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Wildbuzz: O mermaid of the Parvati
What if someone plunges into that passionate surge of mountain rivers, dares the rapids and explores the waterworld below the churn of sparkles? The intrepid wildlife researcher and an alumnus of Panjab University, Aashna Sharma, did just that.
*No one who visits Kullu-Manali comes back without indulging in a hazardous perch on a Beas boulder. The waters snarl around and speed away to their destiny with stillness. The rivers are of such agility and Swarovski-crystal clarity that, as we perch, our inner eye wanders and inevitably compares them to the murky, crawling large drains they turn to in the lurking plains.
What if someone plunges into that passionate surge of mountain rivers, dares the rapids and explores the waterworld below the churn of sparkles? The intrepid wildlife researcher and an alumnus of Panjab University, Aashna Sharma, did just that. Snorkeling the rapids and pools was a professional requirement while assessing the impact of climate change on the native snow trouts. What magical tricks did lonely, wandering clouds play upon her as she probed the stream of the Parvati and Tirthan rivers (sub-basins of Beas) in the Great Himalayan National Park? What secrets lay there, asleep in the deep?
“Things under water looked so different than what they seemed to be when I was not in it! Those days, I felt I had been colour blind all my life, or that some invisible being had given me a higher sense to witness colours under the waters, that others could not see. I let myself float freely to explore the boulders, rapids and pools around me. The boulders lined by layers of algae had the finest of clinging sand particles. As I headed closer to one of them to observe the ‘streamscape’, the backdrop suddenly lit up into a sunset-orange colour. The sunrays hitting the stream took my breath away, everything was magnificent. As though the stream had switched on a night lamp. The grey boulder I was clinging to shimmered as its sand particles reflected the sunlight in multiple colours and directions, just as a cloudy night sky illuminates with fireworks,” Sharma told this writer.
As she was joyously snorkeling amid ‘aqua-prismed’ colours, a strange fear gripped her heart. “I saw a shadow moving over the bottom of the stream that barred sunlight. Suddenly I remembered the fisherman’s warning of roving bears. I lifted my head from the water. There was nothing around. I looked up and saw a globular cloud slowly veiling the sun. ‘Ah, it was a mischievous cloud’, I quipped to myself,” she said.
“Days spent in the wilderness are most blissful to a researcher, and must be, to any soul dwelling on Earth. I feel we are inextricably all linked. And knowing not of nature’s ecological systems, keeps our wisdom incomplete about our inner selves. At times, the pristine natural ecosystems show me my own self expanded in a larger space,” she added.
The way one sees it
*A piece of derelict flora was waiting to be disposed of. But an unfortunate turn of events led to an eye, exceptionally sensitive to Mother Nature, chancing upon it. That decaying flora was resuscitated by the imaginative mind as a stag, an antelope, a wild buffalo, a Himalayan ungulate (an Ibex, Markhor etc) so uncanny was its resemblance to an antlered / horned creature.
It was as if the soul, the spirit of a wild creature had fleshed out that shape. A marvel really, of driftwood or the shapes and visions we make out in the twists, turns and gnarls that Nature’s design lends to branches, trunks, stems etc.
IA Chandigarh-based MARKFED employee, Sukhwinder Singh, met with an unfortunate accident. He repaired to his native home in Dhuri, Sangrur. To facilitate convalescence, he shifted to his brother’s house for six months. There, in the backyard, the Nature-loving Sukhwinder came across the piece left over from a clump of Lantana weed that his brother had uprooted.
The brother saw nothing exciting in it except “rubbish”. Sukhwinder inverted the piece, saw something unusual and hung it from a tree. He put up the picture on social media and it drew imaginative comparisons. Karma may not always be a bitch!
That piece is now enshrined in Sukhwinder’s collection of natural relics. It won’t be unceremoniously torched to ashes in some dump — that nameless, pauper’s graveyard of things we don’t see or would want to see, ever again.
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