg driven into the ground among the mangroves. Broken footwear, pieces of nylon ropes, runaway fishing-net floaters and sundry little debris lay washed up in small laterite rocks piled up on the sides, fashioned to hold back incoming tides. They had met their ‘reefs’ and reduced to debris they now spoke of fishermen and fishing. I wondered if the footwear belonged to a dead man, and whether he had died of drowning, and whether he had drowned from being pushed out at sea. Somehow I felt that such an end seemed likely in the setting the ruins commanded. There was every likelihood the flotsam might have resulted from a fate as innocuous as someone casting away their worn footwear let alone a sinister end in the middle of the sea, but I was not prepared to concede that possibility; believing instead in the forlornness of the landscape abutting the sea and the dark promise it held for an unsuspecting victim. A black dog regarded us nervously as we took in the silence, and contemplated our strangely disquieting setting. In such places, noises cease to be noises, instead they voice the silence of the departed, and the rage of those whom time left behind.

On our way out we passed a low laterite wall fencing off the property. A jamun tree grew over the other side of the wall, and some of its branches reached over the laterite wall where we had parked the bike. Three kids, not older than nine years, were busy collecting jamuns. Two of them stood beneath the tree, holding awkwardly an oversized fishing net to prevent fleshy jamuns from squashing to the ground as they fell. The third was up in the tree, shaking jamuns loose. I picked up some jamuns where they had fallen to the ground on our side of the wall, and brushing off the soil against the seat of my pants I popped them into the mouth. Then I stuck my tongue out to see if it had changed to the colour of the jamuns – inky violet, like I used to do growing up. It had, to the colour of Camel Ink. Old habits die hard.

The setting sun lit up in a shade of gold the fishing net and the two boys straining to hold up its ends. I paused to take their pictures before kicking the bike to life, and entrusting the ruins to the remains of the day, we rode away into the sunset.

Alone at the Top

It was at the turn in the road to Paikul that we saw this lone tree on the hill. On our way up the slope the dense undergrowth tore at my shirt and skin as we crashed the spiny carpet of green. Jaggu followed closely behind. In time we got up there and as I looked up at the leafless tree the Sun stared back hard. There was something about the barren tree I couldn't quite fathom as it reared up to the Sun, matching its fierce glare with the intensity of its own desolation. They stood toe to toe as I wiped away thin trails of blood welling up on my forearms where the thorns had caught them.

Sometimes I pull out this picture and look at it and wonder if I missed anything I shouldn't have.

The tree on the hill
Is bereft of leaves,
In a frenzy of joy
They had once danced themselves loose.

Where Scarecrows Walk

I do not remember how long it took me to get these pictures that summer day in Carambolim. However, what I do remember is waiting by the side of the road under the shade of coconut palms and mango trees while a light breeze blew across the paddy fields carrying with it excited chatter of Purple Moorhens flocking in the lake behind me. I had walked across the road after the Bronze Winged Jacana that I was watching while it glided on ungainly legs, deftly stepping on Salvinia weeds in the lake as it went about looking for fishes, had moved further back until it became a dot in the far distance, in the direction of the church at Old Goa. I found it rather surprising because on my bird watching trips to the lake over the years I was used to seeing the Bronze Winged Jacana fishing in the waters by the side of the road that split the lake into a 'water catchment' at one end, and paddy fields on the other.

Letting the breeze run over me, I sat on dry grass facing the rice fields on the shoulder of the road that led up to the railway tracks to my right before bifurcating into two; one road ran east in the direction of Neura where Joseph once drove Ajay and me to the church that sits on the hill overlooking a vast stretch of open land cut by narrow slivers of water that I believe draw sustenance from the Zuari, and the other ran on to Old Goa in the opposite direction.

From the parapet of the wall that fenced off the church from the sloping hill I gazed at the scene opening out in the distance. It is rare to see large open spaces in Goa amid what is essentially Western Ghats territory; mountains and hills largely shaping the terrain even as the topography levels out as it descends to the West Coast by the Arabian sea.

Portions of wetlands around Goa were converted into farm lands years ago, drawing water from wetlands. At Carambolim sluice gates control the flow of water from the lake to the paddy fields across the road, and while it sustains the farmers it drains the lake of water, turning the wetland at Carambolim (also spelled Karmali) into soggy landmass by winter when the first of the migratory birds begin to land in the lake. Their numbers have reduced over the years from the thousands in the 1980s to a straggling few at the turn of the century. By February it runs dry.

An occasional vehicle passed by on the narrow road behind me. The paddy fields were empty of farmers who had recessed for lunch in the shade at the base of the bund where I sat watching Cattle Egrets poised attentively over water channels irrigating the rice crops, their eyes peeled out for fishes floating in the water sourced from the lake behind me.

A scarecrow stood in the middle, set off by the green of the paddy crop. For a scarecrow I thought he was dressed well. Peering through the lens I waited for the Cattle Egret to move into the frame before letting the shutter land. I believe the scarecrow did not take too kindly to someone picking off from under his nose even if it was only fishes that the Egret was after and not grain because no sooner had I snapped the lever back to load the next frame the Egret took off.

In paddy fields around Goa you can hear stories of scarecrows that take their jobs seriously even if it means that they have to come to life to hustle out winged folks who challenge their authority.

If you've heard it before, you've probably heard right. Scarecrows can walk, and in Goa they do.

The Night and Us

In 1997 the comet Hale-Bopp took hold of our imagination like no other celestial event had in my lifetime except maybe the Solar Eclipse of 1995. We decided it was not enough that we merely see the comet, we had to photograph it. Ten years ago a camera was still a big thing, and digital cameras were unheard of. So when Magan got hold of an SLR, we decided it was time we went looking for the Big Guy. This is a recollection of that trip and of the picture above that Magan took that day.

