The Jungle

We were stopped by the edge of the road, not on the shoulder, because there wasn’t one. There was still room for one-way traffic to go by. That wasn’t a problem because, despite this being a major highway, there was little traffic. In fact, the 20 minutes we waited for our car’s overheated engine to cool off, we were passed only by a few pedestrians and a large wooden cart, pulled by two small oxen, and piled high with stalks of grain headed for the mill.

This was the main road across India, connecting Mumbai (then, Bombay) and Nagpur.

I don’t remember it being a bumpy road. There wasn’t a pothole to be seen. It was, however, a road of patches. Each one seemed about a foot across, but they all ran together to literally create a patchwork quilt of solid roadway…shades of black to gray, showing the various ages of repair.

My aunt told it was a teak jungle that surrounded us. The word “jungle” evokes an image of lush growth and a tall canopy of trees with massive trunks and hung with vines. That is not at all what I saw. It was the dry season and the grass was dead and the trees looked dead too; all sparse and dry; parched. Because they were so barren and leafless, the trees looked small, too. There were no giant trunks and I wondered how anyone could get enough wood out of one of these trees to make a piece of furniture.

I soaked in the strangeness of it all and as the quiet moments passed, it struck me that not all the trees were barren. One tree just down the road was fully leafed out and green! I walked slowly across the road to get a better look. “Don’t go off the road,” my aunt called, “there are snakes out there.” No way was I going to leave the road.

I approached the tree and apparently gotten close enough, because all at once the leaves took flight! Hundreds of green parakeets erupted from the branches and whirled in the air, chattering their displeasure at being interrupted in their midday rest. They circled and spun like a living cloud and then they were gone, speeding away from my intrusion, leaving their perch as barren and leafless as its neighbors.


Interstate, Bombay to Nagpur, India, 1978