My Favourite Nature Stories Read online

  The silence was impressive and a little frightening. There was no movement, except for the bending of grass beneath my feet, and the circling of a hawk against the blinding blue of the sky.

  Then, as I rounded a sharp bend, I heard the sound of water.

  I gasped with surprise and happiness, and began to run. I slipped and stumbled, but I kept on running, until I was able to plunge into the snow-cold mountain water.

  And the water was blue and white and very wonderful.

  My Trees in the Himalayas

  Living in a cottage at seven thousand feet in the Garhwal Himalayas, I am fortunate to have a big window that opens out on the forest so that the trees are almost within my reach. If I jumped, I could land quite neatly in the arms of an oak or horse chestnut. I have never made that leap, but the big langurs—silver-gray monkeys with long, swishing tails—often spring from the trees onto my corrugated tin roof, making enough noise to frighten all the birds away.

  Standing on its own outside my window is a walnut tree, and truly this is a tree for all seasons. In winter the branches are bare, but beautifully smooth and rounded. In spring each limb produces a bright green spear of new growth, and by midsummer the entire tree is in leaf. Toward the end of the monsoon the walnuts, encased in their green jackets, have reached maturity. When the jackets begin to split, you can see the hard brown shells of the nuts, and inside each shell is the delicious meat itself.

  Every year this tree gives me a basket of walnuts. But last year the nuts were disappearing one by one, and I was at a loss as to who had been taking them. Could it have been the milkman’s small son? He was an inveterate tree climber, but he was usually to be found on the oak trees, gathering fodder for his herd. He admitted that his cows had enjoyed my dahlias, which they had eaten the previous week, but he stoutly denied having fed them walnuts.

  It wasn’t the woodpecker either. He was out there every day, knocking furiously against the bark of the tree, trying to pry an insect out of a narrow crack, but he was strictly non-vegetarian. As for the langurs, they ate my geraniums but did not care for the walnuts.

  The nuts seemed to disappear early in the morning while I was still in bed, so one day I surprised everyone, including myself by getting up before sunrise. I was just in time to catch the culprit climbing out of the walnut tree. She was an old woman who sometimes came to cut grass on the hillside. Her face was as wrinkled as the walnuts she so fancied, but her arms and legs were very sturdy.

  ‘And how many walnuts did you gather today, Grandmother?’ I asked.

  ‘Just two,’ she said with a giggle, offering them to me on her open palm. I accepted one, and thus encouraged, she climbed higher into the tree and helped herself to the remaining nuts. It was impossible for me to object. I was taken with admiration for her agility. She must have been twice my age, but I knew I could never get up that tree. To the victor, the spoils!

  Unlike the prized walnuts, the horse chestnuts are inedible. Even the rhesus monkeys throw them away in disgust. But the tree itself is a friendly one, especially in summer when it is in full leaf. The lightest breeze makes the leaves break into conversation, and their rustle is a cheerful sound. The spring flowers of the horse chestnut look like candelabra, and when the blossoms fall, they carpet the hillside with their pale pink petals.

  It stands erect and dignified and does not bend with the wind. In spring the new leaves, or needles, are a tender green, while during the monsoon the tiny young cones spread like blossoms in the dark green folds of the branches. The deodar enjoys the company of its own kind: where one deodar grows, there will be others. A walk in a deodar forest is awe-inspiring—surrounded on all sides by these great sentinels of the mountains, you feel as though the trees themselves are on the march.

  I walk among the trees outside my window often, acknowledging their presence with a touch of my hand against their trunks. The oak has been there the longest, and the wind has bent its upper branches and twisted a few so that it looks shaggy and undistinguished. But it is a good tree for the privacy of birds. Sometimes it seems completely uninhabited until there is a whining sound, as of a helicopter approaching, and a party of long-tailed blue magpies flies across the forest glade.

  Most of the pines near my home are on the next hillside. But there is a small Himalayan blue a little way below the cottage, and sometimes I sit beneath it to listen to the wind playing softly in its branches.