It took a long time coming before Magan and I actually hit the road in pursuit of the Hale-Bopp. Until then several early morning chases had turned up a blank, most notably the one with Naguesh. After no amount of knocking Jaggu's door in the dark of night had elicited a squeak, Naguesh and I struck out for the plateau before dawn broke over the Engineering College and sat out the dark hours on the plateau garotted by laterite that had changed color to black from being exposed to the elements for hundreds and thousands of years. There we sat, shivering in the cold, and eyes peeled out for the comet in the skies overhead, a Star Dial in my hands but no Hale-Bopp. To this day I cannot understand how Hale-Bopp eluded us that day. And when a herd of buffaloes paused to look at us on their way to their grazing grounds we knew it was time to pack up and try another day. So when Magan suggested that rather than look for it in the early morning hours we should try late evening hours, I readily agreed. We took a different route from the earlier ones.

With my back weighed down by a rucksack packed with camera equipment; a SLR, a tripod, binoculars and a refractor telescope, Magan and I wound our way past the Ajanta Cashew factory, along Cashewnut plantations that swarmed up the hill, broken only in pockets by towering Betel nut palms and a smattering of Jackfruit trees whose fruits hung from the stem like bags under weary eyes. Flat terrain broke into view as the bike laboured up the hill through Priol and into Kerim, a sleepy village nestled in the heart of Goa. Then, a rebellious gravel path veered off the road in Kerim. The road runs on to Savoiverem before drawing up short at the ferry point connecting Volvoi to Maina Surla across the river Mandovi where large barges load Iron Ore from the mines across the river before transporting them to far shores while leaving behind barren land that has turned red in angst.

We took the gravel path in Kerim at the turn guarded by a small semi circular temple called Bhooth Khamba, where cane baskets and small change are offered by worshippers and travelers to appease the resident ghost, believed to menace lonely travelers. Saffron flags fly from staffs affixed to the top of the temple. Across the road from the Bhooth Khamba, bang opposite the gravel road running past the hill we were now making for lay the memorial to Nilesh Naik, a local youth killed in the police firing during the anti-Nylon 6,6 agitation. Thapar-DuPont eventually pulled out of Kerim in face of implacable opposition to the project by local villagers who feared pollution from the plant. It was possibly among the few successful ‘environmental’ agitations in independent India. The gravel path ran on to the now abandoned offices of Thapar-DuPont. Amid broken bottles littering the place, grafitti covered walls stand testimony to plans gone horribly wrong. Occasionally village youth sit among its ruins, drawn to it as much by an association that defined Kerim as by its desolateness in the middle of seemingly nowhere. I had sensed a strange disquiet among the ruins on an earlier trip there.

It was late evening when we took the turn and bumped along the path, pulling up by the side of the hill a short run later, the bike groaning and slipping in the loose gravel. The hill stood dark and large. In the dark even the gentlest of hills take on an ominous character that belies their very raison d'etre. Even in that little light, for, light drops even quicker in the hills, I could see that this hill was different. The massive block of laterite, turned black by unrelenting exposure to the elements, showed in its uneven edges that could quickly cut skin if you were careless. Stony hills rarely have the gentle curves that other hills do. Somehow, I believe this gives them an implacable, unforgiving character not unlike the reputation the village acquired in the middle of its stand-off with the administration over the Nylon 6,6 plant.

In fast fading light, guided by a feeble pen-torch that Magan had carried along to help him set up the telescope and camera attachments, we made our way to the hill more by remembered instinct than by any visible signs to guide us. A previous memory from an outing to another hill where we had seen a Cobra among jagged laterite mounds, rushed to the fore as I negotiated the dark, sharp edges on the way to the base of the hill. I determinedly pushed the thought of another unscheduled encounter from my mind as Magan made his way ahead.

It was the first of April and Hale-Bopp was on its last perihelion before pulling away from the Sun on its way out into deep space, not returning until 4380 unless Jupiter exerts sufficient pull to further skew up the date. With skies conducive for photographing the comet, we ascended the rocky summit that had flattened out into jagged edges of laterite. It was past seven in the evening and a calm breeze soothed our wait for the celestial visitor.

We had the whole hill to ourselves. In the distance to the west, rolling hills beaded the horizon, allowing a faint view of the massive radio towers on Taleigao plateau, a good part of thirty kilometres away, maybe less as the crow flies. To our left a small vale opened out, trees crowding it's rim, and between them reflected slivers of the Kerim water body. Along it outline, lined by brooding trees, snaked a thread of a road, an occasional vehicle droning past.

All fell silent. I sat facing the Western skies. The last vestiges of barely visible twilight hung tenaciously over the undulating necklace of hills. Lapwings flew across my face, twittering home. The sky was shedding it's blue gown for a more appropriate black for the approaching night.

Gradually, emerging from the silent darkness in the North-Western skies, was the comet, a celestial tattoo on the body of the mysterious universe. The only sounds were of vegetation swishing in the breeze and the whirr of the camera shutter release in the background as Magan shot frame after frame of the comet. The atmosphere was unreal. Before me, beneath Perseus, despite hurtling at over 16 kms per second, millions of kilometres away, the comet appeared to rest content in the skies, pampered by the warm brightness of the Milky Way stretching across the skies overhead. The setting seemed complete.

Then it got pitch dark. The Big Dipper in the north was keeping the Pole star company like it had for millions of years. Behind us to the east Mars glared down with blood-shot eyes, and below it lay the inverted L of Virgo. Leo stretched across lazily. Corvus and Orion as striking as ever, beckoning our gaze upwards to partake of the show put up by the skies, a royal welcome for Hale-Bopp. We might as well have been sitting in a planetarium and not realized it, intruding into celestial matters.

