Some journeys continue. Last week’s meandering through the
interiors of Bicholim, Calvim and Aldona spills over to this week’s wanderings,
albeit in myriad ways beyond just a simple drive through these parts.
The call of the countryside is
constant, like a soothing din, a symphony of nature sounds, the gurgle of a
spring, the fall of the rain on wet earth, the chug of a train passing through
the woods or even the sound of the water pushed to the shore by a ferry from
Chorao, docking on the banks of Pomburpa.
In travels like this, we capture
landscapes in visuals. Try capturing them also through sounds and compliment
them with visuals – the ever moving sequence of breathtaking frames in constant
unstoppable scrolls.
The absolute mess on Goa’s highways
has made some people with a heart, reportedly like yours truly, dip into Goa’s
interiors, and there’s this charming old world of narrow roads and sun and rain
kissed villages resurfacing on the map, which marks such life’s journeys. And
quite unexpectedly, you meet people who have nested in these parts, much like
the Amur falcon and other migratory birds that move thousands of miles to nest
in Goa.
In another development, on Monday
evening last week, fresh from the previous week’s journey through the springs,
rivers and fields of Aldona and Bicholim, we had one of our regular Monday
fixes of Blues – a movie about or made by a Blues legend screened at the
International Centre Goa (ICG), followed by some musicians doing a live
performance, with musically inclined others joining in.
Among the regulars sat a smiling man,
ageing a bit, though not in spirit, wearing the rhythm of life on his sleeves,
bubbling with an energy that reflects in his eyes. Deepak Dutt means different
things to different people. For a Calcutta boy living and growing up in the
world of literature, cinema, poetry, music and the profession that feeds off
each of these – advertising, Dutt is a remnant of the glory days of Indian
advertising with Calcutta as its sanctum sanctorum, and a slice of reminiscence
of a better age.
To those who know him in Goa, he and
his wife, Rajyashree, the full time birder, are people that have found peace
and music through the songs of birds and the notes of nature, as they have set
and made a home for themselves and the hundreds of species of birds that come
to their ‘Birdsong Retreat’. Their lives are enhanced by birdsongs and tales of
travellers that come to nest and nestle in this retreat in Pomburpa, on the
slopes of the Succor Plateau, a biodiversity-rich birding hotspot. As hill cutting,
felling and the real estate projects threaten this biodiversity, every attempt
to give birds a home, among the greens, is a heroic act.
So yes, the charter tourists from
Russia aren’t arriving in droves but birds are surely flying into the ‘Birdsong
Retreat’, where the rufous woodpecker does have a date with the coppersmith
barbet, who in turn has a chirpy gossip session with the red-wattled lapwing,
and these birds in turn have conversations of a kind we would never know, with
cormorants, herons and flycatchers.
On that Monday Blues night, Deepak,
senior by years, graciously indulged yours truly with conversation and warmth
and an invitation to go home. It’s the backwater route, where he lives, a route
one travels often these days, through Calvim, Aldona, Pomburpa and Britona,
still uncut, still without as many scars on the hillsides, basically still
surviving the onslaught of builders and bulldozers, who must destroy to create,
rather than create or simply augment nesting spots that merge with nature.
As we sat around a table that evening
at the ICG, after the musicians had played and gone, many of us (old friends
and new) caught up and exchanged notes, almost all of them ‘blithe spirits’
like poet P B Shelly’s ‘Skylark’. Much like the ‘blithe spirits’, the bird
species that descend and live in and around Deepak and Rajyashree Dutt’s
retreat, many of us folks, ‘pourest’ our full hearts in ‘profuse strains of
unpremeditated art’, where, as Shelly perhaps meant, the art of nature gushes
out on its own, through the songs of the Skylark.
To many of us that traverse untrodden or less trodden paths and
are in sync with birdsongs, may nature, thus gush forth, in these profuse
strains of unpremeditated art, in our land which is truly blessed.
