The Gift of the Forests

On these wodded hills, the narrow trails
Snake a path through the forests dense.
Which shedding the cloak of glinting mists,
Beckon me: into ceaseless silence.
















A silence so still, it can be heard.
The rustling, humming, chattering,
Scuttling, buzzing, chirping silence:
The sprightly stillness of  life itself.

What stillness is this: that soothes the mind
but sharpens the senses, that does soak
Me in its sounds and scents and sights:
The green-brown fragrance of mountain oak.

I listen to better hear myself breathe-
Not mere air, but the scent of the trees.
I see not mere trees, but living woods
That soar skywards in willowy ease.

"Follow the hooves of the horses
That have trodden this path."
Like a modern Gretel, I keep the course
In search of a Dolphin's nose.

Peek-a-boo: hills now hidden from sight-
Shrouded by films of mist. Yet on I press
Through carpets of crunchy leaves.
For a lofty prize awaits at the peak.


Gasping, I arrive-

And find myself changed.
Now become a giant,
I tower over the pines.
As a cloud skirts my ear.

Brobdingnagian, no less.

The sylvan spirits in their leafy glens-
Indulgent, smile:
At my flights of fancy.
As at an ant that exults
On scaling a rock.

Lagoon reflections

The veil of night faintly lifts-
Dawn breaks gently, unstirring.
Eyelids leaden, shadows drift,
I hear...
Bird- and cricket-chirps mingling
In this liminal of night and day.



Shaking slumber, water splashed
I wander out into a misty path.
As clouds drizzle in languid spurts,
I smell...
Scent, delicious of rain-soaked earth.
In this liminal of rain and shine.




Dew-draped grass draw my steps,
And emerald lagoon, my course.
Clocks tick on, somewhere perhaps.
I see...
A distant paddling of oars
In this liminal of stillness and slow time.



All together, through rain-filmed tar,
We speed on to a time-worn fort.
Armed with memories and laughter, 
We climb...
For sweeping views of an ancient port
In this liminal of land and sea.




All too soon, we bid adieu.
Yet -
Crashing waves, rain-drenched rocks
Moist soil, shimmering red.
Shell-soaked sand and cheery walks.
In our inward eyes -stay etched.

A world of their own

We all grow up, to a greater or lesser extent, in a world of their making. In some cases, they are an occasional presence, casting a charm on long summer vacations. In others, they are doting caregivers, witty story-tellers and the backdrop for one’s childhood. 

Regardless of the degree of proximity, grandparents define us in so many intangible ways. They are our link to understanding the past, the context of our present selves, the glue that binds us to our extended families.

Parents perhaps, are our closer friends - whom we love, confide in, fight with and exasperate in equal measure. Grandparents, on the other hand, are ever our indulgent allies. Parents contend with the ‘generation gap’ in our rebellious teens. Grandparents appear more accepting of the fact that our world and we, are very different from theirs and them, and are at peace with the idea. Parents grow with us through the arc of our adulthood, the guiders gradually turning  into the guided. Grandparents, paradoxically, seem changeless, ever present as a reminder of our younger, lighter selves; a window to a world of our childish innocence.

What would childhood days have been without them as companions or providers of sanctuary? And few things remind us so starkly of the closure of this chapter of our lives as the  passing of the era of grandparents. 

The end of an epoch, one may say. An epoch, however, that lives on in the shared memories of two generations, drawing us closer together.  

Bookrack memories**

She hefted four Forsyths in one hand, rearranging an untidy assortment of Austen, Maugham and Dickens with the other. Her face arranged itself into a frown, bent from the weight of deciding whether to place Brian Weiss in her Self-help rack or in the Spirituality one. Or maybe it was because she was balancing an abridged Time Machine between her chin and neck. That was when something caught her eye. 

She pushed aside a rather formidable War and Peace to uncover a small pile of slim books. An exclamation escaped her lips, and simultaneously, the Time Machine, from the precarious grasp of her chin.

