skies, and their different personalities
all different colours / never the same / but they always make me cry at the end
Last week, I went to Munnar, Kerala with my parents and sibling. Nestled in the Western Ghats, it was the most beautiful place I had perhaps been to: before that, I had been to Coorg, high amongst the plateaus of Karnataka. I had thought then, at the top of the Thalacauvery (the birthplace of the river Kaveri), that I could never see another part of this country as lovely as this, the clouds having their births. But — as Mary Oliver has always put — our world is so much of wonder, so full of it that Munnar felt as if I was being brought back to life with a renewed vigour to embrace this world. Standing with acrophobia prickling at my soles at Ervakulam National Park with a ball of cloud, I thought about the sky.
For the skies in Kerala seemed to have a mind and body of their own.
“If you want to fly / saying I can't go back / I was looking for / white, white that cloud / If you penetrate/ know that you can find it / the more you shake it off/ blue, blue that sky.” — ‘Blue Bird’, ikimonogatari
On the way from Ernakulam (Kochi) to Munnar, I saw skies kissing the waters that flooded in and out of the oceans and in bridges below me. Clouds stubbornly clung onto the blue horizons as if they were cotton candies stitched on a dress. Unlike the cities, where the blue skies were never ending, ever lasting, near; the hilly skies felt farther away, in another dimension to me. Mist hung from the little waterfalls I came across, trying to bend into the waters. The skies went through a filter, and clouds over clouds over clouds jostled their way through, through, through. I couldn’t peel my eyes away from their splendour, their holiness; it felt as if I had stepped into Han Kang’s eternal love for the white clouds, white snow, white lakes (wish I had a physical copy of ‘The White Book’. I would have held it to the clouds themselves, saying look. A book that truly knows you.)
I loved the blue, blue skies with clouds, and I keep repeating their shapes to my lips, over and over.
That is, until the rains came and took my breath away, the summer rains.
“When it rains, I, a bit, / feel like I have a friend / it keeps knocking on my windows / and asks me how I’m doing.” — ‘Forever Rain’, RM.
When the skies darkened in anticipation, and the driver pulled the windows up to trap me in my nausea, rain became my friend. I watched the drops pour down the glass and trickle down to the earth. In the spice gardens, being scared of mosquitos and heights, gripping my umbrella, the rain thuds against me. The mud becomes red and the flowers slowly bloom. I saw one relax and flex its muscular petals against the fastening raindrops. The bus to the Park bending into the rising, rainy oblivion as I grip the handlebars and look at it on the face. It said to me, I will cherish you. You fall not into the tea gardens, but into my everlasting embrace. And perhaps I held it close to me as I read in the hotel room, as we watched the Kalari Payattu performances amidst the loud thunder and the clash of a tree with the metal roof.
In Aleppy, we had a hotel beside the river, and that’s where I saw the most splendid sunsets. The sun seemed like it was being embraced by the clouds and the billion palm trees that rose and fell in the Kerala landscape. Suddenly, as I stood there, I wanted to cry. I wanted to embrace the world like the clouds did. The swift warmth they must feel when they pull the sun down the horizon. The biggest cloud seemed like a whale to me, here to take the sun on its back and into the horizon. As if it was the spirit of dusk, pulling the young Osiris’ near-dead body back into the underworld as humanity grasped the last vestiges of a summer sun that perhaps would not come back the next day. But the sun always does, doesn’t it? It always does.
“The sun shines on the cold, the clouds embrace blue / riding on the wind, right now, to that place, blue / inside my heart, comforting me now, blue / under the blue moonlight, I, alone, blue.” — ‘Blue Side’, JHope.
I feel a change rise within me as I went from Munnar to Thekkady to Alleppey to Kochi to Mumbai because suddenly, I felt aware of the world. Me, who would daydream in an instant about a sight I could see, a song I could hear, couldn’t get the time to drift. For the world around me felt like one — a beautiful dream I was both awake in and asleep in. Desperately, I began drinking the world in. Desperately, I began sweeping the sights on the roof of my tongue, trying to reach the misty clouds. This world where I am briefly gorgeous, where time is a mother and I’m running out of it, I desperately caught the world in my palms. There, I felt like I only had a moment to drink in an entire ocean of beauty.
Here — in the moments in the state — I think I proved Emerson right after all. I yearn for beauty in nature, after all.
Thank you for being with me, dear reader. See you soon.
What I’m Reading These Days!
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood: I approached this book first as a non-fiction read about the pros and cons of social media and ended up with it being complete poetry in prose (when buying it, I wondered why it was in the poetry section. Now I know). But regardless of that confusion, I came to love this book so much. Lockwood’s words are so beautiful that I felt as if I was there, I was the woman. Especially the parts where she saw beauty in her sister’s child and wrote perhaps some of the most heart-wrenching prose. I loved it.
Blue Iris by Mary Oliver: One of the promises to myself was that I will attempt to read more poetry this year, and I think I wanted to give Blue Iris a (re)read because of Munnar. Because being amidst the tea gardens, the misty clouds, I wished that Mary Oliver should come there. I wanted her there, studying the waterfalls, the spices that grew, the tiny florets. I think she would have adored the place. On first reading, I thought that ‘Goldenrod’ was my favourite, but now it is most definitely ‘The Lilies Break Open in the Dark Water’ (partly because I used it as a reference to BTS’ ‘Skit: Expectation!’ but I love it nevertheless).
this was utterly beautiful, i felt like crying, feeling like i was there and made me want to taste the world for myself, meet all those different skies with all their different personalities.
happy to know you enjoyed the trip!!
"This world where I am briefly gorgeous, where time is a mother and I’m running out of it, I desperately caught the world in my palms." wow, now that's one hell of a phrase...
lovely pictures! i'm happy to hear you seemed to enjoy your trip