  When I open the window at night, there is almost always something to listen to—the mellow whistle of a pygmy owlet, or the sharp cry of a barking deer. Sometimes, if I am lucky, I will see the moon coming up over the next mountain, and two distant deodars in perfect silhouette.

  Some night sounds outside my window remain strange and mysterious. Perhaps they are the sounds of the trees themselves, stretching their limbs in the dark, shifting a little, flexing their fingers, whispering to one another. These great trees of the mountains, I feel they know me well, as I watch them and listen to their secrets, happy to rest my head beneath their outstretched arms.

  Death of the Trees

  The peace and quiet of the Maplewood hillside disappeared forever one winter. The powers-that-be decided to build another new road into the mountains and the PWD saw fit to take it right past the cottage, about six feet from the window which overlooked the forest.

  In my journal I wrote—Already they have felled most of the trees. The walnut was one of the first to go. A tree I had lived with for over ten years, watching it grow as I had watched Prem’s small son Rakesh grow up, looking forward to its new leaf-buds, the broad green leaves or summer turning to spears of gold in September when the walnuts were ripe and ready to fall. I knew this tree better than the others. It was just below the window where a buttress for the road is going up.

  Another tree I will miss is the young deodar, the only one growing in this stretch of the woods. Some years back it was stunted from lack of sunlight. The oaks covered it with their shaggy branches, so I cut away some of the overhanging ones and after that the deodar grew much faster. It was just coming into its own this year—now cut down in its prime like my young brother on the road to Delhi last month. Both victims of the roads—the tree kilted by the PWD, my brother by a truck.

  Twenty oaks have been felled just in this small stretch near the cottage. By the time this by-pass reaches Jabai khet, about six miles from here, over a thousand oaks will have been slaughtered, besides many other fine trees—maples, deodars and pines—most of them unnecessarily as they grew some fifty or sixty yards from the roadside.

  The trouble is, hardly anyone (with the exception of the contractor who buys the felled trees) really believes that trees and shrubs are necessary. They get in the way so much, don’t they? According to my milkman, the only useful tree is the one which can be picked clean of its leaves for fodder! And a young man remarked to me, ‘You should come to Pauri. The view is terrific, there’s not a tree in the way!’

  Well he can stay here now and enjoy the view of the ravaged hillside. But as the oaks have gone, the milkman will have to look further afield for his fodder.

  Rakesh calls the maples butterfly trees because when the winged seeds fall, they flutter like butterflies in the breeze. No maples now. No bright red leaves to flame against the sky. No birds! That is to say, no birds near the house. No longer will it be possible for me to open the window and watch the scarlet minivets flitting through the dark green foliage of the oaks… the long-tailed magpies gliding through the trees, the barbet calling insistently from his perch on the top of the deodar. Forest birds, all of them, they will now be in search of some other stretch of surviving forest. The only visitors will be the crows who have learnt to live with and off humans and seem to multiply along with roads, houses and people. And even when all the people have gone, the crows will still be there.

  Other things to look forward to—trucks thundering past in the night, perhaps a tea and pakora shop around the corner. The grinding of gears, the music of motor hor
ns. Will the whistling thrush be heard above them? The explosions that continually shatter the silence of the mountains as thousand-year-old rocks are dynamited have frightened away all but the most intrepid of birds and animals. Even the bold langurs haven’t shown their faces for over a fortnight.

  Somehow, I don’t think we shall wait for the tea shop to arrive. There must be some other quiet corner, possibly on the next mountain where new roads have yet to come into being. No doubt this is a negative attitude and if I had any sense I’d open my own tea shop. To retreat is to be a loser. But the trees are losers too and when they fall, they do so with a certain dignity.

  Never mind. Men come and go, the mountains remain.

  When the Monsoon Breaks

  I was staying at a small hotel in Meerut, in north India. There had been no rain for a month, but the atmosphere was humid, and there were clouds overhead, dark clouds burgeoning with moisture. Thunder blossomed in the air.