Bite-sized books in a series called Great Scientists: those were the cause of her happy surprise. Yellowing, but in excellent reading condition, still arranged in her favoured alphabetical order. Albert Einstein. Alfred Nobel. Archimedes. And so on. She pulled out Marie Curie from somewhere in the middle of the lot, idly flipping the pages of child-friendly, large print, as childhood daydreams replayed themselves, unbidden, in her mind. A jumble of conical flasks and beakers and test tubes, one of them hissing with the nascent fumes of an element just discovered. Presiding over it all, a girl in an immaculate lab coat. Herself, of course- not Madame Curie.

Smiling indulgently, she reached far into the recesses of the next rack, and felt a large volume.  The peeling hard-bound cover declared proudly in fading text on a green background- "Complete works of Shakespeare". An inscription in the inner flap revealed a relative's name, and the year, 1968. Memories tripped over one another in their race to the top of her mind- seeing this tome in an old bookshelf in a faraway attic at a grandfather's rural homestead. Slow summer afternoons with chattering cousins making up games, and watching with excitement as tender coconuts were gathered from the palms in the garden by a local expert. Mangoes from the backyard cooled inside a bucket dunked in the well. 

The pages were still intact. She put them carefully aside and continued to wind her way through the shelves, browsing through books of all kinds: Small and concise. Unwieldy and hard to place. In need of mending, but fondly familiar. Large and inscrutable. 

And she struck gold. Again and again.

Out toppled an afternoon hidden away in a corner of a cousin's room. The spoils from a bargain-hunting rampage at a used-books store. An elocution contest in primary school. Playing truant in a Maths class. A fascination with a historical figure. A friend who shared her love for a certain author's murder mysteries. Lectures drowned out by noise from the Electrical Laboratory. Visits to a much-loved bookshop. Birthdays celebrated. Train journeys.

To be opened, relived and carefully rearranged. All the memories. And the books, of course.

When the last of them was filed away, she stepped back, to look at it all in one glance.
Bookrack, perhaps. Pensieve, undoubtedly.

** with due apologies to George Orwell

A paean to the New year

The turn of a date, a month and a year-

What feeble reason for all this cheer!

A day is a day is a day, they claim;

Just as mundane by any other name.

All this ado over the coming of a year-

Parties, resolves and

Peddlers' gimmicks, soulless veneer!

But, nouveau Scrooge, for what it's worth

This first day is but a symbol of rebirth -

Of friendships, of warmth and ill will erased

Of reflection, of inner cobwebs effaced.

The life of a day is that you imbue.

Then, imagine a day when

The zest of all humans accrue!

Dates, inanimate, can scarce life-change .

We englitter of our own, the sweep of an age

by the pixie dust of our Hope and Spunk.

Dreams take flight, old doubts shrunk.

For they who plan to travel afar

Have now and again

To start from tabula rasa.

The coffee of anger

A brimming bowl of the bitterest beans
A savage surge of current: heedlessness
Are all that it takes to
Brew
A frothing, simmering decoction
Of the coffee of
Anger.

The crushing of the roasted beans
And the gnashing of incensed teeth
Lo! bitterness smashed into angry
Smithereens.
Of brittle brown brutish
Grains of sleeping
Rancor.

Which by fierce, flaming water-
Undoused by the voice of reason
Or the sway of temperance is
Piqued
Into caramel espresso: as
The distilled essence of
Fury.

In time, the powdered bean weaned
Off sparks of kindling water
Turns slowly sodden-
Awkward;
Arranging itself into the ash of regret
Of the Coffee of
Anger.

In search of the lost City: travels in Angkor

"The rain god Indra seems to be angry today," said our tour guide, only half-jokingly, leaving me surprised by his ready reference to the Hindu god, as we skirted gathering puddles on the embankment of the moat surrounding the Angkor Wat.

Through my travels in the Angkorian lands, I was to discover how keenly Hinduism and Buddhism alternately waxed and waned across centuries under the reign of the powerful Khmer kings over large parts of mainland Southeast Asia. The Chinese wielded hard power, extracting tributes in return for peace, but the source of soft power was undoubtedly India, exporting culture, religions and folklore to ancient Angkor.

