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Once upon a Konkan morning
As soon as day breaks I am awake, nose pressed to the window. Here I am at long last, travelling on the Konkan Railway , and I wonder, fearfully, if the romantic visions of the Konkan conjured up by a stream of articles on the new line will prove to be just a lot of hype.
I have always wanted to return to this place after a slender acquaintance occasioned by a fortunate mishap. We were on our way back to Bombay ( it wasn't yet Mumbai ) from Mahabaleshwar and the bus broke down in the evening, in the middle of ripe paddy fields with a broad river running by.
We got talking to the farmer those fields belonged to and heard him calling out to his workers to get on with their harvesting.... this could have been Kerala, but for the sight of farm hands toiling late into the evening. Idyllic, the gentle river and the endless paddy fields, and we got back to our dusty bus with regret. I told myself I would come back.
Not that this train journey can be considered `coming back ': we are hurtling along at Rajdhani speed to Kochi and will have reached Goa by noon.
But let me make the most of it ; I'm not so sure now , at the age of forty, that I'll get to see all the places I had planned to see when youthful optimism made the wildest plans seem well within reach. I would die of regret if I did not see Delphi, I was sure , and here I am , still alive and well and with never a thought of Delphi. I am fortunate to be able to see the Konkan from the window of a train.
This can't be real, these banks of clouds covering the hills . But they are clouds to be sure and the train hasn't gone climbing into the stratosphere. Puffy, shimmering, plumes of cloud swirling over the hillsides, draped over slopes, gently billowing and cascading. I screw up my eyes to see if I can find where the cloudbanks end and solid land begins.
The clouds slowly clear and the hills are green. Pristine green, dark green of unspoilt countryside . Throbbing, primal green of dense trees and shrubs in unbroken continuity. Once in a way I glimpse a thatched hut or a cluster of brown houses that are of a part with the landscape. Near the window waves graceful wild grass, pale green, pink, white, tipped by little mauve cones or tiny yellow flowers.
Mile after mile of serene green unfolds.
It must rain here for months on end, I think, to create and sustain this profusion of glorious green tree and shrub, this emerald carpet.
There must be human life but it is mercifully invisible in the verdant wilderness.
Now we pass an occasional station, drab little places with poetic names, Vilavade, Vera, Anjani, Savarda, Sindhudurg. They look stunted and bleak as the train hurries past to unveil further vistas of wood and hill.
We cross a muddy brown river in full spate : a slim country craft glides down the centre, cleaving the brown water in a precise line and the smiling men lift their oars in salute to the train rumbling overhead. I rub my eyes in disbelief at the perfection of composition, a poem in motion.#This was what most of the West Coast must have looked like , I think, before the advent of development. My eyes never waver and I take in the varied shades of light and dark green.
I wonder what Sartre would have said. Simone de Beauvoir tells us of how `he was allergic' to chlorophyll and lush pasturage exhausted him. The only way he could put up with it on a trip to the countryside, she recalls in '' The Prime of Life '' , was to forget it.
Seventy years back there was greenery to exhaust the eye.
Development is coming to the Konkan : I spot a girl tethering a cow dressed in a pink nightie.
The national dress of the Kerala countryside is spreading northwards.
We are entering a series of tunnels and the enchantment is broken.
There will be more towns and more stations. More people, more grime, less green.
I have glimpsed paradise from the window of a train, and it was surpassing green and fair.
NIRMALA ARAVIND
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