[ This is Essay # 22 in our Spotlight Series. Click here for the archives.]
Beyond the Open Road, Wandering and Wondering
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Now when I look back I wonder if I’ve been lucky to not confront, even once, any introspective thought on the merits of travel. However, I’ve been asked just that by people. This is not to say that people question the merits of travel per se, actually it is the choice of my destinations they question, reflected no doubt in the contrast their own choice usually presents with those of mine.
Years ago, after a rewarding trip with a friend through Maharashtra and beyond, to Madhya Pradesh, I was asked on my return, “What on Earth made you plough ankle deep through muddy fields to go digging for fossils in the heart of a Gond tribal village?” I struggled to answer it. I would struggle even now. How does one explain the thrill of unearthing fossil after fossil, knowing full well that for millions of years life that lay trapped in sedimentation saw light that day. To hold a life form kept intact by fossilization is to peel away layers of time right back to the very start and see it the way life shaped it, and be the first one to do so.
To understand where we come from and of what or who preceded us will continue to shape our curiosity, occasionally nudging it sufficiently enough to spur travel, on the road and off it, in the mind, in effect fitting imagination with legs and letting it run free. Without either travel will be poorer for, in traveling to a destination it is imagination that often makes for the journey.
When time is measured in millions of years it adds a touch of the mystic to the mystery, and when the journey turns a shade philosophical, like it did for Jags and I when we unearthed an intact tree trunk that day, possibly spanning geological eras, its every sinew intact as time wore down ages, the moment acquired reverence, turning the experience a shade spiritual. It was the mystery of the unknown that excited our imagination that day for, it is in the gaps in knowledge or understanding that our imagination can play out, and when the possibilities are many, and the traveler can choose his pick, the journey acquires the personality of the traveler. I would find history less appealing if its documentation left little latitude for possibilities. A bit of the unknown adds mystery to the magic of travel.
In traveling to the Gond tribal village that day we passed their burial grounds, a series of circles, made with loose stones, marking them. A Pied Crested Cuckoo took off as we made a turn in the direction of the village where we met with the village headman. While curious villagers gathered outside the door we ate from wooden plates he offered us before making our way through slushy fields randomly strewn with colourful beads. I picked some up and wondered how they came to be here; women working fields? From how long back? The stone patterns from their burial grounds kept at me from the back of my mind; what might the circular patterns signify? Before leaving the Headman’s dwelling Jags was shown a Sandalwood tree by Tina’s father, while villagers gathered to watch Jags run his hand along the trunk. This was the first time he had seen a Sandalwood tree. The next day we learned that the word that went around the village spoke of ‘Sandalwood Smugglers’ from the city!
On our way back from the fossil dig we opened the plastic bags each time a curious tribal motioned us to show him the contents, and having sated their curiosity or maybe allayed their suspicions after seeing what were essentially a few ‘stones’ they would wave us through with a smile. Even as I walked, the thought of the long sessions that mapping the fossils would now take was far from my mind, instead occupying it were images of burial grounds (who were they?), the colourful beads (whom did they once belong to?), and the fossils (what creatures roamed the planet in the lifetimes of these fossilized remains?)
I was intrigued at finding fossilized remains of shells, and they were aplenty. Did a river once flow where we now squatted? Behind us, trees grew handsome, and tall. Could a river really have run through here once upon a time?
Impressions from the road are shaped as much from impressions gathered beforehand in anticipation of the journey as from impressions that play out to passing milestones. It is when something that you’ve not read about and are least expecting confronts you, compelling a change in visual perception, that imagination takes hold.
Driving through the plains to get to the Gond village there was little in the landscape to suggest that a river might have flowed there once, but there was ample indication to suggest just that, and I held ‘it’ in my hands. Water ‘obliterates’ physical features, unless they whip up the current like rocky outcrops do in fast flowing rivers descending from the mountains. There is a certain solidity to landscapes. It is partly due to physical features that mark them, unchanging, immune to time. That they must have lain at the bottom of a river once is hard to imagine, let alone contemplate.
The next day we headed to Ramtek where remains of two Buddhist Stupas were discovered when excavating a hillock at the ancient site of Mansar only a few months earlier. As we begun our ascent up the partially excavated hillock I paused every now and then to take in portions of the Stupa, running my eyes over remains of tools and pottery. Though their voices fell silent centuries ago, in the shards of pottery, scattered whispers sounded again. Freed from the embrace of earth, they would speak to a ready ear, but would their tongue make sense now? How might their spoken language sound to the ready ear? Would nuances usually peculiar to diverse tongues likewise characterize their language as well? I could only imagine. Were I to know for sure they might only make for academic interest. Not knowing made them come alive in my mind.
The remains were traced to the Mauryan and the Wakataka periods, reportedly dating back to ‘200 BC and 400 AD’ respectively. There is little that’ll ever be known of the people that lived there, even less of what must have engaged them as they went about their lives by the lake that drew into view to our right as we gained height. There was not a soul around, and as rows upon rows of exposed brick gave shape to contours that human endeavour once laboured to put up, I could only imagine the setting and the activity that must have accompanied it. Turning to face the lake, now bereft of life, my thoughts went quiet. Were they like me? What might they speak of if we were to somehow span the centuries that now separate us? It was here that Archaeologists stumbled upon tools dating back to the Stone Age, between 80,000 to 30,000 years ago.
