A PATH LESS TRAVELLED

Photo credit: Devabrata D Maitra
Memory tags: Walking down a road less travelled in Tezpur University.

Walking down a not so often traveled path one evening, the rising cool wind blew down a fresh green vernal tip with three green leaves and unopened bud.  The heart shaped leaves, drawn out into fine tapering point were translucent enough to allow the rays of the setting sun come through! It was like holding the elixir of life in my hands! I wondered what thicken these leaves into opaque factories, partitioning one side from the other. Is that what the layers of years do to us? Wipe out the view of the other side and give us smug one sided mirror images that only reflects without reflection?

This same green bunch made me look up to see where it had been blown down from. A thousand leaves greeted my eyes in tall soaring peepal tree on the side of this road. Ancient in legend, venerated down the ages, the rock against which many a wayside temple cleft, tempered by sun and rain, the peepal still kept its tryst with spring! It suddenly made me realize that even in the tropics, amid the apparent notions of heat and dust vernal leaves can spring surprises as much as the temperate climes. Its roots pegged into the earth living stories of seasons past. If only they could talk, what a treasure house of tales they would have for us!

Walking ahead, I had to stop for a snail carrying its home on its back was crossing the road. A brown mongoose darted into the low bushes, a early owl hooted from the mango tree and the setting sun set the evening aglow. The cocky black and white magpie robin whistled naughtily from the silk cotton tree behind a house. The snail finally went over to the other side and I could walk ahead to the grassy patch under the silk cotton. Not so long ago I had seen the silk cotton in brilliant leafless blossom. This evening it was mosaic of soft new leaves and black open pods filled with silk cotton.

I bent to pick up this natural cotton floss, each with a small black seed in the centre. Were aeroplanes ever constructed thus to carry the seeds to new destinations? My fingers were mesmerized by the ethereal soft tree down. From blossom to seed, from bare skeletal boughs to vernal green leaf cover, I needed no human computed calendar to tell me month had passed, since I last wrote of spring.