How Green Was My Valley...

The first thing that struck me when I reached the top of the hill was the utterly mesmerizing landscape…and various shades of green splattered across it.

It was a clear day and apart from clouts of white cotton clouds overhead and bluish black hill-ranges on the horizon, everything was green, and different tones and hues of green.

There were grassy savannas yellowish green in colour, covered with partly dried, partly grassy green expanse with white, pink and purple blooms. The hill’s downslope was fully covered in this foliage and at the bottom slowly gave way to the forest. I had never seen such dark, dense forests till then. The trees were intertwined and created a dark green sunscreen for the earth. It started at the bottom of the hill on which I was standing and went to cover the whole of another hill. I would venture inside it some day, I thought. There was a third departure where the landscape slowly graduated to shrubby delights of wild plumage so typical of those transition zones. Slowly these shrubs gave way to cultivated lands, interspersed with electric poles and randomly placed small jhuggis and cement slabs. They were looking out of the place or maybe I was just envious of the people living in this beautiful countryside. The fields were not uniformly spaced or demarcated. Every field was defined by a spate of trees and every field had its own character, some had paddy, some had some other unknown grains, and some were converted to meadowlands, and depending on what was growing in them, they had different greens.

For a person who grew up in a dry, deciduous landscape, a green cacophony like this was like an impossible allegory …my colour receptors were completely flooded with this green chamaleonesque bumper bonanza.

It was out of this world…

I would want my home here…