Home PageCopyright of the text and the images with Arun GaurColonial British Graves of Kasauli / Himachal Pradesh / Tripolia-Exploring India-Arun Gaur’s Indian Landscape Images
|
We spent some evenings wandering about the colonial British graves of Kasauli in the evening sun. No one visited them. |
When I followed an old Indian trail from Kalka to Kasauli, the locals told me that it would save us 18 kilometers as compared to the stretch on the national highway. The gradient was steeper and the winding road narrower. It was the old colonial British road that served the British traffic in the days of yore. At the end of the road, just before I reached the bent where the buses stopped for a halt at what is called the chhota (lesser) bus-stand there is a portion of the slope on the sheltered side of the hill that must have been a site for an old British cemetery. There are numerous graves some intact, but mostly chipped, displaced and shattered. They lie scattered in numerous spots, nooks, plots and hollows and seem to be chiefly belonging to the years of the 19th century. These colonial legacies, these remains of mortality and immortality are seldom visited and that too only by the stray wanderers. They remain un-attended, un-brushed, un-cleaned; surrounded with weeds primarily. I have seen likes of these British remnants at myriad places in India--they are in the Deccan and they are in the plains of the North and they are there in the valleys and shaded nooks of the gently rolling slopes and in the weeded jungles of plains and among the scrambles of the grass of the Himalayas. The inscriptions tell us of the tales of loyalty, friendship, of filial affections. They celebrate unattended the pipers and drummers and musicians. They express the genesis of motherhood, of fatherhood and of the curtailed infancy. They were laid in the best of convictions that they would retain their laid perfections for all time to come. But one and a half century is enough to belie the expectations. There is no visitor. Nobody knows who they are, from where they came. I was there that evening. Nobody came searching for the names of the long lineage of affections, long histories of family-trees. The rays of the evening sun played with the green pointed spruce tree-needles, with their multi-layered chocolate cones and with the jagged corners of the stones. With the last rays of the sun the dark things became darker and the mysterious places were filled with the sudden affluence of mild gold. The weeds glowed and the solitary little yellow flowers suddenly sprang up in the shaded side of the grave-stones. Etching became three dimensional in the quick slant of the sun and the wheels became the wheels of fire. Everything turned into its own corrugations--the undulating ground, the weeds, the inscriptions, the trees, their needle-like trees, the conical fruits. All the graves became corrugated. And no one was interested in them. |
It is the cool place for resting. To keep one's head on the pillow of the comforting earth. The slope is decent. Breeze is cool and sun slips down dancing through the golden, though pallid at times, grass and weed. Cones and needles on the branches are good to watch at. They are of chocolate hue and green. The setting seems to be so well-chosen. Perfect.
|
There is no tinge of mankind. Only the immortality of the soul. Or the tales of mortal remains. Should I participate actively in Robert's grave-yard school of poetry? The shadows are shade. Sharp corners appear and the stones glisten. What's that straight shade in the prolonged linearity? Angularity? It is not shadow. It is shade. Yeats would note--not shade not shadow: sometimes somewhere in between.
|
It is not the light of the setting sun. Is it that the clouds have gathered up in the sky or is it that the early morning sun has come into a new ascendancy? When I looked up, the gold had vanished and cool shades had come over the weeds and stones over stones and weeds. It is cool cold without a throbbing.
|
It seems to be an important grave; it is set on a high platform. I cannot read the etching well. It must have been of a dignified personage, quite un-attended. Blue is the sky.
|
When the sudden clouds arrived, wind rasped glisteningly through the leaves, and they were gone. The declining sun then gently touched the corrugated bark of the tree. The tree stood dark and tall and dignified. The fiery wheel was dark too. It stood dark, dismal yet with inherent stony silence and power of its own. The tree and the stone were two live things, dark and dismal and strong.
