March 1 to 14, 2004

That He would also snuff the harmful from this idyllic world...

KOSAGIR is a tiny village that could well be R K Narayan's Malgudi. It has the same sylvan charm, with green fields stretching their arms to hold up the mango orchards that border them, and boys riding the buffaloes as they return homeward, their horns dipping as they lumber back in the deepening shadows.I saw it briefly from my train window on the way back to Mumbai from Chennai, and wondered whether it would not be a nice idea to live there, at least for a while.

A FEW kilometres south, the amazing rocks that make up so much of the Deccan plateau would be a great adventure to discover. I've always wondered about how each seems to have its own character. Even now, as I watched them flit past my window, I noticed how some of them stood stacked one against another like men leaning to pull at a rope in a tug of war, how others lay seemingly carelessly as though a house of cards had collapsed. Still others seemed to mimic some clown's antic, as one perched dizzily over another one-hundredth its size just a few metres away from another pair that was quite the opposite: The tiny rock on top was almost invisible compared to the giant it sat on...

TO the north of the village as the train went on, were more fields and tiny rivulets. The mighty Krishna river was still some distance off, but intimations of its presence were obvious in the dampness of the soil. Fertile land, I told myself; the peasants here should lead a comfortable life.

BUT something nagged. Something that told me that into this quiet verdant surrounding, there was the infiltration of a malevolent, insidious evil. I had seen it the moment I had taken my place near the window, waiting for the rocks. All along the tracks, like a border running at the edge of a sari, the white and silver scraps of plastic lay. The first glimpse made me think that it was but one of those places where the railway crew, in all its wisdom empties the waste bins into which conscientious travellers put all their litter, but as the minutes passed, I noticed that the wrappers and used paper plates, the 'gutka' covers, the chips packets, the coloured plastic bags continued with a monotonous regularity. Every passenger from every compartment of the 16 that this train held, and on every other train that passed every day up and down this way had obviously done his or her bit to add to the waste that now lay bordering the tracks.

OVER the years, they would pile up... When the winds blew, the debris would fly about, and when the rain came, soak into the ground, making way for new waste to take its place.

ALREADY in Kosagir, I could see empty bags, blown by the wind, lying about in the fields. Soon, the rain would send them into the earth, and there they would lie, neither melting nor tearing, but festering like a cancer that would not let anything else grow in its wake. Would it, I wondered, effect a terrible change in the now prosperous life of its people, if the ground yielded less and less each year as more of it went under the shroud of plastic waste?

FOR one mad moment, I wanted to pull at the chain and stop the train as it whistled on its way, and show my co passengers what I could see - the beginning of the end of an idyll.

BUT of course, I did no such thing. I only prayed to some unknown god who looked after villages, that Kosagir and villages like it, would remain unspoilt and pure, and that nothing would spoil the fertility of the soil, so that boys of carefree spirit could still ride buffaloes as they lumbered home after a day spent wallowing in the mud.