The timeless value of 'wastelands'

The ground was a black, pitted surface and a white mist touched it with an old familiarity.

- NEHA SINHA

A little drizzle lay on the proceedings: suspending rather than falling on petals, eyelashes, bark and skin. And through the mist, there were flowers-tens of thousands of flowers: blue swishing against white, dark pink with light pink, purple nodding against yellow, masses of electrifying pink on pink. The colours ran over the dark lunar-like slope in a frenzy, candy swirls melting into the ground.

We stood there, taking in the scene, trying to fold in our bodies to avoid damage to the flowers. Impatiens lawii was all around us, the flower pink with a purple throat-the colour of a rich, syrupy cocktail you have with friends when the sun is going down. Then there were purple flowers, layered with a lighter centre-Utricularia, a bladderwort species. They stood next to tiny white flowers which were reminiscent of carrot blossoms. Yellow, daisy-like Linum mysorense nodded gently. Near them were “mickey mouse” flowers-yellow petalled with red dots, looking like the ears of an animated childhood friend, like the plant would start speaking. Malabar larks whipped into the blooms, their wings a blur, their crest an exclamation. Frogs sat in rock pools. Crabs hid under grass. We were on the Kaas plateau in Maharashtra, and everything was urgently and vividly alive.

Every year in the post-monsoon time, around September, the lateritic plateaus of Western Ghats burst into dramatic blossom. Formed by continuous volcanic deposition, many of these plateaus appear flat, and so are also called tablelands. In summer, they look bare, even barren. Wind whips the land and the sun is pitiless. The soil is thin, appearing almost nonexistent. But that is the nature of the area: harshness is its feature. And as usually is the case, this is a twin to abundance. Come monsoon, the plateaus soak up moisture, helped along by the porosity of the rocks.