A Captain's Dream

I met up with Mohan, an old friend going back to our days as cadets under the Indian flag, who after tossing around the high seas finally settled down to setting up a designer boutique resort off Lonavla. After his fervent pitch to checkout his place on the edge of the Western Ghats located on the now proposed Bhimashanker/Rajmachi wildlife preserve and compounded with the erstwhile lion of Maharastra’s most picturesque fort of Shivaji at Rajmachi in his backyard, it was enough for me to checkout this one out. What the Captain claimed was more than true, though seeing the property must have set him back the best part of umpteen contracts on Hong Kong, European and Greek rust buckets.

It was just right, no concrete jungle, off the Lonavla belt. I got in in a snap from Mumbai en route to Pune on the spanking new expressway, and after a few kilometres of slithering through near vertical drive towards the last bit, I was quietly settled in the Captains lounge to exchange old yarns and do justice to his Australian wine shipped home and saved up for such evenings, from his sailing days. Apparently Payal and he started it as their home away from it all, but midway the dream had run amok to encompass a property spread over 2.5 acres with a swimming pool, Jacuzzis and saunas (he plans to market his place as a spa eventually for the select few later).

For the moment he was just supplementing his income by inviting select friends and odd visitors from overseas and boy, was I the lucky first to stay at his pad.

As I stepped into his backyard, the most amazing views unfolded, the Rajmachi forts of Shivaji stood on a twin spur of rock, Matheran twinkled in the dusty haze from Bombay, but the air was as pure as the clear and odourless ozone of the mid Pacific, this was the captains new part of his oceanic past. The captain claimed you could see the sea and Bombay on a clear day from his property at the back and after a few more of Fremantle’s best Port, I told him I could see the dusty fume haze of just vacated Delhi too, if we tried a bit harder, well we agreed on confirming this yarn for sure one day later.

From the rooftop of his ancestral home in Rani-ka-Baug, Amritsar, we could see the looms of Lahore, too.

I was to stay a single day, but his wife’s food made me stay another and the enticing Rajmachi forts beckoned too, the rains had lavished some of the best waterfalls, and the fuji film greens of the sweeping grass just made me take this one trip to Rajmachi. I am allegedly fattened and obese to a limit which just forbids me to travel more than ten paces, the captain says no sweat, he yanks a mean 4 wheel drive SUV and I plump myself into the air-conditioned front passenger seat as taking tours to Rajmachi is his ante for nature lovers only, he’s the first one to handle these for the non backpacking set like me. I at times wished my legs would take me to savor the still preserved western Ghats biosphere of the Bhimashanker wild life sanctuary just a days trek away.

As we drove by through the jungle, the captain enlightened me on the wildlife endemic to the area, of the Indian giant brown squirrel (Ratufa indica elphinstoni) which still surprisingly still exists in the preserve of Bhimashankar and Dhak (a rock cut temple to dedicated to Kal Bhairav), I just saw some big Langurs and jungle fowl, though captain has sighted leopards and even lost a dog to them a few years ago, then there’s plenty of wild boar and the elusive Kalga and the big Sambhar deer to the mouse deer, though this proposed preserve is recomended for nocturnal miscellanea on night safaris. He further confounded me with the information of a fungi type lichen which apparently glowed at night on tree barks, now this one was going a bit too far, so to prove his point he whipped out a recent National Geographic article on Indonesia & Malaysia where I read that it does exist in the Borneo forests, too. He advised me to take a trip to Kotakinabalu nature reserve in Sabha in East Malaysia ( It sounded like Timbaktu to me) so I took a note to check this one too with the BHNS (Bombay Natural History Society) at Mumbai on my way out without antagonizing the dead serious captain by my frequent frowns. I then kept mum.

