The charm of solitary walks

 

The solitary walks on sunny winter afternoons allow you to soak in the last traces of seclusion still available in the farming countryside that is now showing visible signs of getting stretched to utilize every square yard as the population further increases and the landholdings get further squeezed. We are now the most populous nation on the earth. As I take my steps away from the human hubbub at the village, a tiny canine lad daily harks my attention from its post. It’s a vacant plot on the fringes of the village serving as a dumpsite. The heaps of plastic waste and other discards show the ugliness of what we have consumed. This is the tiny canine baby’s territory. It has reasons to defend it for this site provides it the survival crumbs. He means to defend it and barks with shrill, childish notes.

Further on, there are three puppies at a path-side farm shelter, all itchy, who also mean to defend their bastion. They bark with irritation, itchy complaining and whining bursts. Well, they have a good reason to bark. I don’t mind it. They have a hard life and barking maybe relieves their pain.

The further I move on the dusty path, and lesser the marks of tyres in the ruts, the more prominent become the marks of mother nature on the soft sand. These are nice designs, gently looping lines, curves and circles. A picture of sustenance on the soft sands of life. The long-legged birds like water-hen and lapwing leave a floral trail on the brown sand. Titeeri (red-wattled lapwing) is a slender-legged bronze-brown beauty with white, black and crimson fleshy wattle. It’s an irritating complainer with its famous ‘did-he-do-it’ calls. It can fly well but its long legs inspire it to walk and run a lot. It’s a crazy vigilante, keeping watch almost twenty-four hours, spots intrusion and raises noisy alarm against any transgression into its domain covering a few fields. It lays eggs in the farms among little clods of earth. There it defends its territory around the little open hollow containing its greyish brown blotched eggs, matching the earth to almost perfection.

There are few such vigilantes loitering along the path. They think it’s their path; I consider it mine. They daily snub me pretty vociferously for loitering around unnecessarily.

The lapwing leaves a nice design of its walking trail on the sand, slightly less aesthetic than a moorhen. There is a group of five-six doves, flitting around peacefully, peeping from their perch on the electricity wires, sailing over the yellow of mustard and the green of wheat. The mere survival of a little group of doves, so unassuming and docile, confirms the fact that there are still little niches left for the docile people to survive in this angrier world.   

To the north of the path that I take for my solitary walks, about a kilometer and half away, around the marshy loop of fallow lands, due to its low-lying character and hence being unsuitable for tillage, a group of four sarus cranes comes visiting during the winters. They will come till our needs force us to use that little sanctuary as well. But with the arrival of winters, it’s reassuring to hear their far-sailing, loud trumpeting calls reaching my ears as the afternoon yields its pale sunrays to the evening mists. They are a tall grey bird with long, bare red legs and a red head. Their slow rhythmical wing strokes, the neck determinedly stretched ahead and long legs trailing behind like an expert air swimmer bring them annually to this little hideout every year.

As I move further over the still smaller foot tracks bearing still lesser human footprints and more of the birds, rodents and insects, it boosts the sense of solitude manifold. The cranes’ trumpeting calls go sailing over my head and merge with the setting red disk of the sun across the silvery thin veil of mist above the green, yellow and white in the fields.  

There are some clumps of grass and trees along the field channels for irrigation, little patches of fallow lands and the narrow ribbon of scrub forest between the canals. This is all that stands for the countryside wilderness presently. A jungle cat is the top predator of this terribly shorn—shorn like a sheep—wilderness. I have seen it flitting across the shrubbery a few times. It’s, I guess, about one-and-half times bigger than the feral cats in the village, its ears bigger and tautly erect, tail bushy with greyish dark bands on its dark brown coat. It snoozes around for field rats and hares. It has reasons to be cautious as there are many dogs in the mushroom farms dotting the countryside. The dogs have bred quite impressively and I feel they are far more than their sustainable number. They bark incessantly and seem to be the front squad of the upcoming one more assault on the path of further taming the nature.

It’s a silent misty evening. On a leafless sheesham tree, a sad silhouette of grey, a group of birds is enjoying the sight of the dull-red sun-disk hovering over the silvery fabric of mist. It’s a surprising bonhomie among a few species of birds. The birdie watchers include a couple of crows, a dainty oriental magpie robin and a few smaller ones like robins and rockchats. The approach of twilight is really peaceful. All insecurities melt. I watch from a distance. Then the oriental magpie robin gets playful and suddenly sails down, almost pecking at the head of a lapwing standing among the wheat saplings below. The leggy beauty gets angry and gives a tittering call, hearing which all the birds dart away in different directions. It’s a world of shifting sands and scenes.

