India Abroad - March 30, 2012

India Abroad March 30, 2012
Back in the day when I believed that god had created the world, I honored peri- odically a votive my mother had made to send me with my father to Sabarimala, a hill shrine in the southern Western Ghats reached after a half-day pilgrim- age on foot from a check-dammed river that curls sluggishly at its feet. I loved
the vagabonding, and the uncustomary trot in the forest.
It’s been two decades since I last went, though. The rea-
sons for my turning away owe to a relationship that might
be called, in all-too-familiar Facebook parlance, compli-
cated.
That temple – now among this land’s richest, and visit-
ed by 300,000 pilgrims daily in the season – occupies
more acreage than it did then, what with the permanent
habitation enveloping it and eating away the surrounding
forest. That sorrowing river, Pamba, swirls now with plas-
tic, detritus and the excrement of pilgrims too blinded by
devotion to consider what their ecological footprint has
stamped out. It’s another matter altogether that some-
where between then and now Messrs Charles Darwin,
Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins interrupted my reli-
giosity with questions of pressing urgency, eroding it first
with guilty discomfort, but eventually washing it away
albeit without disrespect to the forces worshiped by those
who had brought me up.
That said, some nights when I attempt to will my mind
to sleep as effortlessly as I did as a child, that temple and
its sacred forest surface unbeckoned from my subcon-
scious, embellished with shards of innocuous untruth —
deliberate fictions that soothe and console the pangs of
losses irreparable in this lifetime.
When that reverie takes hold, I feel the moist
trampled earth mollify the ache in bare feet, the
damp of the forest condense on my shirtless
back, the overwhelming aroma of vegeta-
tion. I hear a faraway chuckle, then see
the bough of a forest tree bend
and quiver as it receives the
crashing burden of a
leaping Malabar
Giant Squirrel. I
always hear
birdsong – the jubilant squeals of Hill Mynas, the sweech-
ing of Scarlet Minivets, the percussion of White-bellied
Woodpeckers, the squabbling of Rufous Babblers, the
trilling of Chestnut-headed Bee-eaters...

And first first-loves, a multitude,
The exaltation of their pain;
Ancestral childhood long renewed;
And midnights of invisible rain;
And gardens, gardens, night and day,
Gardens and childhood all the way.
- Alice Meynell, A Thrush Before Dawn (1920)
Every time I see the Blue-capped Rock Thrush – and I
have seen it frequently in southern India in winters and in
the Himalaya in late spring and early autumn – I am
reminded of myself at twelve, a scruffy, itchy pilgrim gaz-
ing in rapture at a sprite, a vision, a gift of the forest. At
childhood’s imminent end, this forest sprite in feathered
form had gifted me a dream. I have followed it ever since.
Thank God, or whoever is in charge, for that epiphany. ;
Bijoy Venugopal is the founder-editor of The Green
Ogre ( http://thegreenogre.blogspot.com),
a top-ranked online journal of

God, Darwin God, Darwin
nature and wildlife.
and a feather in the forest and a feather in the forest
In the foggy ruins of time, most memories can get blurred, or muddied entirely.
But not a birder’s remembrance of a cherished bird, says Bijoy Venugopal
SANDEEP SOMASEKHARAN

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