Sitting there I thought of the things people think of when overwhelmed by nature. A human lifetime, human distances, mobility and the like pale into insignificance when juxtaposed with celestial magnitudes. The unknown excites imagination. What was I in the larger scheme of things evident in the little that was on display that night?

I wondered if someone like me sat on this very hill when the comet last visited Earth over 4,000 years ago and as I looked up at the stars twinkling away mischievously I was certain there were many among them so far away that I was seeing them now as they existed at the birth of mankind. What then had they been witness to which they cannot communicate to me just as the streaking wonder before me cannot regale me of the world it passed by on it's last visit, four millennia ago. As we retraced our path I looked up at the comet and bade goodbye 'like me you'll go away but when you return someone else will wonder about you and his place in the world.'

And we left the night behind in the silence of its interminable pauses. The kick caught on and the bike roared, shattering the silence of the heavens.

Paan Melodies

HT first ran this account of my weekend trip, meandering on Mumbai streets.

“Yeh jo paan khayenge na aap ab, yeh ghul jayaga,” he said as he handed us two meetha paans, shaking his head when I asked him for a piece of paper in which to wrap the paan that I did not intend to eat just then.

Seeing him shake his head I decided otherwise. I was not about to treat the meetha paan in a manner that the connoisseur did not seem fit. After ‘forty years and three months’ of running a paan shop in Fort, I doubted if there was anything that Mishraji did not know about paans. A paan rested in a corner of his mouth as he turned to me and spoke in the same manner in which he made us the two paans, soft, and deliberate, taking his time, and in tune with the deserted Sunday afternoon in Fort. “Do not chew it. Just hold it in your mouth,” he said. I stopped chewing it and pushed the paan into the corner of the mouth where it bulged slightly on the outside.

We had happened upon Mishraji’s paan shop on the sidewalk opposite HMV (His Master’s Voice) in the Cowasji Patel Street as we exited Mahesh Lunch Home after lunch, where a waiter found it amusing to alarm a kid with a live crab that he paraded until pretty much everyone saw it claw the air in vain. The street was deserted as we stepped out and took to the Sun.

Two varieties of paan were stacked neatly on a wooden rest covered in red cloth that was wet from water that Mishraji sprinkled from time to time to keep them fresh. Mishraji had picked up the smaller of the two varieties, explaining as he went about opening tins of ingredients that went into the making of the meetha paan. “The smaller paan leaf is called the Magadi patta. It is sourced from Magajpur, near Gaya in Bihar. The bigger one, Banarsi paan, is from Orissa. Dekhte chalo kya kya dalenge paan mein,” he said as he opened a colourful tin of Snowpeas Paan Rasna – Paan flavouring material made of a mixture of Amla – Bel, the latter a creeper. Amla powder is mixed with Bel Pulp powder and added with Saccharine – Sodium and natural flavouring substances. It was free of Betelnut, Tobacco, Catechu, and Lime. Then he added grated dry coconut that was coloured light yellow, pink, and green before dipping a miniature brass pestle into a brass jar of gulkand that he held up for me to smell. “Smell the gulkand,” he said turning to me. “Since the time I found a cockroach in gulkand that I bought from the market twenty years ago, I began preparing it at home along with Katthah, and Chuna (Lime). I make the Katthah from Babul that’s also used in cleaning teeth. I get the Babul from Kanpur.”

Then he pointed out the HMV studios in the building opposite, and said, “Hridaynath Mangeshkar, Lata Mangeshkar, Ashaji, and Mohammed Rafiji used to walk down here after their recordings in the first floor studios up there.” Then pointing across the street, Mishraji said, “Woh samne wala shutter dekh rahe ho na . . . Das Prakash Hotel tha. It used to be a good hotel, no longer exists now. We used to get Masala Dosa from there, made in desi ghee. Those Dosas used to be large. Mukeshji used to like them very much and used to order for them when he came to the studios to record his songs.”

I look at the old radio on the shelf behind him and imagine it playing the immortal hits from the 1960s and 1970s soon after being recorded across the street.

“Narulaji used to be the manager then. Amitabh Bacchan used to visit the HMV studios regularly. He is very good natured. I used to go to the studios and have chai-coffee with them; Lataji, Ushaji, Hridaynathji, S D Burman.” Time rolls back as Mishraji recollects moments long gone, now kept alive by their significance. He adds, “The HMV Studios was like home to them. Sometimes they would call out to me from the First Floor asking me to walk across the street to the Studios upstairs before the traffic lights turned green: ‘Uncle ajao ji, green light ho jayegi, ajao, jaldi aao.’” His voice softens at the memory, quivering ever so slightly as his eyes moisten.

We stand in silence as Mishraji gathers himself, each lost in their thoughts. Shadows on the sidewalk shift as a car drives past. I look up at the building across the street, at the fading HMV logo and imagine S D Burman hurrying Mishraji into crossing the street before the traffic light turned green.

Then it is time to leave. We bid the man from Benares bye, and turn left into Pitha Street while remembered images from newspapers and magazines over the years turn into a slideshow in my mind.

Indibloggies Nomination

Windyskies has been nominated in the Best Travel Blog category in Indibloggies - Indian Weblog Awards.

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."

To Qurban Ali's in Masjid

Masjid (also known as Masjid Bunder) is the last stop for trains on the Central line of the Mumbai Suburban Railway before they roll into Victoria Terminus (renamed Mumbai CST), built by the British in 1888. Masjid takes its name from Juni Masjid or the Gate of Mercy Synagogue built in 1796 near the once thriving Jewish community in Bombay.

