Origins...

I visited the abode of my childhood - Siliguri for just a couple of days prior to crossing the Atlantic. The queen of hills – Darjeeling, was in the process of being usurped by people who think it belongs more to them than the rest of the world. Accompanying my parents, I drove up to the foothills of The Great Himalayas into the mushy trails of a tropical forest ironically named as the land of dryness – ‘Sukna’ in local language.

As one would expect in the middle of the year in these parts of the globe, it was pouring. The ground smelled wet, brooks emanated from puddles which had coalesced into a pond, the leaves wore bathed looks and gray clouds rendered the perfect bass for this monsoon orchestra. The rain was beating down fiercely on the muddy slope that maintained the forest path in place. We noticed that the impact of the rain drops had started to create a stippled motif on the muddy canvas.

My father attributed the origin of the stipples to the presence of pebbles in the ground which resisted the impact of the drops thereby stabilizing the land mass beneath it. In absence of pebbles, the drops could erode away the mud. Two tiny saplings stood testimony to this battle between the elements – Water and Earth. We anticipated the formation of an interesting landscape as the rain drew towards an end. The wait yielded a memory which had to be cared for – it had to be the cover picture of one of my first creative literary endeavours. Since my father is more comfortable with the pen than the mouse, the second sapling had to be my other partner in literary creation & criticism – Platinum. She appreciated the idea of a joint blog and the memory got framed as above.

I ran out of fuel for naming the blog as most of it had been used up in conceiving it. It had to be arbit in nature and so here was Verdigris – a phonetically interesting synonym for the bluish green mass we had long observed on copper vessels since our childhood. Calling it a day with the hope that posts and comments keep accumulating on this shingle of our life.

Carbide