Impressions

Photo credit: www.youtube.com
Memory tags: On holiday

The Indian Railways are truly getting their catering act together.  Asleep after breakfast, travellers on the Rajdhani Express,  are woken up  to the lunch first course.(Hawkers don’t ride this train to provide  never ending commercial breaks ). The paper cups of peppery, grey undefined soup, carry a plethora of enticing labels - visit Corbett ,Hard Rock; 7 days in etc, etc . Just dial-a-trip while you sip soup! After all one sure highway to a person’s heart is through the stomach. The cheap value addition of soup to the meal, is made special by top notch crunchy bread sticks which everyone blissfully dips into Amul butter packs. Divine indulgence!

Outside the large glass windows male cattle egrets in breeding plumage preen before disdainful females. What a waste if their new yellow plume doesn’t prove irresistible! Above acres of jute, maize harvested and drying in the hot sun, bajra nearly ripe for harvest, birds swing on high wires. Sparrows and mynahs forage on the ground. Graceful, slim green bee-eaters make aerial swoops to catch their prey. While kingfishers in their white shirt fronts, look exactly like supervisors, from their wire perches! Cormorants sun bathe on rocks while lily walkers and avocets wade in serious abandon.

One of the luxuries I enjoy, when out of my adopted Shangri-La, is a crisp newspaper with my morning tea, this time it is Delhi. It lets you catch up early on all that happened in the world while you were asleep! You can confidently step out with your general trivia account fully updated. An essential part of the well turned out persona. Another unique experience is to walk into the doorstep of the one stop, guzzlers lot. Mindless shelves filled to brim. Enticing you to buy everything you don’t really need to buy, in air conditioned utopia. Carbon footprints? That’s for Copenhagen 2009.Even a single capsicum has to have its regulation plastic bag! And my rustic vendor makes me carry a cloth shopping bag!

In the evening we meander into a Sandwich Joint - veggies and meat slumming it out in 6 or 12 inch packs oozing with sauces thrown in with gay abandon ! I am willing to upgrade the Earl of Sandwich  creation into a club sandwich, beyond that it’s a taste bud  Waterloo, and an aesthetic disaster! Another night we go Italy via LaVazza. The blessed relief of coffees that do not taste like a toffee remix, topped with the cafe add ups and glossy nomenclature. My daily diet of the soul satisfying filter coffee, home grown in Coorg: Plantation, Arabica, chicory blended to perfection is worth a king’s  ransom.

The journey winds back now, the rice fields of the northern plains are ploughed but dry; waiting for life giving rain. In Bengal and Assam some rain has fallen and the rice transplantation has begun. It’s a recurring image, people transplanting rice wearing palm leaf rain shields. One that I first saw in the junior Stembridge geography texts in class three or four. They drew me like a lodestone. In it, a child named David flew out every night, on mother owl’s back to gather impressions of his home planet. Wonderful illustrations told us what he saw! And like all good pictures, they created impressions that not only lasted, but did not stop, till I brought you my rambling impressions in Green Cardamoms.