From the hillock, the countryside, including the lake now cast in reflective light of an overcast sky, lay like an open palm, its lines of destiny having changed with time over the centuries. A few cows grazed in the grass in the distance even as rains threatened overhead, faint sounds of cow bells floating on the breeze to where I stood, looking out. Standing there it is difficult not to be affected by thoughts that meandered askance where excavated debris exposed traces of life centuries gone. Seeking ‘closure’ to the unknown even while reveling in the mystery, I wondered if some amongst them foresaw the end that would befall their memories, leaving behind their stories so that one day they might be discovered, and remembered.
Much as I seek to learn, understand and assimilate, sometimes I actually draw solace from not knowing, for it makes me wonder even as I wander.
The road from Nagpur, through Balaghat and beyond runs long, and for long stretches it runs straight, so when we slowed down behind a few other vehicles on coming upon a column of as yet undetermined features I put my head out the window as we inched ahead, only to draw my head back in in awe, half shouting, “Are you seeing this?” Jags sat riveted to the windshield.
Before us, stretching as far back as my eyes could see, and partly covered in haze at the far end, gypsies were on the move by their hundreds if not thousands. On carts laden with their worldly possessions and distinct from the others in their attire, the just born, the young, the middle-aged, and the old inched past in a colourful parade, made surreal by the ordinariness of the setting the landscape lent the caravan literally emerging out of thin air where haze erased the far end of the column. A scene one might have imagined of the pioneers setting off to make a home out of a land where no one had been before, or returned to tell the tale except that this was in the middle of the highway connecting
Day journeys reveal the joys of the open road. On the road the why of where you’re going reveals itself in small yet significant portions, like it once did years ago when we went trekking five days in the Nilgiris.
The Annamalai hills made for a permanent bearing on our treks. No amount of trekking seemed to bring them any closer, and it was in an open grassland, heavy with slush and where a herd of elephants had foraged not too long ago, leaving enough evidence behind, that the hills rising in the distance, glinting a deep brown in the mid-day sun, made me truly understand what it must mean to stand still and provide a permanent bearing to a passing fragrance of life, even if it smelled of elephant dung. Elsewhere, the grave marking the site where Hugo Wood, a British Officer and a Teak Planter born in 1870, and largely credited with saving the Annamalai forests in his capacity as an officer in the Indian Forest Service in early 1900s, lay buried in solitude, and acquired the same permanence of the hills that ringed it, not far from where he lived, and died, becoming one with the land he cherished, protected, and nurtured.
His home lay empty on a rise up the short incline from his resting place, fronted by a gentle drop covered by a dense tangle of trees. It was surprisingly well painted for a house that lay abandoned in the jungle. I walked from room to room, gently turning doors that creaked as they swung free on infrequently used hinges, as if protesting our intrusion into their world. I had no face to go with the form of Hugo Wood as I imagined him doing the same. We were told that the house was used recently in a local film; that explained its relative freshness in the December of that year. It is a unique experience to come across an empty dwelling in a jungle, even if not as elaborate as Hugo Wood’s. But stepping through the outer threshold of this neat, almost majestic dwelling (the wild lends majesty to all that it embraces), with doors swinging freely on creaking hinges, made the experience mysterious in as much as it provoked thought.
I felt that if I put my ears to the walls and listened long and hard enough they might whisper of days long gone by, maybe I might even hear voices that lived and died here. Looking up, I wondered what shadows must have played on the walls and the ceilings in the nights the tigers roared their presence in the vicinity, maybe stepping in the veranda for a sniff and a stroll. What sort of a life might its inhabitants have lived in in so isolated a place? Did it make of them quiet folks, given to prolonged silences that echoed the melodies of their hearts? And what melodies might these have been? I wondered what might Hugo Wood have been like? He was a Teak Planter alright, and a forest officer dedicated to preserving the Nilgiris, but living in the wondrous setting of the Annamalai hills, what changes must nature at her bountiful best wrought in his soul, and who were the people whose lives he touched? Did those who served him love him as a master? Did he read books and gaze at the faraway hills in the distance? Did he love the land he had made his home, far away from the shores his ancestors had left to seek their fortunes in India? Or was he a lone ranger coming ashore to a land none of his ancestors had ever set foot on? If so, what must have drawn him to this patch of
We were told that sightings of a mother bear with cubs had been made in the house a few days ago. To the back of the house lay low squares with missing ceilings, in an unbroken stillness of the moment when the last of Hugo Wood’s servants had ceased to live there. Silence has its abode in myriad settings; not necessarily in the permanence of a visible landmark or in the remembered memory of a moment lost to time.
Now when I remember of swinging the door free on its hinges as we left the forest dwelling, down the trail where it joined a path that disappeared round the bend in the bush, I’m reminded of Lewis Caroll who once said: “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.”
And what a journey not knowing would make for, indeed.
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I have always enjoyed Anil’s writing. His style of writing is very descriptive yet captivating and intriguing. All soul, no façade.