Once upon a time, in the Sahyadris (Chapter 3/3 : Deluge)

Chapter 3 - Deluge

The rains had begun again - dark, sombre clouds, tinged in blue, came forth, flowing against a translucent sky that had given up on the sun. The mood back on earth couldn’t be more different. Rain-worshippers as ourselves had escaped from the confines of the city for precisely this purpose - to dance in the deluge, to splash  in the showers, and to wade in the waterfalls. Wet earth - tick, chilling waterfalls - tick, the RGB scale on the hills escalated to full green - tick. Just another bout of bounteous rains required to finish the album of the day. Tick. And then, there was glee.

Why you ask? As the Buddha had said, ‘The trouble is, you think you have time…’ When you know you don’t, life speeds up. For you know then that with autumn, the emerald hills will dry, the ephemeral waterfalls will cease, and there will be more emptiness in the hearts than in the hills. Then you know that you will have to wait impatiently for another year before the hills bloom again. For it is not just a burst of rains - monsoon in the Ghats is a phenomenon, where the elements come together, offering a strange solace to every parched soul. The two months of meaningful monsoons then suddenly become precious. Every wet weekend becomes an opportunity, and if not lived to its brim, becomes another greyed out blurriness that you never look back and recollect. Just like an ordinary day in our otherwise ordinary lives.

But if you give wings to your inner adventurer, you will stand atop a waterfall - or better still, inside it - and look out to the jaded hillscapes, wondering if all of this is a reverie. Just like we were, on yet another weekend, in the gullies on Tamhini-ghat. We had trekked up hills, made pilgrimages to ancient Buddhist rock-cut caves, ambled up medieval fortresses, waded in pregnant streams, even ziplined on these hills in the rains, but there was nothing like climbing up a waterfall and feeling that chilled deluge on your body as you reached the last climbable fold in the hills. Perhaps it was nothing but a simple climb on some slippery rocks; perhaps it was nothing really extra-ordinary, but on that day, in those moisture laden winds, there was intoxication, there was adrenaline. Most importantly, there was euphoria and ebullience in that experience, all guard-railed by camaraderie in a group of friends, who, though as diverse as the directions, came together to share their joy of travelling and uncovering new experiences in the same old hills.

Tamhini-ghat was waterfall country. Wherever your eyes fled, was an outpour from the hills, so much that you had the luxury to choose which fall you would flirt with that day. Oh, this one is too close to the asphalt, that one has too shallow a pool, that one, oh too many people...we said. Until we got one nestled deep in the woody hills, left all alone, and high enough to risk a climb and then savour the glory. A flat footed me, ambled slowly, carefully, one hand audaciously grappling a camera. If the rains arrived, I would have had it - my flat foot would slip in the rocks, and my canon would be wet and spoiled. But little by little, I went up, gathered courage more from my friends than from myself,  until there we were, at the very top, just in time for the rains to shower us. Camera hid in the rocks, it was time to splash, sing, dance, cheer and laugh. 

And finally even meditate. An unforgettable experience. To sit in those frigid waters, listen to yourself shiver, yet be there, looking out onto the hazy hills covered in rains. And breathe. In that moment of surrealness, time meant nothing, it froze. And the world pushed itself, encapsulating the five senses in a single moment, making it so dreamlike. It was visceral. Perhaps in a different universe, I am still in that moment, everything else being a hallucination of the mind, a decoy of the future, that that one moment in the present becomes everlasting. It was nothing great - just a simple climb in the hills, after all. But as Hillary had said, It is not the mountains we conquer, but ourselves. For my romance with the rains and the hills, it was a new summit, almost like an epiphany - so bright that the pictures are still displayed proudly in my mental hall of fame. Whenever my mind wanders off to the Sahyadris, this image sits on the cover of the book. It will be difficult to comprehend this madness, unless you have had yourself, a similar moment of absolute lunacy.

I had many more weekends of unrestrained joy in these hills. All with the good fortune of a band of friends, so close you could call them family in the lost lands of Mumbai. We visited the colour-splashed plateau of flowers in Kaas, we discussed the Glass Place in the exiled Burmese king's residence at Ratnagiri, we spent hours walking around cuprous lakes in the ghats. 

And not just in the rains - we actually travelled in all seasons. 

And not just lazy languorous drives, we went paragliding in the hills in autumn, rafting in the summers, and rappelling and ziplining in the spring. 

And I have only recollected our stories in the hills, there are enough chapters on the sandy coastline to fill a book.

Looking back, the memories would seem very poor without them - many would not even have existed without this fellowship. Perhaps, the deluge that I speak of then, that whirlpool in the mind - came not from the rains alone, and not even with the rains and the hills - it came through evergreen experiences of chasing clouds, in the hills, with kindred souls. Who ensured there was at least a sliver of joy, no matter what the  melancholy. Who proved, time and again, that the proverbial whole was actually, many more times greater than the sum of the parts. And those who are still standing, outside the borders of those countless, untaken photographs, smiling and laughing with each other, in moments that never really became the past…

24th July, 2020