FAR FROM THE MADDENING CROWD
1.
Trees. There are trees everywhere I look. Trees of different length, shape, leaves and colors. I simply cannot keep my eyes off the different shades of greens. The saplings are a kind of baby sap green, that almost incline towards an innocent yellow, some young leaves are a beautiful pinkish red in color which make the branches look like they have beautiful fingers adorned with reddened henna. And there are dark greens, that grow darker under the shades of the trees, through which the sunlight itself drinks a little green before falling down to kiss the earth, that is again, green. There are many mango and jackfruit trees. While the mango trees seem to have leaves that fall down, as if they have left everything to the fate of gravity, jackfruit leaves defy the gravity, their leaves are upturned like the hand gesture of questioning, why? Why should we listen to gravity? Tall coconut trees quarrel with even taller Acacia trees. Must have been planted here a long ago, by whom we don’t know. A lonely bougainvillea (or called locally and aptly — paper flower) stands with its branches hung. As if it is contemplating its own creation of the pink papery flowers with a kind of hopeless disdain. And there many cashew trees and gooseberry trees with their characteristic leaves and height(short). I see slow creepers, at least 6 kind of grasses, little anonymous flowers, trumpet like flowers that spring from nowhere and innumerous set of leaves and branches, which I do not recognize at all. I have an urge to know each and everyone of them, to know their name, their flowering seasons, the birds that dwell there and the bugs that hover in and around them.
And bugs. I am in a living museum of a multitude of bugs with such brilliant colors, such quirky designs! Tiny bugs, huge bugs, triangular bugs, a bug that is just like a miniature bull(!), bright colored, chrome plated, buzzy winged buggity bugs!A little bug has a human face on it! (Or so I imagine, two eyes, a nose and beard on a red base) One little bug is so coppery and shiny, like whose wild dream is this? Is there an original template of design in the consciousness of nature somewhere, from which all these colors and patterns burst out in the form of flowers and bugs, bug-like flowers and flowerlike bugs? And please don’t start me on moths and butterflies. These ethereal friends get their wings somewhere out of this world. Dotted, striped, splayed, sprayed, one butterfly actually has a Picasso like abstractly designed wings, this is too much for me to even consider wondering about.
So this is us, all these millions of life forms and 3 human beings in a foresty farm. One human is young and carefree, the other two are older and a little weary. They recently packed up their apartment-dwelling-traffic-jamming-extremely-tiring-city-life to come here and learn to live, in this little piece of heaven some where in a desolate lap of the Western Ghats. They like it here, especially the young one, and the other life forms seem to not mind the presence of these curious, often intrusive human beings. It may seem adventurous to the readers, let me confirm, it actually feels adventurous.
