Beautiful Days

A favorite Rumi quote

Or even drive…

Down the curves to the Mona bend, past the shabby shopfronts of the little market, and into the forest, the road fringed by pine needles shed by trees marching down the hillside, into the narrow valley of the Suyal half a kilometer below.

Clattering over the steel plates of the rusting bridge near Kherda, suspended over moss-laden rocks. If you climb to the ridge behind our home, and drop down into a lush little valley - I explained to Chintana and Santosh - you can follow that stream all the way to this bridge. Now the road climbed, the pine trees shared space with dark oaks and rhododendrons, some still festooned with fading red blossoms, and ferns nestled in the dark crevices of giant rocks.

The road narrows ahead, and the time I cycled here, a few years ago, the little wooden bridge at the next bend would not take the weight of a car. We parked in a rocky hollow, and marched up the road. The bridge seems solid now, Santosh agreed, but we walked on, testing our legs against the steep ramp that followed, then around a bend where the light seemed to open, from where I could point to the vast forest that cloaked Mukteswar, softening its ridges with a deep nap of varied green.

Hot in the sun, we walked back to the car. Listen, the forest said, and when we stopped speaking, a hundred crickets whispered a backing track to birds that called, now from behind us, now from below, each note as clear as the mountain air, soaring, carrying, then fading.

Let’s drive on, past newly sown fields, into the village of Darmauli, where the furniture of last night’s wedding waited to be picked up by the tent-house truck. Premi and I posed against red velvet.

I think there’s a road down to a stream somewhere here, I mumbled, mostly to myself, then swung the wheel sharply as the turn appeared, at the top of a climb, descending through a tribe of langurs, their silver fur always so striking against the simian black of their faces. Don’t you dare disturb me, an alpha male threatened, as it looked up from the kilmora berries it was consuming off a roadside bush.

A Bhairon temple sat atop a conical hill rising from the narrow stream. We climbed onto the narrow aerial courtyard on which it stood. Babaji ka Prasad - the temple workers offered us twigs of the kilmora bush, and we picked the deep purple berries, almost black, and sucked the juice, acrid, tart, sweet.

Time for lunch, we declared, and Santosh recalled a clearing in the pines we had passed an hour ago, where we found a fallen log on which to perch our plates and pans.

Santosh and I snoozed on the forest floor, Premi decided the backseat of the car was more hospitable. I woke to the wind blowing through the pines, lay on my side, savouring the waves of sound more pleasing than silence, yet heard only in silence. I cleared the soot from the hollow of a burn-out tree stump, and when the others awoke, declared it my throne, feeling like the exiled Duke* in As You Like It,

"Our life, exempt from public haunts, finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything"

Back in the car, the Ducal party careened back to our little valley, down to the infant Suyal. A couple of kilometers short of the medieval temple of Kapileshwar, we walked the lost of our sorties into a beautiful day, threading our way down to a narrow strip of beach, paved with rounded pebbles. The water was cool after the afternoon sun, and we picked our way into the center of the narrow channel.

It’s almost deep enough to swim in, I looked at Santosh. Swim, he urged. I shucked off my T-shirt, chucked it at him, and launched off, into the bend edged by rocks, rounding my way into a large, dark pool, where I floated onto my back, looking up at the softening edges of a late evening sky, at fraying white clouds, at a stone path clambering up the hill to a distant temple.

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Beautiful days - you have to launch yourself into them.

*William Shakespeare, As You Like It