On a sultry Sunday last year, I returned to Masjid, stepping off the train at Masjid station and taking the bridge that led me out west before walking up a gentle incline crowded by paan-bidi shops. Turning right I walked in the direction of the Bhat bazaar (rice market) whose history is almost as old as the history of Bombay itself. The narrow road led me past small shops that appeared to function as efficiently above the level of the road as below it. To conduct business with a shopkeeper of a basement shop, I had to bend and transact business through the narrow opening that opened out at the level of the road. I was none the worse for the effort. Above the shop sat another whose shopkeeper was oblivious to what was happening in the shop below his.

Walking through Bhat bazar in Masjid near the Bombay Docks from where Indian Muslims set sail to the Annual Haj, I passed teams of local youth playing cricket in narrow lanes lined by old buildings on either side. Walking past them, and occasionally ‘sprinting’ up the wooden stairs of a building or two and speaking with curious residents emerging from darkened staircases or corridors that ran past their doors while dodging faint shadows, I soon realized that not all old buildings in Masjid now sport old names.

I meandered past Ananth Niwas; opposite it an older building was simply named Juna Ananth Niwas. Juna in the local language, Marathi, and Gujrati, means old. It is possible that the older building was named Ananth Niwas before the new one was built. Then, it was time for it to pass on its name to the new kid on the block, and acquire the prefix ‘Juna’. I would have thought that it might have been simpler for whoever it was that built the new building to have let the old building retain its name, and called the new building by a different name.

As I stood there and looked around at other old buildings in the Bhat bazaar area, I turned my gaze once again in the direction of Juna Ananth Niwas. I wondered if it was not the case that its residents on shifting to a new building did not want to let go of the identity the old one gave them, and the moments spent growing up in its embrace. There is no other reason I could think of. But this is not always the case with other old buildings there. On changing hands, some buildings in Masjid simply changed their names. Most old buildings change names more than once in their lifetime. The new name all but erases the old one even if the identity and the character of the building remains the same. In time when the older generation shifts to new residences or simply dies out, the old name goes out with them.

For the second time in two days, I took the stairs of the old building in the vicinity that sits unsteadily in the street in Bhat bazaar. Across the building the fountain and the clock tower shone in the mid day sun. It took me a while to adjust to the lack of light in the short corridor that led to a flight of wooden steps. I looked up the staircase as it faded out in the darkness. Behind me the staircase appeared to descend tunnel-like to the street outside where a car sat on the kerb. There was no one around. The wooden steps were bunched up closely, overlapping one another. I’m accustomed to staircases whose steps do not overlap. It is easier to ascend staircases where each step ascends to the next at a right angle, leaving ample foot space with which to negotiate the steps. But here, in climbing up the stairs, I had to withdraw my foot from under the step protruding above before I could place it on the next step. Descending the steps became trickier still. On the way down, the steps do not begin from where steps above them end; instead each step begins from well under the step above it. After almost stumbling once, I took care to place my heel after accounting for the disconcerting overlap between the steps. This construct accounts for their steep descent.

Of the wooden staircases in old buildings that I’ve seen around Mumbai, their construction does not differ greatly. As I came up to the landing on the first floor, I was taken aback by rows of red lights from electricity meters glowing in the dark against a large board fixed to the wall. To its right, a window opened out on the street below. Behind me the staircase appeared to descend tunnel-like to the street outside where a car sat on the kerb. Strangely, for all the noise in the street outside, an eerie silence enveloped the building. It was as if I had stepped back in time, passing a corridor that connected different worlds, removing me from my surroundings. For a moment I hesitated, wondering if it would be wise to explore any further. However, it was difficult to resist the urge to explore the building, so I continued past the swarm of red eyes that seemed to circle maddeningly around themselves, vibrating to a silent melody in the darkened corridor, wriggling like fluorescent earthworms in a continuing nightmare.

I was yet to see any life in the building though the rooms that opened in the corridor ahead seemed occupied even if disconcertingly quiet as if weighed down by its long history. Later I learned from one of its residents that the building was over hundred years old. A window in the side of the corridor looked out on a square shaped opening covered on four sides by walls of other buildings, or maybe by living quarters of the same building. It was difficult to tell from where I stood. It was the reverse of a courtyard; here the back portions of living quarters enclosed the space while their front portions opened along corridors on each floor. Pigeons walked about on sheets shading the windows. Someone had strung hemp rope across the vertical bars which I suspect was to keep the pigeons out. It was cool where I stood. Standing there I could smell the years gone by.

I recollected the conversation I had the previous day with Shantilal Patel when visiting the building with a friend while we were looking for Sookaina Manzil in Masjid. I was curious to find out if the 3, Sakina Manzil from the play of the same name by Jamini Pathak actually existed. It did, though by a slight variation in its name as we found out later that day when we came face to face with Sookaina Manzil near the post office where the postman, Salve, was tolerant enough of me while I climbed up on their sorting table to look up buildings on a map on the wall while he waited down as I read him names off the map. The sorting table had swayed alarmingly under my weight. The next day I returned to Masjid, alone, to meet Qurban Ali. Shantilal had asked me and my friend in the course of a conversation about the 1944 SS Ford Stikine explosion that had rent the dockyard area asunder, if we remembered EC TV. His former work-place was near the EC TV manufacturing unit in Bombay he said. We were conversing by the staircase near the balcony that went from being four feet wide before the explosion of the ship to two feet after the smoke had settled. “Silver bricks thrown clear in the dockyard explosion crashed into the balcony,” he told us. Two women sat by the open door listening to Shantilal tell us both of those days or what little he remembered of it sixty years later. He was born in May, 1946, two years after the explosion that sunk other ships and killed over 800 people, injuring scores with flying debris. Then he told us about the building. “This building was built by Budda Dosha,” he continued, “a rich Gujrati businessman. He owned many more buildings, over a hundred of them. They were five brothers. After they died, their children finished everything.”

