A Sarus Serenity

For Susan Mathews, Amanda Graham, Roy McMillan, and Robert Macfarlane. And, in memory of Nani-Nana.

“If we return to the old home as to a nest, it is because memories are dreams, because the home of other days has become a great image of lost intimacy.” 

Gaston Bachelard

“Dikkhi aaye apne bhai-bandhu?” So you have returned after seeing your fellow-beings?

Ma posed the query part matter-of-factly, part expectantly, in her sing-song Kangri dialect, as I stepped into the long sunlit verandah of my late maternal grandparents’ home, a little after breakfast. This had been going on for some time now: me quietly slipping away at the crack of dawn to meet my ‘bhai-bandhu,’ and then plodding back a couple of hours later; shoes half-drenched in mud, trousers imprinted with dew and mulch along the shins, and a heart full of uncontainable contentment. Yet again, the sarus cranes had generously sustained the sense of assurance and endurance I had so strongly come to associate with this landscape. 

Standing up to a height of five feet and eleven inches, and equalling the stature of an average human adult, sarus cranes sport a predominantly light-grey plumage balanced on a long pair of pink legs. With their firm-yet-flexible necks, long, pointed beaks and bald, crimson heads, they invite a sacredness entirely their own. Indeed, in several parts of the subcontinent, these birds have long been held as holy. But here, in the lower Himalayan region of my ancestral home, they have additionally been venerated for their proximity to God, who is said to listen to all their entreaties, even if the pleas of other mortals go unheeded.

Rait—that is what my Nani-Nana’s village is called. It’s a little nondescript settlement that lies on National Highway 154A at an altitude of 676m. The geography ensconcing it, however, is anything but featureless. For this is the astonishing Kangra Valley of Himachal Pradesh. Opposites meet here in a glorious union of tropical and temperate, snow and sun, might and modesty. Within an hour, you can drive all the way up to McLeod Ganj, seat of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile since 1960, whose evening lights are visible in horizontal bands from our terrace. And coming down, the cedars and oaks seamlessly give way to the banyans and bamboos, mangoes and bananas, peepals and arjuns, the memory of a different air still fresh upon reaching the valley-base. 

Seen from afar, especially from an airplane lifting off from the local airport, the distinctiveness of this strike valley against its other Himachali counterparts can be easily gleaned. While places like Kullu and Chamba act as transverse valleys, with their major rivers cutting across ridges in a perpendicular fashion, in Kangra, the valley system runs parallel to the mountains. This is a region ruled by the Dhauladhar Himalayas that soar at an average height of 4267m, and roll on for around a hundred miles along an east-west axis. And while their granite-sculpted, slate-layered flanks are impressive, with certain peaks even touching 6000m, it is the massif’s meeting point with the lower hills, the Shivaliks, that maintains a singular grip upon me. 

Impressions of the prehistoric collision that chiseled the world’s grandest landform are still evident in the dramatic forgoing of levelness in favour of loftiness. Despite this, if one were flying over the mountains, it would be hard to ignore the poetic smoothness of the gently terraced slopes. Their lattice work of wheat and rice fields spreads across a series of streams and alluvial fans that had once fed the courts of the Mughals and the British Raj. The highway hosting Rait passes through this very farm-grid, running along the Dhauladhars for miles together. And once you cross the road and march southwards from our home, an agricultural idyll seamlessly springs forth within a matter of minutes.

This, then, has been the cynosure of my maternal homeland. I fondly call it Nana ki land (land of my maternal grandfather). It’s where my great-great-grandparents practiced farming since the beginning of the 20th century. As you keep pace with the narrow pathway ribboning through the territory, the emerging world resolves itself into a redoubtable wall of the Dhauladhars guarding the north, and a band of humble hillocks charmingly encircling the field of vision towards the east, south and west. 

And yet, these mountains held limited lure for me as a child. Because every evening, as Nana and I neared our smallholding during our ritual sauntering, our unequivocal aim was to catch a glimpse of something else—creatures that just might be there, ceremoniously standing a stone’s throw away in the marshy patch by the stream—a pair of sarus cranes. 

After Nana passed away in 1999, the frequency of my visits to Rait decreased. My widowed grandmother would spend her time with her children in different parts of the country, before breathing her last in 2015. My bond with Himachal therefore accrued around other places, especially Shimla, which lay over two-hundred kilometres south-east of Kangra, and where my father had spent the final phase of his tenured job. But his retirement in 2019 saw us shifting to the world’s most polluted area, Delhi’s National Capital Region, and it was then that my mother and I began experiencing the loss of the mountains, almost viscerally.

