hamara apna

Our ancient wild mango is a survivor(all the others in the vicinity are gone).. and it has highest emotional intelligence in the family..

dance studio to one hyper fantail, summer home to generations of a palm squirrel family, three hundred crickets and ten thousand ants, last refuge for a befuddled and rather vocal kukal, club house to a mongoose twosome, sports facility for three, sometimes seven monkeys, boarding and lodging for sundry barbets, leaf birds, drongos, blue magpies and woodpeckers, a night hot spot for a single spotted owlet, a happening bistro by day for innumerable bulbuls, treepies, magpie robins, babblers, finches, cuckoos, prinias and sunbirds and generally ready to take the whole world on board..

it covered itself with a welcoming effervescence of  yellow-white new leaves the year we moved in..

flowered in a heady baur of joyous abandon and then sang in the voice of a million bees the year Arshiya was born.

this year it decided to bestow fruit and how.. tiny green really tasty sweet-sour mangoes in their hundreds dropping singly with a little thump on the ground below(or on a singing sister).. creating an energetic tabla bol in a strong breeze or really raining down in a storm..

                       jeeo to aise jeeo. hazar saal jeeo..

Raag Aambari

Monday storm and after in Kishanpur

Posting pretty pictures..

The Monkey Act


Mikazaru

As i write this i’m not listening to the rasping concrete mixers

Although i see them turn relentlessly in the corner window

Not hearing the four-storey rearing on the next vacant lot

the wilderness home of four golden jackals (until the day the JCB came)

Not listening to the roar from the imprisoning high-rise readying on the other side

(Will the emerald doves that lived in the felled orchard move back in?)

Or hearing the decibels of hysterical realtors reach a crescendo

In the background score of this locality of prime

Like the car horn cacophony crawling its way up Mussoorie

Or the ominous sound of tree hacking in the finally quiet night

And in all this effort of not hearing, how can i hear the ugly drone

of my inverter driven fan circling slowly?



Mizaru

I cannot see the sheet of dust settling on every horizontal surface

I cannot see the abandoned and blinded old bull at the street corner

Though he stands in the same spot everyday

Nor can i see the reserve forest thin alarmingly behind

Green sal trees disappearing for the ‘sake of the state’

(Can’t we already hear the inaugural applause at the plush new project?

“medical tourism is just what we need”)

And in all this looking away

how can I see our very own shameful mountain of consumption

growing exponentially beside the gate?



Mazaru

So I have decided

Not to hear

Not to see

Not to speak

But to post pretty pictures

And to leave it to CFGD and FOD

to deliver my precious green valley..

PO Kishenpore Pin 248001 Circa 2010

Walking into the tiny Kishanpur PO on Rajpur Road was like walking into a time warp..                                   

  

Right from the postmark stamps, ink pads, stamping pads to the scale for weighing parcels

were relics from the Raj!!

                         

Amazingly though, everything worked.. accounts were being opened, letters stamped and parcels weighed and the staff oldworldly polite and helpful..

 

                                        

wandering in the FRI campus..

Am late meeting up with M and A at the FRI. Racing to Shatabdi gate via the Garhi canal road route.. canal road indeed - there are no canals visible in Doon any more –a town once criss-crossed by these delicate green arteries.. first to go underground was the East Canal- then this Kaulagarh one and the other day, on canal road parallel to Rajpur road (the one ‘nak-katti’ Rani Karnawati is supposed to have built), one saw workers closing it up and the ancient pump house before the pul on the new IT Park road lay unroofed/exposed. There’s the end of a whole chunk of childhood. Remember the East Canal – in spring, racing paper boats in the green waters; summer, feeling like jumping in (many did.. others just fell in and had to be rescued!); monsoons, watching the wildly rushing muddy flow, awestruck and mesmerized; winter, walking along it in the sun with friends- its languid trickle threading a whole lot of chat together. And always, always, the sound of water..

At Shatabdi gate we decide to follow our instincts and find ourselves parking near the Botanical Gardens. This is a stunningly beautiful campus. Why couldn’t anyone in the family have joined the forest service? A says she knows some people here and they crib about being away from heart of town, etcetera. We guess the grass is just greener. Then we hear it - a canal! Sure enough along the left, beyond the overgrown embankment, hidden by the grass is bachpan.

Click, click we try to capture it for keeps. Then M spots a giant black and yellow spider. Then she spots another one, then another and hey, another- oh there are a whole lot of them! The Common Giant Wood Spider informs A. Sometimes the webs span several meters.

Then we’re at the gate of the Botanical Gardens. The rest of the afternoon is spent in paradise.

Later, we walk out of the BG as the sun is setting. A spots the Great Indian Flameback on a dead tree ahead. While M studies through the glasses, a flock of parakeets noisily wings southwards. When the gorgeous woodpecker flies, a young hornbill takes its place. Then you catch your breath. Blomfield’s amazingly beautiful building and its environs look like a sepia print in the setting sun.

Tips: Go on a weekday, take repellent, wear full sleeves, take a tree book…but then you can do without all these.

Ramblings in Rajpur - I Shraddhanand Ashram