Have you heard the song, Varaha Nadhikarai Oram? It goes like this:
Varaha Nadhikarai Oram (On the bank of the river Varaha)
Orae Oru Paarvai Paarthaen (I caught a glimpse of you)
Puraavae Nillunu Sonnen (Bird, stop, I said)
Kanaavaay Oadi Maranjae (but you slipped away like a dream)
The song is from an old Tamil movie that I haven’t watched. I haven’t watched the video sequence either. But I loved the music and have been listening to the song for as long as I can remember. This could have been from one of the album cassettes my parents had.
The river bank I imagined was the kind that you see when you pass by large rivers over a railway or highway bridge, with a large sandy bank on each side. These were the only kind of rivers I had known. I had seen tiny streams, but Varaha is a river, a large one that floods at times and is in the news for it. I imagined that it would be difficult for the woman to slip away like a dream on a large bank; one has to sprint, and it’s not easy to do that on a sandy bank.
The next set of rivers I saw were in Northern India. These glacier-fed rivers have rocky banks and hills on both sides. They run quite shallow during the first half of the day and rise during the night. It takes that long for the melted glacier water to come down. Varaha isn’t in the north; hypothetically, even if it were, sprinting on a rocky bank isn’t very fun.
A few days ago, we went to trek the Netravati Peak. The day before, we had trekked the Kudremukh, which I learned after trekking was the 2nd highest peak in Karnataka. I was tired, but when we started the next day’s trek to Netravati, 3 km in, I started not feeling any of the tiredness I did at the start. I find it eerie when my body does that. I have experienced doing extremely physically demanding activities on mere adrenaline, only to crash really badly afterwards. So I decided to stop at the bank of Netravati and wait for the rest of the group to go to the peak and come back. I love the deafening sound of the river and the birds and crickets. It’s hypnotic and therapeutic. I can easily spend 2 hours there (that’s how long it would take one to go to the peak and come back from that section).
Sitting there, I realised that Varaha might also be flowing in similar landscapes to Netravati. No sandy or rocky banks. Thick jungle, the kind you can use as a curtain, the kind you can’t see through, the kind behind which an animal could be hiding and you wouldn’t notice, or you may catch a glimpse but it would slip away before you even realise what you saw. The lyrics Kanaavaay Oadi Maranjae suddenly made sense.
