The holiness of wide open places -- 2

These wide open places, this surviving patch of wilderness (it's not true forest of course) comprises mostly of scrub and mid-sized trees with a Rain tree and a Silk Cotton here and there. The rest is all wild grass and undergrowth interspersed with a couple of abandoned quarries and a really wide fire trail (the other side of which is military no-man land) encloses it on one side. The other side is an apology (in development terms) of a road, red, red, red.

I stumbled upon these wilds totally by serendipity when I was looking at basically staying off the highways or the traffic choked one's of the colony while taking the little man on one of his much demanded "tirigi vodamu" rides -- if memory serves me right -- some 3 years back.

The little man used to call the wilds "water"; that was his blanket term for that stretch, yet another stretch dominated by a big (again disused / abandoned) quarry and the buffalo wallow that thinks it is a pond, the pond that thinks it is a tank (it even has a bund of sorts) where he once wanted me to jump into the waters and get out fish for him to eat. But then, since the little man's preferred adventure was to throw stones into water we haven't much been into the tree / grass wilds that much, but for slow first and second gear thumping, either on the red road looking out for peacocks and wild rabbits in the summer or going through every single puddle (much to the little man's delight) that had formed on it through the wet season. And of course a number of rides through shoulder high grasses after the first of which I taught him the word "forest".

For the last two years, increasingly the little man's visits have grown lesser and as to be expected, apart from the Cartoon serials on the TV he has got hooked to playing games on mobile phone handsets too. Which means that he has never come birding or butterflying with me (I have been seriously doing it for a bit over one and half years now). I hope I can do something about it this butterfly season, maybe encourage him to go chase one of them, but I know that the chances are remote -- he and the adults in the family will certainly not be enthused by the prospect. And -- in all probability -- being the opportunist he is, the little man will turn the butterflying trip into yet another pizza trip.

Then again, maybe I am running ahead of myself and he is too young to be really interested in what the difference is in between a hawk and a crow and a butterfly and a wildflower. After all he has just turned six.

But then, there is a child in me who consistently finds thrill in these open spaces; not just because of the photographs or the keepers among them. But also for the open spaces themselves, for so many things that register on the mind's eye and are beyond photography. Like the cool gusts of breeze from the quarry / pond waters bearing in them the promise of rain or the silvery flash -- more imagined than seen -- as a fish turns tail, or even the serious (thoughtful child) observations of how the grass grows (even as my hair does) and dries as a more implacable season finds its feet. And yes, I have no shame in saying that I tried shooting butterflies in flight and could have bitten myself in anger when all I could see "captured" were fuzzy blobs of colour where there should have been wings, antennae, proboscis and so on. I also have no shame in saying that I have been awestruck more than once when in some rain-fed green meadow in the wilds, I have seen more butterflies aflutter than I could count and couldn't know which on to concentrate on.

It's yet another thing that I still will chase and try to "capture" a butterfly in flight this season too, but if I fail this time I will laugh and not be piqued. Because now I know butterflies better.