Mother nature will have her adornments even among the dry sandy soil, the last water drop falling a few months back, and the grass beaten dry by the cold and frost. But here comes a milestone. It’s a sandy path without even grass, but four-five flowering thistle (Mexican prickle poppy) stand in their snappy luxuriance. It looks like mother earth has developed a prickly, snappy, hard-pointing finger of resistance. It’s a hardy pioneer plant, drought resistant and a prince of poor soils. They have bloomed to full proportions and stand as mighty oaks of the grassy kingdom. I marvel at these sole sentries of mother earth holding onto their little patch of poor earth by the dusty path. Its bright yellow latex is poisonous to the grazers who leave it alone. But they say that it’s used in medicines. They flower in March, flaunting their yellow flower (kateli ka phool) as an offering to Holi mata in spring. They are offered in prayers during Holika Dahan. The seedpods resemble mustard, so some people adulterate the mustard oil with these seeds—pinchy aids for our prickly desires. This concoction causes diseases. The offerings from the so-called wastelands and their weedy crops coming to the aid of our rich crops and their suitable lands. Ours is a very needy mind. So the nuisant plant, categorized as an agricultural weed, still serves its purpose and utility in the scheme of our selfish designs. Its greyish white prickly leaves welcome me with my solitary step and tell me softly that we aren’t altogether ‘satyanashi’ as we are named in the local dialect. These little groups of erect, prickly herbs, their leave margins having prickles, each tooth ending in a prickle, pass me a gentle message that even the apparently lifeless soil has primordial urge to expand and evolve. The erect herbs, undisturbed and unpoisoned, seem a little self-satisfied world complete in itself; absorbed in its silent, solitary self. Their flowers are complete, i.e., bisexual comprising a functional male and female part within the solitary yellow flower. However even within the same bulb they need the help of insects for pollination. And the wind disperses their seeds to such undisturbed corners where the mankind is not at war with the nature, to spare them of the noxious herbicides. The herbs stand all braced up for a cold frosty night with their determined bluish green leaves, dense at the base, with the middle and upper leaves oblong and elliptic. The spiny prickles on the long arrowy leaves pass a soft warning by mother nature that I can bite if disturbed too much.

I walk further on. It’s a sandy upland, not too much under the farming assault. Among the dead trail of grass by the footpath there is dusty green little bouquet of sorrel, a perennial herbaceous offering of the potential in the sickliest soil to have a buffet of leaves branched out on the ground. Maybe a mouthful for some goat or stray cattle. But they hardly reach this point. Nearby is a leafy growth of patience dock (garden patience or Monk’s rhubarb). They call it a garden weed, but here this meditative bunch of leaves has all the time and space to nurture its patience to lie as a mark of life in the trail of dry, almost lifeless soil.

I move on and come across a clump of lantana grass. Lantana is an erect, branched out shrub, reaching up to 1.5 meters and covered with roughly hairy, pointed, toothed foliage. There are clusters of yellow, orange and red flowers in the same bush depending upon the number of days they have seen. As per our utilitarian index they are invasive and noxious weeds. Our grazing cattle avoid their leaves. But they are very sturdy skin covers for mother earth whom we are regularly stripping naked. I have seen just a few clumps of lantana here but they cover the entire low Himalayan foothills. I remember having stranded in a lantana covered hillside in the Himalayan foothills and I had to crawl like a jungle fowl to come out, bearing non-bleeding scratch marks all over my body. They are the defenders of mother earth’s last ramparts. We may condemn them as useless weeds, but we hate them because they stoutly defend mother nature. Looking at this lone lantana brings back the nostalgic memories of those mighty defenders of hill slopes from erosion and human encroachment. They may not have much use for we humans but their tiny fruits are a delicacy for the white-eyes, bulbuls and scaly breasted munias. These flowers possess some sweetness in their core as the butterflies flit over them irrespective of human prejudice. Then there is a lovely aspect to their existence. Some male weaverbirds would arrive and pluck lantana flowers to adorn their nests with them. These striking decorations attract the aesthetic sense of some female looking for setting up a home. A lovely tale blossoms, and a family starts.

Collecting the last traces of these still available gifts of nature among the severely tested and beaten countryside, I look with hope as the still larger line of wilderness running along the space between the canals cajoles me to walk further on.