The cumulonimbus archives - an excerpt

In April 2008 some of us visited the awesome Iruppu falls near Wayanad.

Geologically it's just one giant gash in a mountain gorge, a great big jagged gash. The water just kind of tumbles down into the crevices of this gash.

About a few hundred metres to the top of the mountain where the descent of the water begins, there is a stage with standing water, enough to hold about thirty persons. Here a few tourists reveled in the mountain stream and let their voices intrude in the awesomeness.

The mute(?) verdant green and the jagged granite outcrops listened to their self-absorption in a place such as this (!!), and looked on them as they reveled. The water, as always, just kept falling over itself, hurtling delightfully down, twisting and turning its way down the sculpted ravine, oblivious, as it had been all through the years, to people, their presence and their intruding voices.

Every place knows. Looks on the people that come. Sees what it evokes in the onlookers. And every place has its own presence, something that it says. It never fails to say its piece.....and the ones that hear it, know. They will come again, not just to see, but more to hear.

Iruppu falls. An exquisitely lovely cascade of white water, tumbling down the gorge, reverberating in the echo pipes and the natural theater, framed in verdant green. It seemed like no one had EVER been there.....no footfalls, no one to hear its awesome voice in this forlorn, pristine valley. To speak in such a place ....would be to intrude and not listen, so out of turn.

I tried to imagine Iruppu Falls in the rain. On a murky day. Perhaps there had been endless, ageless murky morns on which the foot of a rainbow gently rested on the top of the fall. Anyone that's seen this sight would have seen it as in a dream, through the silver, dreamy tint of a raindrop on their eyelashes. Through strangely suffused sunlight, trying to break through silver-lined clouds to dispel the rainbow. I hardly believe anyone that saw this would ever forget. As it was, I never forgot what I saw - and it was almost a cloudless, still day.

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Later, driving pell-mell through the rain through Nagarahole on the way back to Mysore, a strange warp occurred. The water falling down was also white, or a strange, whitish-ashen grey, with something unimaginable behind its veil.

Criss-crossing the veil of grey were black, distorted dendritic skeletal tentacles opening out to a gigantic cumulonimbus cloud that had well and truly burst its seams. These tentacles happened to be the trees in Nagarahole, devoid of any leaves, trying to brave the gales and the sheets of water. It really was surreal, a scene not from nature but from one of Herge's original black-and-white creations. I felt I was running away from some villains that had sprung up from Herge's pen-strokes. Strange, I always remember flight with the villains in hot chase, from Herge's books.

There was no indication of the time of day in that dream-distilled downpour. The ashen grey cleared slowly, very slowly. The brown in the trees (with patches of green touched with grey) slowly emerged. Something that resembled nature, a forest in one of India's foremost national parks, finally materialised. The warp had gone.

But while we were in it, the warp told us any number of stories; all adventure-comic, all copy-book and all Herge. I was a child again.

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Every place, I believe, has strange stories to tell; and not all of them really have to do with what our eyes see; and certainly, many, many of them have nothing at all to do with the people in those places. I've learned to listen, not merely see; I've learned to tune out the people and tune in to the voice of the forms of rock, water, green and sky.

Thank you Avinash, Amit and Anil.