Crooked, winding, lonesome, and dangerous… but also amazing!

When I mention crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, and amazing in the same breath, all I mean to tell you is how enthralling it is to walk into and above the clouds. It doesn’t matter which mountain range you’re on. It doesn’t matter which villages are near or far. It doesn’t matter which country you’re in. All that really matters is that you are on a mountain trail… or maybe even a road that goes winding out of sight and into the heart of clouds every few yards and you just pause and wonder.

Crooked, winding, lonesome, and dangerous… but also amazing!

This wonder continues even when the clouds aren’t so low and hang temptingly just beyond your reach. You can feel their fresh laughter on your skin and you want to whisper to them, ‘Come closer. Come and envelop me in your arms. I yearn for your embrace.’ Even as you whisper you walk on hoping that some turn ahead will surprise you softly.

I remember walking on a trail that went through a village and above neatly step-farmed fields to the other side of the mountain and surprised me with the entire length of the slope covered with Sal, Pine, and Rhododendron trees. The trail went winding through the trees like a leopard stalking its prey in semi-darkness and all this was simply too thrilling. The light filtered in long shafts from the top of the dense tips of the trees and it seemed as if someone far more powerful than anyone on earth was either pointing out some fact or was desperately searching for it. I stood there transfixed by the sight and said aloud, ‘This is indeed devbhumi or the land of the Gods.’

Walking on the road is no less thrilling where you discover old women carrying twice their weight climb slowly but surely up a steep goat trail as you stand huffing and puffing on the road that has a comparatively gentler incline. In this State with a skewed male-female ratio 963-1000 I saw most males sitting on benches in front of little tea shops smoking bidis and the females busy going up and down the slopes finishing tasks before it is dark. And yes, they do not mind to stop for a short chat or to let you carry their strapped basket for a little while. You laugh because you find the experience novel and they laugh because they see how inappropriate it looks on you.

One fascinating sunset

The State has almost 70 percent in rural areas and the sort of facilities that people in the cities are accustomed to have not reached here. I don’t find this inconvenient at all because it is the golden sunset that catalyses the primary as well as secondary colours to wake up and dance that seems far more hypnotising. A bird looks at you from an unlikely perch probably wondering if you even know that her twitter doesn’t have any character limitations. The houses with their stone walls and large brownish-black flat tiles on the roof know that the city folk love clicking their pictures but would not want to spend an entire lifetime staying in them.

Walks on such roads have hundreds of stories peeping out through closed doors, and literally written on fallen leaves, tall trees, dense undergrowth, squatting locals, and the quaint architecture that knows it isn’t going to survive for long. Every moment is full of amazing thoughts and interpretations that pop up at a speed you have not experienced before and you resolve to come back again rather soon, knowing that this would be yet another lie. So you let these thoughts of returning remain dormant as speaking them aloud will only multiply your guilt.

As you make your way back to wherever it is that you are staying the night, you suddenly realise that crooked, lonesome, and dangerous aren’t such bad words after all… and you’ve linked them to amazing forever.

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I can see movement in this picture…

Even closed doors have stories to share as you walk along an empty mountain road

Is my twitter the same as the one that you play with on your smartphone?

Walks on a mountain trail can bring you closer to surprises that God has created

Cricket in a school on a mountain top

Fallen leaves are just as full of poetry as the ones that are still on trees

What does this acorn remind you of?

Yes, I can wear their basket… but to fill it with heavy stuff and then walk up steep slopes is what I simply cannot do

The shy but strong women here

These wrinkles seem like the contours of the terrain here…

Stone walls and these tiles for the roof… these houses are fast getting replaced by ugly concrete structures

Religion and beliefs peep out of nowhere…

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Arvind Passey
20 May 2016