|
I stood there confronting them. Or could I confront them? Could I ever do that? Did I have the strength enough? They turned me into a blackish thing. They themselves remained luminous. Golden luminous. The wheel of fire tried to absorb me. Or did it only try? Am I not already absorbed? They turned me into a single-planed shade. A ghost or a shade; more than a ghost or a shade as W.B. Yeats would say.
|
When the wheel of fire turned me into a shade, I became aware of my existence. In fact, only then I became aware of my existence. My double self was there. When the wheel of fire assimilated me as a figment of darkness, I came alive. Somewhat of a human shape. A new incarnation. Half head, half arms with feminine long inflated skirt. I was also golden at that time. My gold came out of my dark.
|
One stood intact, solitary and sturdy. It was late evening then I suppose and the diffused luminance caressed the flanks of the stones. I thought it would be soon black pitch of the color that would dominate the undulations of the ground and would dominate the flicker of the pallid green needles and the deep chocolate of the cones.
|
It is the bold face. It comes out of the lurking dark. it wobbles from side to side. It divides the darkness into quartets. It spreads its massive self of the stone all around and stamps the darkness with the inevitability of the stone of the massive silence. The wheel of fire embroiders, weaves and stamps the glory of the golden dignity.
|
Weeds are the constant companions of the forlorn. Who are more intimate friends to us than our weeds that grow out of our body, our soul and our self? They grow out of us. Or is it the other way round? Perhaps, we grow out of them. Or do we simply grow out of each other? We are of the same color, complexion, hue, shade and tan.
|
Here too I and weeds together would sing the song of myself. Whitman was a good fellow. Tall, sturdy. Never letting the world know what was ailing his body from within. Let the soul take gory of all. It is the most sacred thing on the earth. The weeds and me together. It would be a good lullaby.
|
When I concentrated, it grew in size. Its mildness was awesome. Its tilted stance seemed to make fun of me. But it never did. It was the essence of intimations growing in size size size. It was the softness of luminance, the gentleness of the touch that won my heart.
|
O how neat I am. It is a winter evening perhaps but there is enough warmth in the heat of the sun. Golden lasses and golden boys, chimney lasses and chimney boys all must feel this warmth in the obscure nook of an Indian Himalayan slope.
|
Small twigs of insignificant leaves of grass have the power of casting geometrical straight lines and curves across the grayness of my stone. Can I waive them away? Tarnish them with the color of my self, the color of my grayness. My gray cannot overcome the black of small leaves of grass. Then what? Let them live too as they wish. Let us all live as we wish. Stone lives. Grass lives. Blackness lives and the grayness too.
|
Is it the written word that outlasts all? In the beginning of the world there was a word in the air. The sound of the word. The rhythm of the script wedded-- he sound of the letter--the sound of the word. The word is etched in the stone. Who will outlast all the other? Will it be the word in the end? Will it be the stone in the end? In fact, what was in the beginning? Was it the stone? Was it the word? Or was it their rhythm? Or exclusively the rhythm of the stone?
|
We don't know who will remain till the end. Or even after the end? The gold of the sun licks the corners, the curves, the inside of the ovals, and the circles, and the triangles, and the polygons of the tales in the stones.
|
Oh the depth of the evening. The evening has come and it is about to go with all the depth it brought in its wake. The tree trunks so young are cut in the half, still they stand erect fresh and strong and full and uncut. Uncut uncut!
|
The twins are twined together. On a vine. The two leaves on the vine. This vine came out of nowhere and it is slithering into nowhere. One leaf is turbulent with the glory of the gold. The other leaf is also turbulent with the glory of blackness.
|
How beautiful these weeds are! They are affluent, fervid, fluid. Waving with the waves of the breeze. Painting all is the liquid flow of gold. Mildness of the flow of the gold. Gold of the earth, of the air, of the darkness of the nooks and crevices.
|
Isn't it all gold? This flower of mine states with no ambiguity that it is so. This flower is frank, stark in splendor, in beauty. This is the flower of the gold of the soul, gold of the earth, air and weeds. And gold of darkness. Of the night.
|