On my way out, I passed the landing where we had met Shantilal the day before. I walked across the Narsi Natha Street in Bhat bazaar to where the fountain stood, a monument in stone where, the previous day, a man in green vest was filling water in shiny brass pots from a drum shaped water carrier fixed to a haath gaadi (hand cart).

Later he joined some acquaintances on the platform where they shared a joke while Nandi sat silently facing the street. On a marble plaque fixed near the bottom of the fountain structure was written in clear letters:

The Kessawjee Naik Fountain and Clock Tower.

Erected by Kessowjee Naik & Son Nursey Kessowjee at a cost of rupees 23000 and presented to the city of Bombay for the use and benefit of the public was opened by His Excellency The Honorable Sir Philip Edmond Wodehouse, K. C. B Governor of Bombay on the 8th day of January 1876.

Designed by R.G. Walton, Municipal Engineer.

Sir Philip Edmond Wodehouse was the Governor of Bombay between 1872 and 1877. He died on 25th October, 1887 when he was 76.

Later in the day, on our way to Carnac bunder, before visiting Pydhonie, Bhendi Bazar, Mohammed Ali Road, and Dongri, passing Sandhurst Road station before returning to Masjid, Kurban Ali stopped the taxi as we neared the fountain. We got off. There he told me of how Kessawjee Naik used to sell water from a leather water-carrier in his early days after arriving in Bombay. Later, Qurban Ali told me, Kessawjee Naik built a fortune, and in obvious acknowledgement to the city that helped him find his feet he dedicated the water fountain to the public, and it is over 128 years now of quenching thirst.

I walked past the fountain to what was essentially a chai shop but was named Mahavir Hindu Hotel. Pausing in front of the chai menu on a large board outside the shop, I mulled the choices of chai listed on the board.

Disco chai - 4 = 00
Rajwadi chai - 5 = 00
A1 chai - 6 = 00
Ukala - 5 = 00
Kesri Ukala - 7 = 00

I asked for Disco chai. The owner welcomed me in where I took a picture before drinking Disco chai. It tasted different though I couldn’t place my finger on what made it different. He smiled at me. I smiled back. Outside his shop, people sat nonchalantly on a wooden bench, watching the world go by while a truck emptied its load.

The fountain demarcated the narrow playing areas I now picked my way through, dodging children screaming ‘dead ball’ ‘dead ball’. The green plastic ball they were playing with could not have been more alive in the grey surroundings and the heavy silences characteristic of places weighed down with history or age; mostly both. A red plastic stool substituted for wickets.

The previous day these lanes were choc bloc with people, some of whom had stopped by the fountain where a man in a loose fitting shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbows sat on a folding chair on the fountain’s raised platform, a brass vessel in hand, and filling brass tumblers with water for thirsty passers-by. The man in green vest would pass the man on the chair brass pots filled with water from the water carrier which he placed by the side of the chair to fill the brass vessel that he used in pouring water into tumblers. Behind the fountain was the office of the Haath gaadi association. Several empty haath-gaadis were parked in front, and some of the haath gaadiwallahs operating in the area sat on a low platform, talking. There was a relaxed feel to the place.

To the other side of the fountain, barely five metres from the first team, another cricket match was on. This lot was older, but the passion was indistinguishable from the previous lot. Taking a left turn ahead on my way to Kurban Ali’s house across the street, I passed yet another cricket team, the third in less than two hundred metres from the entrance to the bhaat bazaar. Excited cries rent the air as the batsman scored a hit. I smiled to no one in particular as I looked up at the sky and marveled at the vastness of it all.

As I walked past Patel Restaurant, a radio rung out an old hindi tune mere sawalon ka, jawab do. Do naa. I looked in the direction from which the song was floating out and saw a youth in the hotel eating batata wada while another man reclined on his haath gaadi on the pavement outside the hotel, his hands crossed beneath his head, eyes open and facing the sky.

Mere sawalon ka, jawab do. Do naa.

Visiting Dadar Kabutarkhana

I got out of Dadar station and passed under the bridge to the west before taking the left turn that runs past the Kabutarkhana where pigeons mill around in an open enclosure, feeding on grains that people toss over the waist high fence.

Further up, devotees visiting the Siddhivinayak temple in Prabhadevi await BEST buses at the bus stop near the Kabutarkhana where, in the heat of summer, they step up to a coconut vendor behind the bus stop for tender coconut water (nariyal paani). The vendor sits under a ceiling made of mirror so when you look up, the coconuts stacked up on the floor appear to hang over your head. I visit the vendor for nariyal paani whenever I happen to pass that way.

As I began to walk past the enclosure that was fairly abuzz with busy pigeons I saw an elderly man hoist a young girl on the fence to enable her a better view of what the pigeons were up to. There was just about enough space for her to balance herself on the fence that ended in iron spikes set at regular intervals. She was oblivious of the spikes once up there on the fence, pointing excitedly at the pigeons and relaying information to the elderly man standing behind her, whom I took for her grandfather, and engrossed in what she was saying. Clouds inched past in the sky overhead as the sun beat down gently. I took this picture as a pigeon took off from the enclosure just then. The tender expression on his face as he looked up at the little girl, taking in her excitement, stayed with me long after I took the bus to Prabhadevi later that day.

