Last Tuesday I caught an off-season hill station by surprise.
Ever since, I've been itching to chronicle the things I saw -- "saw".
But I curb myself.
Travelogue, I've come to suspect, is soft writing,
A home-delivered pizza that keeps the saucepan of imagination unlit.
It altogether eliminates having to look a reticent blank page in the eye all day in hopes of teasing inspiration out.
It guarantees sleep.
It hires a secretary and dismisses the muse.
"Describe the pictures in your head in 500 words or less."
And that, reader, is why I'm not gushing about the orchid petals and the snaking river and the bison and the kurinji blossom and the spotted deer and the luscious kamala oranges and the coffee berry -- or their lack thereof.
Not because they, in absentia, were not fine pegs to hang a tale by, but because I am not that flavour of writer.
Not because my sleeve isn't brimming with lines like "Seen sights are curious, those unseen are curiouser and curiouser", but because in general I prefer to talk about, say, a stripe of moonlight cutting through the heart of a lovelorn damsel, or strive to fly the word "spezzatura" amidst the rough weather of an ode and land it on a stanza without crashing it.
Much rather would I indulge in such unashamed birotechnics, than clamp sentences onto sensations past, a labour that bears out little more than powers of portrayal.
Vast as the fascinating gulf between truth and travel brochure is, I oughtn't to give in.
And therefore, with resolute heart, the orchid plant no longer a-bloom will have to be pinched by the stem and pulled whole out of my poem, and tossed to the margins,
Where it will have to jostle for space with the Cauvery stealing her chilly way under the floor of the cave that wriggles all the way to Mysuru,
The leafy grounds said to heave beneath the hooves of mountain bison at night,
The kurinjis expected to awaken next spring only to squint at the skies and wind the alarum up for another dozenyear,
The Deer Park closed on Tuesdays presumably to annoy the town barber,
The unripe oranges swaying in the breeze -- emerald pendulums -- as if impatient to live up to their name,
And the first coffee flower I ever saw.
