The monsoon rains serve but to sizzle and calm the dosa griddle that is Mumbai. The vapour from the quenching still hangs around the bustle and vigour of the mornings waiting for the glowering heat to return in a big sweaty odorous embrace.
Travelling towards Pune is not unlike scuba diving from the depths of the ocean. The pressure of existence and survival eases as one travels without. Both the road and train journeys have their own kinaesthetic zephyrs of their own ready for discovery along the travel.
Travelling on a train to Pune is enamouring. Doubly so when the monsoons are at the fag end of dispensing their succour and perhaps rest and look with a maker-like contentment at their own handiwork on the seventh day.
The journey is an imploding dive into a gradient but like a fractual. The more one dives through it the patterns are resplendant with myriad curiosities.
The metronomic clackity-clack of the Deccan Queen blurrs away the city of bustle and concrete greys towards the browns of the suburbia rapidly. Blacker sewer flows fuse in a blur of motion to browner little streams.
A compressed look at the journey is like the childhood wonder of glimpsing and running a finger along the neatly arranged colour gradients in a large box of pastels.
The dark skies blur into the grey black concrete of a hurrying city. The girders and strum-throbbing heart-strings of ever growing construction fuse as one moves towards the movement blurred unending billions of granite shards of the rail-track bosom. The grease streaked sleepers kreee-rup rattle like running comb teeth over dentures, while the glittering streak of rails lead towards the warmer rust and the browns of soil.
The specks of green have started already like the ilshay-guri rain mist as one rides into impending rain.
The greens of moving landscape soon start soothing like a chamomile tea kicking in. The foliage gradients take off towards the already calming verdant blur. Bright uniform rainfed swatches of the farmers' toil rush to meet the natural darker greens of nature's spontaneity towards the horizon.
Enter the Western Ghats in a crescendo lofting the experience towards the clouds covers. The olfactory senses lessening sweat grime soot and more of the seas little wild flowers dotting the greens with pinks and yellow, the moss clasping the mountainside, and the spray of the cataracts cascading like hundreds of rivulets of milk tumbling past.
It's like swirling slowly into the clouds. The clouds around the mountains are drift closer and swirl as cotton candy mists softly wisping the dense flora covered gentle undulations. Through the mists glimpses of ant-like vehicles tendril and stream on ribbons of tarmac past Khandala, Lonavala and beyond.
The speed too eases soporified by the mountainous gradient towards a brief halt triggered by an unseen signal. Enough to show signs at Malavli beckoning at the forts and Buddhist caves of Karla. The sleepy eyed doggy on the plaform cranes to look briefly before quickly resuming slumber as we move towards a soporific Pune.
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