It took me back several years, to another place, to another elderly man who sat attentively while I, all of ten years, held forth on cricket, sharing my enthusiasm for the game and the dreams I saw for myself in it. My maternal grandfather is no more, but occasionally if I’m lucky, like that day in Dadar, I see him reflected in another’s eyes.

Sometimes when I look back I cannot help feeling that they used to be simple days.

Time and Again to Tambdi Surla

I never attempted to bicycle to Tambdi Surla ever again. Once was enough.

And moreover the road to Tambdi Surla through Sacorda where it turns left off the national highway 4A that runs on to Mollem on its way through the Anmod ghats to Belgaum in Karnataka, demands of the cyclist a strong heart to negotiate the undulating terrain in the heat of a Goan summer. It took me a long time to pedal to Tambdi Surla that summer day many years ago. However, halfway through the journey after I had pedaled about twenty kilometres, I propped my bicycle against a mud-house in a village along the way, smiled at the owner who’d come around to see what the commotion was about, and hitched a ride on a two-wheeler to the temple. To my luck, the rider was headed to Tambdi Surla the village where the temple is located. Before I got off his scooter, he assured me that if I waited long enough at the turn in the road near the village I’m bound to find someone who would offer me a ride back the way I’d pedaled. “Then you can get off where you’ve parked your bicycle and cycle back home,” he said. Then he asked me why I had chosen to bicycle such a long distance – twenty kilometres in the middle of a Goan summer is a very long distance. I was drenched from sweat, and was wary of pausing for breath lest my legs cramp up. “I enjoy bicycling in the countryside, and thought the route to Tambdi Surla might be a challenge,” I replied.

The bicycle offered me an escape from the textbooks. That morning I started early, and stopped on the way at Khandepar for pao-bhaji at a local inn opposite the road to Opa that runs past the ancient Saptakoteshwar temple by the banks of the Khandepar River before culminating at Opa water works, the source of water for much of Goa. Years later, Ajay and I frequented the inn for mirchi-bujjiyas until the cook lost it quite inexplicably. The color of mirchi-bujjiyas turned to a consistent burnt red from the rich blend of pale yellow with a warm brown to it that we so enjoyed eating even as our mouths caught fire and eyes watered from ingesting the extra spicy green chillies cooked in besan. Later that year when my school closed for the vacations, I would return to Khandepar where I helped with paperwork at the tractor yard, getting them registered at Margao. I had a good time the three months that I cycled the six kilometers to Khandepar each day and back the same way. And, the days when there were no new tractor arrivals, I got back on the bicycle and pedaled further up, along the way to Bondla with the wind in my teeth. Those blue skies above me were irresistible.

After downing the pao-bhaji, I mounted the bicycle in the direction of Mollem, and just before the bridge over the river I pedaled past a narrow road to my left that goes up an incline before skirting a playground where a fig tree fruits in the summer and down a rocky slope where three caves cut in laterite face a fourth one in silence. They rest in the side of a gentle hill after they were excavated decades ago. Legend has it that Pandavas built it during their exile as they traversed the country. If it is true then their origin is set back by thousands of years. However, I’m perplexed by the sheer number of such caves around the country whose origins are attributed to the Pandavas.

When Jagdish and I visited the caves last April, A explored the narrow pathway cut in the banks of the Khandepar river that flows from under the bridge a short distance away, and sweeping past the bend that hid the bridge from us. Now, when I occasionally stop by the caves, I walk down the narrow pathway where it disappears beneath the river surface, and sit on the edge with my legs in the water. Invariably I spot a Kingfisher diving for fish from an overhanging branch. Usually I spot the White Breasted Kingfisher doing the honors; sometimes it is the Small Blue Kingfisher. I never tire of watching Kingfishers skimming the surface of the river at full tilt before taking up position on another of the many overhanging branches of trees that line the banks. Occasionally I spot a narrow dugout anchored to the bank with nylon ropes. If the water is clear, and chances are the water is clear in the summer, fishes are visible beneath the surface; sleek, black creatures.

Clumps of bamboo in front of the caves line the banks of the river. In spring time, Magpie Robins seek the upper reaches of the bamboo and let their melodies float in the breeze. Then the bulbuls join in and quicken the pace, letting out their own chorus. I used to try and separate the conflicting melodies in my mind but soon gave up. After a time, it really does not matter, they invariably mesh well together. Also, it was here that I saw a Tree Pie for the first time as it flew past me and into a tree to my right. Jasmine fragrances from plants that circle the caves trail me in the spring when I ride down to the laterite caves. I’ve rarely seen people visit the caves and it suits me just fine.

As I pedaled on the road in the direction of Mollem, a gentle breeze stirred in the mango trees along the route. Gulmohars were in bloom. Occasionally an Indian Laburnum (Amaltas) burst forth in golden melody in the brown hills. As I scoured the countryside for these bursts of colour, reveling in their enthusiasm, I remember thinking that I could not have been happier that summer. Ahead, a man in loin cloth herded his buffaloes to the side of the road near Usgao to make way for a Karnataka State Transport (KSRTC) bus on its way to Belgaum. It had left Panjim an hour and half ago, covering forty kilometers through the countryside. Belgaum lay 115 kilometres ahead. I slowed down behind the herd of nervous buffaloes before passing them in the cloud of red colored dust swirling in the wake of the bus where it had swerved off the road to make way for a mining truck hurtling from the opposite direction. Then more mining trucks passed us on the rutted road.