I wasn’t the one to climb a fort, and that too a near vertical climb of at least 800 feet, but the enticing view prompted me to, and boy, did I see a 360 degree panorama that sweeps from the famed Dukes Nose of the British Raj days (the Duke of Edinburgh lies silently with his stiff upturned British nose and broad forehead checking out the heavens and his legs traverse to the broad sweep of Matheran /Karjat ranges to Hajji Malangs pinnacle rock and onwards to the Dhak/Bhimashankar spur and the massive lakes of Shirotra and back to the Ghats of Khandala). I was just jerked back into our time with the distant drone of an airliner from the East making its approach to Sahar, it was amazing that I was just a scratch away from Bombay.

The Belt of Orion winks back at us, as we look at skies we never see from cities anymore.

What the rains did to this area was a riot of green and tropical forests with rolling mists. A most amazing waterfall spiked into an abyss which the captain has nicknamed as the Shiva’s trident, it is a three pronged trident, jabbed into the Yoni maw of rock and water that has carved out a hollow the size of 20 football fields and accessible only by a crazy rappel with a 500 foot descend line or a sharp spiral descend of a paraglide. My imagination rode wild at the handiwork of 200 million year of natures yarn (perhaps, as I guess when the Ghats had taken shape).

And then. And then. My cell phone rang itself shrill as I picked up the SOS signal from the mad house of modernity just 60km as the crow flies at Pune. I felt like whirling this weird gadget into the 800 foot chasm from where probably some Aurangzeb followers got rocks and hot oil thrown at them while rappelling up the lingam rock face to catch the mountain lion about 300 years ago.

Rajmachi, I was told, was the first of the defending bastions to the Deccan plateau, of the ferocious Maratha stronghold of yore at Poona. A quaint little ancient Shiva temple sits peacefully next to a more recent mosque, both besides the steps of a pool with a 1100 AD plaque, and artifacts lie buried at places where the captain has hidden them from robbing eyes of vandals till they find a place in the future Rajmachi museum. Today just the backpackers scratch their love’s graffiti, and smoke the Nandis and Shiva lingams off Rajmachi temples with their night camp fires and the caves that house the giant water storage tanks for Shivaji’s armies. .

Rajmachi mercifully is beyond the hordes yet, but a road is slowly digging and winding its way to it, for a while only interrupted by the forest departments merciful savior of bureaucratic lethargy. Still, pristine forests traverse the road and the chasms and nature comes back to rule with a fury in the heavy rains when its only approachable by footpath and track, by the most hardy and determined ( the captain tells me there’s a casualty every year . . . some folks swept down by the monsoon torrents trying to ford the furious rivers.).

The captain laments the delay in the proposal of converting this last vestige of the Western Ghats biosphere into a wildlife and a nature park which for present lies buried in Mumbai’s Mantralaya under a stack of khaki files awaiting the mantris nod, numerous petitions and visits still hasn’t set the government seal on preserving this last surviving gem of the western ghats, but the captain is optimistic his dream of the giant squirrels and glowing lichens will wake up the deep slumber of our wise rulers one day. He drives me back through the scene of the Adivasi way of life and the Adivasis "jhoom-ing" that yields the Nachini roti (its a ruffage buffs’ultimate with a healthy dose of irons and vitamins, grown most organically as nature surely does). He takes me to show the glimmer of hope in the 200 adivasi children fed, sheltered and educated at the Thakurwadi school, run by the Adishakti trust with help from the Government of India and foreign donors in the hope that one day they don’t cut wood for a living from the captains backyard of the Rajmachi wildlife and nature park.

I leave with a heavy heart and a resolve to pen this and make the captains dream into reality of providing a skills training schools so that carpets and other adivasi art and craft can prosper and not denuded forests, and that these bright shinning eyes don’t lumber firewood to town for a living. Once again my cell phone trills and I know I have to get back, the captain waves a moist hard goodbye and we part misty eyed as we had once parted 25 years ago as shipmates at the gangway and I wish him all Godspeed and luck in his dreams and realities of making Captains his little nature resort a success.

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