It might be a coincidence — though one gets a rather assertive feeling in the gut that ‘tis not — that the less we splash about in the rain, the more we swoon over petrichor in the annals of internet… Google Ngram Viewer testifies to the fact, with the usage of the word spiking around 2010, the same time when social media platforms were coming out of infancy aided by the smartphone revolution… in a nutshell, everyone seems to be a pluviophile these days, have a look at the rainy day traffic and you’d be amazed…
Not necessarily a bad thing though, and in part quite understandable… for rain is no doubt one of the best platforms to give into procrastination sans any guilt… as romanticism fuels the air, mostly behind air conditioners these days… but still, rains emain a seasonal bridge, enticing folks to come out and pay heed to the biota as compared to sultry summers or foggy winters that send them scampering in the opposite direction towards the relative comforts of the four walls…
Rains in Ranikhet, not unlike any other Himalayan hamlet, are an exercise in high contrast… and while all those marketed epiphanies are all about the sights and sounds and the smell, if one were to actually wander into the outdoors just after a shower, the real revelation lies in the added dimension of ‘texture’, something that only reveals itself on the condition of proximity… the water wiping or distorting the existing layers to reveal depth and geometries that seem averse to anything served without dollops of humidity… and a bagful of leeches added to the fray, if one may…
For ‘tis only in the rains when the dropped pine needles shake away the statis and start navigating into random water channels, the fungi looks perturbed at the possibility of being scraped off the host… the berries throw one more bait for the surrounding fauna… the critters seem to have lost it in times of abundance… and the forest, which is usually ‘quietly loud’, becomes ‘loudly quite’ for a while… when it comes to rains in the mountains, the woods are the place to be, be it seeking shelter, or sanctums…
Musings on Himalayan forests in the rains, the ever enchanting woods of Ranikhet, Uttarakhand…