  The monsoon was going to break that day. I knew it; the birds knew it; the grass knew it. There was the smell of rain in the air. And the grass, the birds and I responded to this odor with the same longing.

  A large drop of water hit the windowsill, darkening the thick dust on the woodwork. A faint breeze had sprung up, and again I felt the moisture, closer and warmer.

  Then the rain approached like a dark curtain. I could see it moving down the street, heavy and remorseless. It drummed on the corrugated tin roof and swept across the road and over the balcony of my room. I sat there without moving, letting the rain soak my sticky shirt and gritty hair.

  Outside, the street rapidly emptied. The crowd disappeared. Then buses, cars and bullock carts plowed through the suddenly rushing water. A group of small boys, gloriously naked, came romping along a side street, which was like a river in spate. A garland of marigolds, swept off the steps of a temple, came floating down the middle of the road. The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

  The day was dying, and the breeze remained cool and moist. In the brief twilight that followed, I was witness to the great yearly flight of insects into the cool, brief freedom of the night.

  Termites and white ants, which had been sleeping through the hot season, emerged from their lairs. Out of every hole and crack, and from under the roots of trees, huge winged ants emerged, at first fluttering about heavily on this, the first and last flight of their lives. There was only one direction in which they could fly—toward the light—toward the street lights and the bright neon tubelight above my balcony.

  The light above my balcony attracted a massive, quivering swarm of clumsy termites, giving the impression of one thick, slowly revolving mass. A frog had found its way through the bathroom and came hopping across the balcony to pause beneath the light. All he had to do was gobble, as insects fell around him.

  This was the hour of the geckos, the wall lizards. They had their reward for weeks of patient waiting. Plying their sticky pink tongues, they devoured insects as swiftly and methodically as children devour popcorn. For hours they crammed their stomachs, knowing that such a feast would not come their way again. Throughout the entire hot season the insect world had prepared for this flight out of darkness into light, and the phenomenon would not happen again for another year.

  In hot up-country towns in India, it is good to have the first monsoon showers arrive at night, while you are sleeping on the veranda. You wake up to the scent of wet earth and fallen neem leaves, and find that a hot and stuffy bungalow has been convened into a cool, damp place.

  The swish of the banana fronds and the drumming of the rain on broad-leaved sal trees will soothe any brow.

  During the rains, the frogs have a perfect country music festival. There are two sets of them, it seems, and they sing antiphonal chants all evening, each group letting the other take its turn in the fairest manner. No one sees or hears them during the hot weather, but the moment the monsoon breaks, they swarm all over the place.

  When night comes on, great moths fly past, and beetles of all shapes and sizes come whirring in at the open windows. The fireflies also light up their lamps, flashing messages to each other through the mango groves. Some nocturnal insects thrive mainly at the expense of humans, and sometimes one wakes up to find thirty or forty mosquitoes looking through the netting in a hungry manner. If you are sleeping out, you’ll need that mosquito-netting.

  The road outside is lined with line babul trees, now covered with powdery little halls of yellow blossom, filling the air with a faint scent. After the first showers, there is a great deal of water about, and for many miles the trees are standing in it. The common sights along an up-country road are often picturesque—the wide plains with great herds of smoke-colored, delicate-limbed cattle being driven slowly home for the night, accompanied by troops of ungainly buffaloes, and flocks of goats and black long-tailed sheep. Then you come to a pond, where the buffaloes are indulging in a wallow, no part of them visible but the tips of their noses.

  Within a few days of the first rain, the air is full of dragonflies, crossing and recrossing, poised motionless for a moment, then darting away with that mingled grace and power that is unmatched among insects. Dragonflies are the swallows of the insect world; their prey is the mosquitoes, the gnats, the midges and the flies. These swarms, therefore, tell us that the moistened surface of the ground, with its mouldering leaves and sodden grass, has become one vast incubator teeming with every form of ephemeral life.