Holding umbrellas aloft, we legged it quickly into the first level of the famed structure to be led into a seemingly endless corridor to inspect the bas-relief on the walls. We joined a group of tourists examining the panels, spellbound by the size and detailing of the marvels commissioned by the Khmer king Suryavarman  II.

On a whirlwind tour, we cruised past a yellow-clad towering Vishnu statue, past panels depicting the Kurukshetra war, the king and his retinue, snapshots from the epics and the past the occasional pock-marked segments of the walls where bullets had once landed.

Finally, we joined the long queue for the ascent to the third and final level. At the topmost level of the temple complex, high above the humdrum of the mortal life of his subjects, the king was thought to receive divine inspiration to conduct the affairs of his kingdom. It was believed that the kings of the Khmer empire were no mere mortals, deriving their authority from god, with even images of gods being modelled after the king of the day in these temples.

After a rather steep climb, I surveyed the environs from a vantage point, at the sweeping views of the temple complex and the jungles beyond, the simple beauty of the carvings around me and I understood why the king had visited this tower to commune with the divine.

High up in the Angkor Wat towers

Soon, it was time to head a few centuries forward to the rajavihara or royal monastery of Ta Prohm, said to be dedicated to King Jayavarman VII's mother.

A Mahayana Buddhist, this king established a welfare state on Buddhist principles and left behind a legacy of a vast network of Buddhist temples. Religious u-turns appeared to  commonplace in this land, with the king of any given time dictating beliefs, swapping Hindu and Buddhist images and sculptures at will.

In contrast to the towering Angkor Wat that spans dizzying heights, Ta Prohm is almost all flat. Where Angkor Wat has been carefully restored by men, Ta Prohm has been left to the artistry of nature. Giant trees have sprung from the laterite walls, with their coiling roots gripping the structures with a firm grasp. The combination of the exquisite ruins and the towering trees lent an ethereal quality to this monument. It has been carefully restored, with attention paid to retaining its quaint atmosphere.

 Ta Prohm - unshakeable Nature vs. frail man-made structures

We left Ta Prohm for Bayon, another temple of the same period. On a smaller scale than Angkor Wat but no less impressive, the Bayon temple was said to have had 54 towers originally, with giant faces carved on to each of the four sides of the towers. The impression, on arrival, is of being greeted by a serene army watching over the city of Angkor Thom from all directions. We walked through the winding corridors, encountering apsaras, garudas and scenes from mythology, under the benign gaze of the multitude of faces.

Were the faces those of Brahma of four faces? Or of the Boddhisattva Avalokitesvara? Maybe both- to push religious transformation in a non-disruptive manner, according to our guide.

 At the upper levels, I looked closer at one of the faces, fascinated by its stoic expression. Our guide drew my attention to another face, saying, “Doesn't this look like the face of a lady?" Of course. Then another, "Doesn't this look like a demon?" Sure enough, there was a foreboding expression on the one indicated. Despite being unable to peel eyes off these images all along, I had not noticed differences in their aspect. Suddenly, from an army of identical faces, the towers had been transformed into a horde of distinct sets of people. He pointed to yet another, this one calm and intriguing like the others. I felt the spell descending upon us again, and all faces seemed uniformly alike once more.

Faces at Bayon

I left Bayon, just as mystified and fascinated as I had been when I had arrived. As the tuk-tuk whirred out of the city gates, I shook myself off my reverie to hear the guide say, "This is the gate of Angkor Thom. Bayon is exactly at the centre of the city. And these," he waved to the human sized figures along either side of the causeway, "are the devas and asuras churning the ocean!" And indeed, the figures were holding what appeared to be a gigantic snake, evoking the well-known tale of the gods and demons churning the ocean for nectar.

And yet again, I felt a familiar thrill upon finding a well-known cultural reference thousands of miles from home in this lost city.