Time’s passage slowly made it clear to us that we had to forge a new link with the only house we had in the mountains, now in a state of disrepair. But this wasn’t just going to be an act of assuaging our highland-starved sensibilities; it was a conscious step towards reclaiming the roots that had birthed them in the first place. 

Unknown to us at the time, our trips to the mountains would be augmented in the coming years, making this transition all the more special. One fine evening in the spring of March 2021, after a spell of more than two decades, I suddenly spotted a pair of airborne sarus in Nana’s land. There they were, carrying the memories of my childhood walks under their strong, wide wings.

And that was the moment I knew that we had made the right decision to reunite with our ancestral dwelling. For the saruses had chosen to reveal themselves, elegantly and determinedly sailing their long bodies against prehistoric pyramidal peaks, before disappearing into oblivion. 

Fate flew me out of India on research work in 2022, and it wasn’t until the winter of 2023 that I properly reconnected with Rait. Upon return, I was greeted by a refurbished house with lemon-white walls and fresh flooring, all enlivened by Ma’s artistic touch. The novelty of the paint and plaster added new zeal to my life. I found myself more enthused by everything, including my walks through the fields and the prospect of encountering those winged beings again. With rampant haphazard development layering the landscape now, the sarus had given up their decades-old haunt by the road-stream. But the memory of that pair from a few years ago kept me hopeful and tethered to the terraced farms, their crisscrossing grids of foot-high borders serving as ready-made pathways for my explorations. 

And then, just as the January of 2024 was yielding its cool to the fertility of February, I finally located those imposing presences in the half-light of dusk, foraging in a direction opposite to where I had been searching. Still far away, but in much greater proximity than before, an apparition stitching together two different worlds, carving a picture of splendorous serenity not only through their composure, but also their count. For they numbered not two, not four, but seven. SEVEN!

It was common knowledge that you hardly ever saw a single sarus, for they always roamed in pairs. But nothing could have prepared me for a septenary revelation, an occurrence that resonated with the gravity and fame of vital collectivities, all tied together by the magical number: the colours of the rainbow, the days of the week, the notes of music, the sacred rivers of India, the wonders of the world, and on and on. All my life, I had prized this digit, even to the point of absurdity, so much so that a ‘seven out of ten’ in class-tests invariably felt more wondrous than a ‘nine out of ten.’ I now believe that that avian-vision manifested itself to vindicate my numerical bias, and, more importantly, to teach me that a group of seven saruses could never be absurd. 

Enigmatic, yes. Mystical, yes. But never absurd. 

The austere visual grammar embodied by these cranes is a far cry from the ostentation of peacocks and the regality of swans—the other two large avian species that permanently dwell in my imagination. Despite this, their upright demeanour has frequently recalled to my mind those tall and slender surahis from royal chambers of yore that were once used to store wine and water. And water defines their etymological basis too: the root-word for ‘sarus’ goes back to the Sanskrit ‘sarasa,’ meaning ‘lake bird,’ since they roost in shallow water and wet patches of land. Their field-probing can go on for half-a-day straight in an affable quietness. But when they decide to break this stillness—which is almost always unexpected—the whole world listens.

I vividly recall a February morning, a few days after making my primary acquaintance with The Seven, when I was first jolted out of myself by a sarus-call. Unlike all my previous sightings that had taken place in the evenings, this was also the first time I was encountering these birds in morning light, that added a remarkable crispness to their sheen. And what made this viewing even more special was the coming together of Valentine’s and Vasant Panchami on that very date. Against this backdrop of love and spring, I advanced towards the stately set of seven with my camera in hand, now well-versed with their ground-perch.

Recent experience had taught me the value of approaching the sarus at the slowest possible pace. A friend from the UK, who originally came across these birds via my Instagram account, had remarked on how ‘clerical’ their gait appeared. It was this deliberate manner that I tried emulating too. But given the uneven border-paths, I faltered every few steps, provoking a sarus or two to immediately raise their heads in apprehension and stare directly at me. Their customary confirmation of my innocuousness would be followed by a resumption of foraging, and I, for my part, soon found a spot under the shade of a resplendent arjun tree, just a handful of yards away. 