After I got off the scooter and thanked the scooterist for the ride, I walked the final stretch to the stone temple at Tambdi Surla, passing silent trees, and dodging the shadows they threw on the even quieter road. Traveling to Tambdi Surla, known to be home to the ‘only known specimen’ of Kadamba-Yadava architecture in basalt available in Goa, is a pilgrimage I’ve undertaken several times over the years. The fact that it nestles in the mountains, far away from tourist-traffic, often overwhelming, that other temples in Goa are witness to, starting with the end of monsoons in Oct-Nov, and petering off as Carnival comes around on the eve of the season of Lent when Christians fast and offer penance, makes it an attractive travel destination in my scheme of things. In two months time after the Carnival the first monsoon clouds wind their way across the Arabian Sea for their rendezvous with the Western Ghats. And I imagine the stone temple at Tambdi Surla, nestling in the Western Ghats mountain ranges, is among the first to welcome the monsoons to Goa.

The temple is situated in the Bhagwan Mahavir wildlife sanctuary. I particularly remember one trip when I was showing Jai around the place when he jumped up in alarm at seeing a Green Whip snake crossing his path. I set off in pursuit as it dodged stones and plants until I cornered it by blocking it path. Promptly it climbed up a small plant, curving up in classic Whip snake pose. As I moved cautiously in a semi circle, covering its exit, it swayed gently, as if undecided on its future course of action. It was a beautiful specimen; setting off its fluorescent green against the brown of the earth. I took pictures, framing it on the green plant. Then it left. However, photographing the Skink proved to be more difficult.

A flight of steps opposite the entrance to the temple leads to a stream below. It runs hundred-odd metres in the direction I had come before meeting a bigger stream where the road bringing visitors to the temple ends. For years, under a tree where the road draw up short, a flower seller had set up shop, selling coconuts, incense sticks, and flowers to devotees who offered them to Lord Shiva in the temple. My regular trips to the temple had induced a familiarity between us. “Visit Tambdi Surli during Mahashivratri,” he told me once. “It is quite a sight at the temple.” I nodded, and resolved to do so. Somehow I haven’t made it to Tambdi Surla during Mahashivratri. Now he is no longer the only flower seller there.

Where the road comes to an abrupt end not far from the tree, visitors cross a small bridge to get to the temple. From here, the temple unveils itself between branches of trees that crowd the cobbled path leading to the temple. In the spring of 2001, I took the flight of steps down to the dry stream bed in search of a Laughing Thrush whose call I had heard while exploring the length of the temple plot adjoining the stream. Instead, on rounded stones set off by brightly colored Gulmohar flowers blown free from Gulmohar trees on the banks of the stream, I saw several Skinks quick-stepping across the stones that littered the stream bed. It was awhile before I finally managed to take a picture of one skink basking on a stone amidst petals of Gulmohar flowers. By then I was sweating from chasing them only to find them disappear under the stones just when it appeared that I might pull off a good photograph.

Butterflies are aplenty in the wildlife sanctuary, and so are various lizard species. I particularly remember seeing a mass migration of Common Crow (a butterfly species) near Caranzol in early 2002, not far from the entrance to the wildlife sanctuary in Mollem. Philip and I had paused on seeing the sight unfold before us, dodging them lest we trample any. They must have numbered over six hundred. Three hours later when Philip and I returned by the same path there was no trace of them. On another sojourn to the temple, I managed to photograph a Common Crow as it rested under a leaf in a thicket by the temple. I suspect it was laying eggs though I couldn’t be sure in the gathering dusk. By then, Jagdish and I had spent the last daylight moments clicking a Forest Calotes on a plant near where we had gone to relieve ourselves. Talk of unlikely opportunities!

Later, as Jagdish and I sat on a large rock in silence watching several insects enact a riveting drama in a pool of water stagnating in a depression in the rock, I took my eyes off a frog that had disturbed a Stick insect in the pool to look at a Dragon fly that had landed on a bamboo shoot overhanging the small pool. Behind the Dragon fly, dusk had fallen, silhouetting it against the faint blue of the sky. An occasional noise in the jungle alerted us to life beyond the stillness where we sat on the rock, covered on all sides by vegetation, but from where we sat those noises took shape only in our imagination. Jagdish sat leaning on his hands stretched out behind him. His Pentax K1000 rested by his side. After several hours walking in the vicinity of the temple, looking for butterflies and birds we could photograph, he was relishing the drama being played out in the stagnating pool in front of us. Without getting up on my feet, I dragged myself forward, cautious not to startle the dragonfly and took a photograph.

As the shutter came down in a booming click, heightened by the silence, the Dragon fly took off.

A Late Afternoon in Fontainhas

Each time I step off the street in Fontainhas and walk into Percival Noronha’s house, I leave time behind.

And, each time I pass the Victoria lamp on the wall behind the door where the stairs wind their way up, passing among other artifacts statues of Hindu deities, and a steering wheel of a ship, I cannot help but wonder about the horse that drew the Victoria carriage along quiet roads in the light of the lamp. Sometime ago the lamp cracked, and a thin line now snakes along its length. But the glow of the bulb it houses is undiminished, like the spirit of the man who put it up there. Percival Noronha turned 83 last month.

The landing, covered by red carpet and lit up by light from the window that Percival Noronha uses to peer out to check on visitors ringing his door bell in the street below, opens into a sitting room. A brass-lamp stands in the corner by the door, and another hangs from the wall above it. Inside the room, intricately carved furniture wear their Portuguese influence in the same easy manner that Fontainhas, Goa’s Latin Quarter, wears its Portuguese identity in the heart of Panjim, its Indian context inextricable from its Portuguese past. Then, as always, after looking around the room I rest my eyes on the black and white pictures of his parents framed on the wall.