  After the monotony of a fierce sun and a dusty landscape quartering in the dim distance, one welcomes these days of mild light, green earth and purple hills coming near in the clear and transparent air.

  And later on, when the monsoon begins to break up and the hills are dappled with light and shade, dark islands of clouds moving across the bright green sea, the effect on one’s spirit is strangely exhilarating. For in India the true spring, the beginning of things, the birthday of nature, is not in March but in June.

  Rosebud: A Fragment

  Jai had placed a chair on the beaten earth floor of the little courtyard, in the shade of an apricot tree. Apricots appeared to be the only trees that grew near the village. Their leaves were russet-red in the autumn sun. I felt sure that other fruit could grow here too—apples, pears, peaches. If I were living here, I thought, I could try them out. If I could get a message to McNulty he would send me saplings from the Saharanpur nurseries. And on the other side of the hill, where it was shadier and moister, there were plants that he would love to have. If I were living here—but I had no plans to stay.

  Jai’s village, in the next valley, was a warmer place. Here we were facing the snows—the mighty Srikanth peak towered directly above us. Two months from now the village would be under snow.

  ‘Do you stay here through the winter?’ I asked Gulabi.

  She nodded, ‘People come down from the Gangotri shrine to stay here during the winter. The temple priests and others.’

  I looked down the mountain to where the river, green and gold, wound its way through sandbanks and rocky islets on which grew clumps of pine and maple.

  ‘Why not live down there?’ I asked.

  ‘There is no land down there for fields,’ she said. ‘And sometimes the river is in flood and everything gets swept away.’

  She seemed to give out some of the glow that was in her face. I felt it pour over me. And this golden feeling did not pass, even when I went into the cool darkness of the house to join Jai in a meal prepared especially for us.

  It can be hot in September, even in the mountains and by the time we climbed the steep path to Harsil, my companion and I were both very thirsty. I sat down on a low boundary wall, while Jai walked over to a small house to ask for water and enquire about his relatives.

  It was one of those warm, humid afternoons when drowsiness is in the air, and the buzz of insects lulls one into slumber. I had closed my eyes and was half asleep when a footstep made me sit up. Someone was holding a tumber of water before me, but the hands that held it were no
t Jai’s. They were the hands of a girl—not very delicate, but firm and without blemish. I looked up into her face and our eyes met over the rim of the tumbler. I forgot to take it from her.

  She was a fair girl, as fair as they come in the hills, and there was a tinge of pink in her cheeks. Her hair was black and glossy and lay open across her shoulders, for she had been drying it in the warm sun. Her clothes were plain but neat; her feet and hands were brown from sun and wind. Her lips were full and soft. Poppies in her cheeks and roses in her lips, I thought.

  ‘You are thirsty,’ she said.

  I took my eyes off her for a moment, grasped the tumbler and drank till it was empty.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘And who are you?’

  ‘I am Gulabi.’

  ‘Rosebud. A pretty name. It suits you.’

  ‘These are my father’s fields. Your friend is a cousin of mine. He is waiting for you in the house. Come inside and rest.’

  What I liked about her was her smile. It dropped over her face slowly, like sunshine moving over brown hills.

  To the End of Our Days

  Six or seven—that’s the age at which our essential tastes, even our obsessions—begin to be stamped on us by outside impressions. They are never eradicated, even when we think we have forgotten them. To my dying day I shall have a special fondness for the cosmos flower because I remember walking through a forest of them—or what seemed like a forest—when I was five or six. White, light purple, magenta, those fresh-faced flowers nodded to me as I played on the lawns of the Jamnagar palace grounds; and today more than seventy years later, whenever I see the cosmos in flower, I go among them, for they are eternal even if I am not. And to this day I like the sound of a cock crowing at break of day, because this was one of the first sounds that impinged on my brain when I was a child. A cock crowing at dawn. Harbinger of light, of optimism. ‘Great day! Great day!’ it seems to say. And it will not be denied.