Shimla...

I met Shimla after penetrating darkness, and clouds that I mistook for fog, in a Himachal state transport bus. It seemed like yet another two horse town with pandering hotel touts and alarmingly only vegetarian momos.

That night poured its guts out to wash into a morning where the veil of clouds lifted to reveal a façade of human greed for habitation thrown like acid on a mountain's face. The British apparently built a summer capital called Shimla to grow up to a healthy twenty-five odd thousand as population in its middle age. Fast food and obesity was not a rage then. Now, the main city of Shimla crams in more than, a reported, 2.5 lakhs and then tops it up with a teeming infestation of tourists during 'season'. Sweet!

The population obesity muffin tops and spills over the mountainsides to places like 'New Shimla' and other inevitable additions. From a distance, my first morning in Shimla, smelt crisp and clean as a sun dried bedsheet after the Mumbai air. Then, Shimla 2.0 showed up like a scab on bruised mountainsides.

Imagine a seven layered wedding cake--with the layers kept up on tooth picks. That, is a building perched in 'new' Shimla. A night of torrential mountain rain gave way to a morning of soil gouged mountains. The inhabitants of my guest house excited thronged the balcony to speculate whether the alarmingly tilting building on the mountainside would topple and exterminate the inhabitants. The inhabitants of the afflicted construct in turn all gathered together, and unlike rational mortals, craned over the tilting edge to peer at the underside of their building. Underside? No really! Somebody wanted to build some more. So, the vegetation and pine trees holding the mountain surface around (translated to 'below' in mountain parlance) the building was cleared. The rain thought "Whee!" and pissed down and washed the soil away. Tada! Precarious building.
   
An army of people were clambering around in the disintegrating soil shovelling the draining soil one shovel at a time while others were draping livid blue tarpauline in fervent hope of denying the rain gods glee.

Ask someone and the response comes pat... Shimla has Mall Road. And assorted temples. A very sharp transition from British architecture to concrete invocations to a pantheon of gods and goddesses atop mountains. The local patois pronounces Mall Road as Maal Road. The ironic realization hit me when I first paid a tenner to ride an elevator to the roughly kilometre long stretch that sells and displays 'maal' of every hue colour and description in rows of shops. The trade then cascades down to Lakkar Bazar and Lower Bazaar that makes the cynosure of trading in the city. 

Shimla is a prime example of an opportunity lost for telling a story. The railway station lists the 'points of interest with a distance next to it like a take-away menu card has prices sans descriptions. I asked the gentleman at the Mall Road tourist office why the Scandal Point is called so and received repeated directions to it and exhortations to read the plaque there.

Yet, Shimla discovered on foot and experienced in contemplations the version I will recall.

The Clouds...
Stay long enough and the clouds you seen in the distance will come sniffing at you like a dog sniffing you awake on a cold morning. The warm sunshine snuffed for a while, the clouds will envelope you in a dampish cold steamish embrace... Once done sniffing, they will move away or even aerosol you a little before losing interest in you and moving away. The clouds make some of the most surreal lightscapes I have seen outside of an aircraft flying thousands of feet aloft. Travelling between Solan and Shimla, the sunsets are breathtaking with the clouds swirling around an orange orb. Edward Munch made ice cream in the sky with a swirling cloud strokes that swirled a palette from orange and magenta to lilac, purple, and mid night blue to bring in the evening. The clouds play peek-a-boo with our solar lantern and glow edge of the hills to fire with a brooding grey on top. Then night comes, the cloud curtain  draws back to show the sky ablaze with a billion stars on an inky blue-black night. 

The Flora and the rocks...
It is in the space between habitation that Himachal comes into its own. I experienced Himachal in a cusp of seasons as the rains furied, then abated leaving behind soft sunshine before the roll on to winter starts. Left alone, the conifers tower on either side of the black tarmac ribbon. The deodars reach out to the skies and make the sunshine glimmer in your eye. The creepers cascade down the boughs of the tallest trees like a cataract frozen as leaves. The cheel sprouts a livid young bottle brush green covering the mountainside. The sunshine spurts out in fingers of god through a cloud filigree to paint the rolling green landscape in light and shade. 
Little wild flowers sparkle pink, orange, red, yellow, lilac, indigo, and white like stars on earth through the fern fronds, grass, and green carpet shivering in the mountain breeze.  

Orange Eye Flights

Orange... The colour of flight... Departure... The colour of the orb driving the blue black from  the horizon into grey and blue as the tears of slumber interrupted dry upon the flight dessicated cornea.

The orange luminance  calmly stares back through the journey acned port hole panes. A sea of cotton  candy clouds mist and shroud the morn and mocks the sleep left behind, cools the purring affection of the warm pools of kittens left behind with slumber on pillows that smell home . 

Early morning orange eye business flights. The orange orb eyeballs the reddened eyeballs peering at the rising warmth. Slumber denied, the eyes that look, feel straight out of a chlorinated pool. Only the body around eyeball is unrefreshed and the soul unquenched.

Day over, business done, the orange dribbles  zip away on the tarmac as flesh and bone urges aviation fuel enflamed metal to fight. The halogen orange that pools amongst the darkness of the moments before leaving a city cohabitated for hours for business. 

The twinkling arteries of a city throbbing and pulsating with traffic. Contrasted by the Swarovski crystal bits of whites of habitation spied upon from the vantage of flight.

Habitation congealed instinctively together among the depths of darkness leading back home, the sighting of life many leagues below an airborne diving bell. The strength of a city laid out hollow man orange arteries and veins, nude and undressed beneath a microscope. Metropolises throb thick.bustling with traffic engorged roadways and petre off to outskirts where the traffic blood flow is scant and the orange of the highway illumination is spread further. The darkness is quick to dart betwixt the orange,  to reveal the lack of life flow. Orange arterioles over swathes of dark seas that cognition matches from repeated traversing. The yellowing orange of a coastline murmuring to the relentless brine. The brine knows the unseen horizon, now blind, waiting for the orange to scimitar it back, at orange eye flights ferrying reddened eyeballs.

Silence in motion

The silence moved with me. Pondering while I read of Ancient Evenings and of Distant Music from a slim little novel from happier times many light years away.  Kincaid and Francesca circled as moths around their flickering flames of yearning.

The Harbour line rakes whoosh in always behind the advertised time and whine away old and less shiny, stuffed with humanity as in an indifferent teddy bear. A little musty, well worn, and weary to the look, peeking from the open seams. Comforting though in a I-know-this-and-not-changing-anytime soon sort of a way. 

Reading about how "... in a universe of ambiguity, this kind of certainty comes only once, and never again, no matter how many lifetimes you live..." makes for a strange transport on a Saturday evening. The "Why"s of a giving swirl in a cranium stilled.

Peregrine spirit musing on sliver of memory. Beatitude. Wistful. A memory that weighs the heart.  

Given along with Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Experienced apart. Felt.

Towards tranquility...

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.