I let my eyes drop to the glow from the two lamps under the framed photographs as it reaches up, and crawls across the wall, casting memories in the shade of the wall, green. Monsoons got through the coat of paint, and green paint flakes in a corner by the window flanking the photographs. ‘Not everything green is coloured green’, I remember thinking while A looked around the room, running her eyes over the mantle pieces and wall pieces that Percival Noronha picked up over the years on his travels across the world, lecturing on Goan heritage and architecture in universities overseas. He had excused himself to answer the phone in the adjoining room where, under a framed map of Goa rendered in a Portolan style reminiscent of maps that sailors centuries ago used in navigating the seas by compass bearings, a vintage telephone receiver rests regally in a matching rest. I hear him talking to someone on the phone. His voice rings out from the room in clear tones. I find this tonal quality of voice unique to old Goan houses, particularly those home to Goan Christian families.

Seeing the map again later that day reminded me of the first time I saw it on my visit to his house in 1998. We were in the middle of a conversation about the quality of workmanship in the years gone by when Percival got up from his chair and said, "Come, I'll show you what I mean by quality of craftsmanship." I followed him into the adjoining room where he keeps the telephone. There, he pointed to the map on the wall and said, "This is Budkuley's creation. Budkuley was a master draughtsman, the best I ever saw. He did all this by hand." I watched him stand there, his hands folded behind his back, admiring the map. It was brilliantly crafted.

"Budkuley was thin, his wrists barely the size of two fingers put together," Percival said. "The last time I saw him was eight years ago. He was ill, down with fever and barely able to get up." Percival got him medical help and he got better.

We wait in the hall while he answers the phone in the other room. I picture him standing by the window overlooking the narrow street, the map facing him. Eventually, I turn my face up to look at the picture of his mother, Aurora Vital e Noronha (1896-1980). She was from S. Matias in Mallar (Divar), an island near Panjim that I last visited with A. K. Sahay three years ago, and where Percival Noronha once found a piece of meterorite years ago as it crashed down near where he stood in the countryside. He showed it to me sometime back. I doubt if he remembers where it is now. It must have passed hands, and ‘disappeared’. His mother has a kindly face. Light from the verandah to the back of the house streams in through the open door where his cat sits watching us, and reflects candle-like off the spot where her collar bones meet. I hear his cat purr. Not too long ago, the cat knocked a large vase off its rest, breaking it. Later in the evening as we prepared to take leave of him I asked him the name of the cat. He smiled and said, "One of the students named the kitten Priti taking it to be a female. As the cat grew up I realised it was a male, so I changed its name to Pritam."

Standing there and looking around, it’s like nothing has changed in the years since I first met him when I was in college, starting out in life. I’m still starting out. Percival Noronha has grown older, and so have I. Once in a while I go to Fontainhas to visit him, and we spend time talking. And each time, I leave his place amazed at the energy and enthusiasm he brings to bear in our conversations.

His father, Antonio Jose de Noronha (1884-1962) came from Loutolim, a sleepy village near Borim where Mario Miranda, the legendary Goan cartoonist, has his home. Antonio Jose left Goa for Uganda in search of work, bringing up young Percival in the African country. In 1929, the year Percival Noronha turned seven, the family returned to Goa, and Percival went to Lyceum to complete his schooling. That he did not is another story, and it probably helped him be his own person. In 1961, India reclaimed Goa from the Portuguese. At the time Percival Noronha was the Chief Information Officer and reported to the last Portuguese Governor General of Goa, Vassalo da Silva, a man Percival describes as 'efficient, and very energetic'. Talking of his time working in the Portuguese administration, he said, "Each Saturday morning, I accompanied the Portuguese Governor General to Daman by plane."

"The Governor General used to check on the progress of development projects, and attend to routine administrative work before traveling to Diu to check on the same. Sometimes, we flew to Diu directly before traveling to Daman. In the evening we returned to Goa," Percival said. Goa, Daman and Diu, along with Dadra and Nagar Haveli were part of Portuguese India for over 460 years. After India drove the Portuguese out in 1961, Goa, Daman and Diu were administered as a single union territory before Goa was granted statehood in 1987.

Percival's house dates back a long way as do most houses in Fontainhas. Its façade is painted deep red, the colour of red oxide. “When I was renovating it in 1987, I found a corroded beam that was marked 1884. I asked the carpenter to cut out the dated portion of the beam and save it. The rest, I asked him to dispose off,” he told me recently over the phone, his voice betraying disappointment as he continued, “and that carpenter, dunno what he did, disposed off the whole lot.” His voice trailed off.

In the other room I hear him return the receiver to the telephone stand. Footsteps sound in the room behind the wall as he walks in through the door, hair askew on his head from the breeze blowing in through the door that opens into a balcony. He pats the few strands down and smiles. He leads us through the door to the dining room that functions as his study. Piles of books and papers are scattered across the large wooden table. Its legs end in finely carved lions. I pull a chair back and sit down, taking care not to place my feet near the lions.

Light streams in through the balcony in the corridor behind us and bounces off a book on the table before glinting in his spectacles, lighting up the book in his hand. It is late afternoon in Fontainhas. His fingers turn the pages in the book where his paper titled Old Goa in the context of Indian Heritage is published in the anthology Goa and Portugal: Their Cultural Links. He presented the paper at the International Symposium on Inter-cultural Relations: Portugal and Goa organized by the University of Cologne in 1996. The book is a collection of 21 papers presented by scholars attending the symposium. Silence settles in the room. I catch sight of the cat siddling to its food bowl in the verandah. As I sit there waiting for him to turn to the page, I take in the smell of wood, books, and life, and it feels good. It's been a long time.


"Ah, here it is,” he says, his eyes lighting up as he holds the book, Goa and Portugal: Their Cultural Links, out to me. I bend forward to read the title on the page: Old Goa in the context of Indian Heritage. Behind me, another cat joins the first one at the food bowl, and the first cat, Pritam, is not amused.