The next half-an-hour presented a calm drama of separation and return. In a few moments, a sarus-couple had left for the adjoining green fields, ranging towards the young wheat seedlings for fresh nourishment. It was then that I started recording a video, hoping to capture this drama in motion. Just as I was sinking into the saruses’ sun-lit silence, one of them decided to magnify its presence through a ringing, trumpeting expression, yanking me out of my charmed stupor, and I pressed the ‘stop’ button out of instant fear.

It wasn’t that I hadn’t heard the sarus speak before. Their arrivals and departures were habitually accompanied by a trailing guttural soundscape echoing across the earth-sky. But to experience their language so close and suddenly was to appreciate a specific kind of otherworldliness, one that brought out the truth of Annie Dillard’s claim that in nature, “terror and beauty are woven into the fringes of things both great and small.” Since the sarus are essentially harmless, this panic eventually disappeared over time. And yet, that impulsive jolt had ensured that I wouldn’t take lightly the serenity I had come to link them with. For equanimity was never that distant from awe-inducing sublimity, so much like the calm-yet-commanding Dhauladhars.

“I can barely conceive of a type of beauty where there is no melancholy,” remarked the French thinker Charles Baudelaire. Perhaps it is the fate of large, beautiful birds to have pain and sadness woven into their lore. Just as the legendary albatross was killed by the ancient mariner in Coleridge’s classic rime, stories conjuring sarus cranes also cavort with the imminence of death. Valmiki’s Ramayana for instance has an episode right in the beginning, where a hunter kills a male sarus (referred to as a ‘krauñcha’ in Sanskrit), sending its mate into a period of perpetual sorrow that symbolically foreshadows the epic’s themes of separation and suffering. And in a popular Urdu poem that my Nana’s father loved quoting from, tragedy strikes an airborne sarus separating it from the flock when a stalker aims his gun in its direction. Lost and miserable, the creature enters a state of extreme despondency until it is reunited with the group after many days. 

These fables of course draw upon the oft-peddled claim that a sarus wails itself to death once its partner dies. But they are also prescient, for the species today is classified as ‘vulnerable’ according to the IUCN. Efforts to conserve them have, however, been successful; Uttar Pradesh even regards it as its state bird. And yet, whenever I encounter these birds in my Himalayan village, I continue to be struck by their singular sort of fragility and tenderness, one that stems out of the rarity of beholding the planet’s tallest flying birds against its highest massif. It’s a miracle of two peerless verticalities plaiting together, that might not be glimpsed in the same way again. And perhaps this is why I have so often preferred to capture the sarus along with the mountains, instead of zooming acutely and focusing on their features, like a professional wildlife photographer might. For it’s the inseparability of crag and crane that has determined and defined the locus of my enchantment.

This inseparability has led to numerous other gifts as well, since every sarus-search has ended up widening and deepening my regard for the overall landscape and its multiple inhabitants. As winter gave in to spring and green wheat seedlings made way for bright yellow mustard, I exulted in the newness of frames through which I (re)saw my fellow-beings, relishing the close-knit enunciations of the words ‘saras’ and ‘sarson’ (Hindi and Kangri for mustard). Even on days when those tall creatures decided not to reveal themselves, I rejoiced in the extraordinary panoply of beings I did encounter. From the brilliant-blues of neelkanths and kingfishers, the rusty-metallics of crow-pheasants, the jet black shines of drongos, the screeching of a thousand parrots, the excitement of a million mynahs, the magnesium-flares of herons, the twitterings of bushchats, the staidness of hornbills, the earthiness of lapwings…this was a terrain perpetually alive and always giving.

In The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, a glorious paean to the pleasures of walking, celebrated British writer Robert Macfarlane notes that “we lack – we need – a term for those places where one experiences a ‘transition’ from a known landscape… into ‘another world’: somewhere we feel and think significantly differently.” He emphasizes that such places “exist even in familiar landscapes: there when you cross a certain watershed, recline or snowline, or enter rain, storm or mist. Such moments are rites of passage that reconfigure local geographics, leaving known places outlandish or quickened, revealing continents within counties.” In the last few years, all my walks in Rait have been marked by this very transition, for here is a land that has continually reconfigured itself, quickened my attention, stretched my soul. It is a land where feathers carry the memories of my forefathers, and where finitude extends itself to infinity, riding on a sarus call. 

And while the search for that term might never end, I’ll be content calling it a saruscape.