Horton Plains in abundant illumination

 

Long before I learned thanks to social media that our country is far more beautiful than we thought it was and at a time when I hadn’t lived enough and hadn’t the means to travel as much as I have since, Maha Eliya or Horton Plains, was my preferred travel destination. This was in the eighties.

So my friends and I would take the night mail train to Ohiya. It would reach Ohiya at dawn. We opted for the trail that went through the tropical montane forest which was prettier and more interesting than the tarred road to the plains. And shorter.

Thereafter we would spend a few days, usually two to four but once seven, ‘up there’ where we did not belong but were indulged by the forces and (other) creatures of nature. We were duly enchanted by the silence, low temperatures, mists, birdsong, vast open spaces, starry nights, grazing sambur, the occasional wild boar, leopard droppings, mountains, streams, waterfalls, wayside flowers and berries. And the silence.  

That immensity is humbling. And it hit me particularly hard on at least two occasions. The first was at World’s End. It was early morning and there was no mist. We could see the lay of our land all the way to the Southern coast. I remembered the map of Sri Lanka. I realised what a tiny island we live on. And yet that tiny island seemed enormous to me that morning. And I realised how small I am.

Then there was a particularly clear night in December. The skies were so clear that we could see shooting stars and satellites. The universe, I knew, was larger than our planet and I already knew how small our island is.  

Decades later a friend added perspective: ‘we are on a pas-guliya (clod of soil) that goes around the sun. That too was humbling.

But the plains!

I knew even then that although it is but a tiny spot on the map of Sri Lanka, Maha Eliya was too enormous to be explored exhaustively. I know what I saw. I remember. I knew that others who visited this fascinating Maha Eliya would have seen things I hadn’t seen. I didn’t know that they could see differently what had caught my eye.

I’ve seen sunlight on the plains. I’ve seen it rain. I’ve seen dusk yielding to night. I hadn’t seen heaven descending on heaven. Kasun De Silva did. He captured four distinct layers. In the foreground, the plains. At its end, the trees. Above, a dull-blue sky and above it a thick and ominous layer of rain clouds.

Heaven to heaven. How so?

There were two distinct streams of light, angling, connecting the earthly layer and the rectangular block of storm-clouds captured in the composition. Heaven, first as metaphor for territories above, and secondly as descriptive of the land we are privileged to inhabit, a land that can make us feel divine or at least divinely endowed. 

Kasun had a companion capture. He had taken it about thirty minutes earlier from the opposite side. This I responded to as follows:

Night is imminent, says the sky
and adds, ‘I am pregnant with rain.’
But now,
through cloud-gap
or mountain pass
but as though deliberate
and not atmospheric accident
nor geographic architecture
light streamed in,
unexpected and soft.
The plains are painted.
Indelibly.

He said, ‘lovely, ayya!’

And I informed him: ‘Your photo reminded me of a chance encounter with a beautiful girl. Wrote it for her actually.  The unintended consequences of your photography!’

He asked: ’Bitter sweet memories?’

‘Still in the sweet phase,’ I was smiling when I wrote this. I did tell him, ‘so read it as a love poem, it would read very differently.’ He already had: ‘…as soon as you said it. The meaning totally changed. Awesome with both cases. And beautiful with both as well.’

And so we continued.

‘Poetry, like all art including photography, belongs to the “reader.”’

All of the above, for most readers, would be incidental and quite irrelevant, but not his final observation:

‘I believe every landscape has its own mood and own feeling.  Every landscape has a story and an emotion as well as a character. So, to me capturing a landscape is as similar as photographing a human.’

And so I revisited Horton Plains, convinced that ‘Maha Eliya’ which literally means ‘Great Light’ but has connotations of open space as well, is a name far more rational and for many reasons too than the dull and troubling description of a geographical element to which the name of a colonial thug was tagged. 

I revisited Maha Eliya, feeling blessed that I had witnessed emotions and character. I may or may not see the ‘maha eliya’ descending on our heaven, but I told myself that even if I cannot capture landscape-people the way Kasun does, I can still revisit and hopefully see, notice and remember them. I could be delighted all over again. And feel blessed to inhabit a heaven-lit paradise, right here on earth. 

[This article was published in the Daily News under the weekly column title 'The Recurrent Thursday']