Zooming out

Home - author’s photograph

A drone hesitates high above a Himalayan ridge.

“Should be somewhere here…” the pilot mutters to himself, as he zooms into the image on his desktop screen.

The dirt road to the Kaphura school reveals itself, and he directs the drone west, over the sketchy pine forest, the ground strewn with drifts of dry pine needles; then, past the water tank built of rough-cut stone, over the last remaining patches of oak. 

“Home turf!”, he exclaims to his friend. He toggles the drone north, follows the steep slope down, past the muddy puddles that mark a spring, buzzes a scrawny brown cow that looks up, as if at the two men, then slows the craft over the apricot orchard. He points to the little Shiva shrine the gardener built, then brings it to hover above the weeping willows.

It’s a little disorienting to view a familiar landscape from directly above. The trees are shorn of their feathery form, and the stone cottage called home is a flat rectangle of red roof. The spring-fed pond throws off diamonds of light in the afternoon sun, and the water lilies are squiggles of yellow against their forest-green pads. The hydrangeas are like an unruly purple border traced in a hurry, and the fruit trees are fuzzy green patches that wander down to the road.

“It’s gorgeous!”, his childhood friend exclaims. “And this is the place you call home much of the year?”

I nod, the stored images of a thousand summer days unspooling in my mind’s eye - of sunbirds rustling in the fronds of buddleia, of thrushes chattering high in the oaks. The neighbours’ dogs sprawled in the verandah, visitors sipping tea and rhododendron squash. 

“Yup”, I zoom into the pond, lower the drone till its blades send ripples across the pond.^.The ducks paddle frantically to the water’s edge. The drone drifts across the pond, to the pipe that funnels spring water into it. 

“That water looks a little green,”  I mutter mostly to myself. “And I told the plumber to lower the pipe so it doesn’t damage the retaining wall.”  

I steer the drone hard right, to inspect the water outlet of the pond. It needs cleaning, as usual. I toggle the camera to both sides of the drainage grill - to the water weeds clogging the inside, the garden refuse blocking the outlet. I groan to myself, reach for my phone to call our gardener. The call won’t go through; I try again. The computer screen is as if frozen, on a meaningless abstract image of green shreds of vegetation against a rusting iron grill.

I’m about to try Bhuvan’s number for a third time, when the absurdity of the scene strikes me - of having shut my schoolmate out to dive into my concerns, of the camera visual that has so little context for him.

I grimace in apology, and pull the drone back up, loop it around the verandah, still occupied by my mother’s wrought iron chairs from half a century ago, peep through the window of the upstairs bedroom, on whose mud wall my sister had painted a huge yellow sunflower. 

“There”, I point the camera north, “lie the Central Himalaya. On a clear day in autumn, and all of winter, we see Nanda Devi and her guardians, Nanda Devi, and the three-pronged Trishul.”

The drone climbs, the pond receding to a dark blob in the oak forest. That - I point to the silver trickle at the bottom of the valley - that’s the Suyal. If you follow it east, just two kilometers short of the Kapileshwar temple, it carves a big bend in a bed of sand and fine pebbles. After the rains, you can wade in its shallows, picnic on its banks, look up at the blue, blue sky, raise a toast to a loved one’s birthday.

The clogged drain can wait. It has its place in the scheme of things, and must be attended to. Equally, it must be shown its place in the scheme of things - somewhere in the dark bottom-left corner of the picture of our lives. 

Don’t sweat the small stuff. Be your own childhood friend, and remember to take joy in the big picture.

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