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.
