21st May 25
The old man shared the change with my wife.
The entry fee to the Silent Valley National Park was paid - part digital, part cash, and the cash settled with the man in his late 60s who had stood in the queue before us waiting for the change. He had all the cliches of a Tamil wise man.
Dressed in a safari suit with white hair combed into a nest-shaped firmness, he was a shade darker, a foot shorter, but strangely had no shoes.
I was waiting for his shoes to appear. It didn’t when he jumped into the front seat of the Mahindra Thar SUV.
Our unplanned visit to the Silent Valley had officially begun.
Jose was our guide and driver. A conservationist, he narrated tales of protests in 1985 popularized by the Poet Sugathakumari, whose poem ‘Ode to a Tree’ became the rousing song of protest. The pushback succeeded in stopping the construction of the Dam. A then newly minted prime minister – Rajiv Gandhi, inaugurated the National Park.
The roads leading to the forest didn’t leave any traces of the Dam as they were neatly laid as a 3-column pathway - tiled concrete placed at the two ends while the middle was set free with grasses inching up to the surface.
There were no bumps aside from the random brake of Jose, who kept watering down our expectations to see the Lion-tailed macaque, an inhabitant exclusive to the forest.
Within a kilometer, we saw the tired maintenance workers looking at us with smug smiles at our false expectations.
“Will we see the monkeys?”
Jose, like an aged parent who had seen the excitement of youth, the philosophizing of the middle-aged, and the acceptance of the aged, branded the journey as a retreat to nature and not spot any wild animals.
“The gift is the fresh air and fresh water,” he truthed, “that one rarely sees in an industrializing India.”
We all agreed.
Our exploration team was an extension of our family – my wife, my two kids, and the uncle and aunt, who we visited a day back.
The uncle, a retired evangelist, and a land dealer, had his fair share of travel under his belt.
He conversed with Jose about the road’s condition, the history, and the changes he had witnessed 25 years ago when he visited the forest.
While we were conversing in Malayalam, and Jose showed wild jack fruit trees and other rarities exclusive to the forest, the Tamil wise man in the front seat kept interrupting, clarifying the words the driver was speaking in Malayalam.
The clarification contrasted his earlier wisdom that ‘he understood Malayalam and all words in Malayalam were a mix of Tamil and Sanskrit.’
Once Jose translated the word to Tamil, the wise man pointed his mobile camera at the tall trees and shared the history of Tamil.
“Every Dravidian language came from Tamil.”
“Malayalam was founded just 400 years ago. “
I sensed the error as my recent memory, reading the writings of the 14th-century explorer Zheng He, revealed the prominence of Malayalam as a spoken language.
Maybe the wise man wasn’t as wise as he looked.
As I was processing the inaccuracy of the statement, he shared his credentials as a scholar in languages.
We let the statement pass and began conversing in Malayalam, comparing and contrasting the two languages.
The Wiseman shared about Senttamil or Pure Tamil as the origin of Malayalam.
“Tamil is the only language that can stand on its own, unlike Malayalam, which needs Sanskrit,“ he kept poking.
My wife – who was raised in Punjab, Maharastra and Uttar Pradesh, thought in Hindi.
She kept mistaking the Tamil words ‘Kolanda’ (child) and ‘Kolambu’ (curry), and we teased how she could go to a feast and ask for a child instead of curry.
That could be it.
The ‘easygoing’ demeanor of the wise Tamil man changed. He talked about the need for ‘educated Southies’ to stand up against Northies and the dominance of ‘Hindi.’
I looked at my wife as a hint to ‘should I start?’
My arguments in my previous life under the influence of liquid courage would last hours, often ending in escalating fights.
Many under my anger would lead to page-long correspondence that ended in arguments and insults.
I had curbed my behavior for the past three months.
I curbed it again, not to ruin a calm trip.
We changed topics and limited the conversation to our section of the SUV while the wise man kept narrating the superiority of the Tamil language.
My uncle, a man of god, couldn’t resist.
He poked, “Why are you here all alone in this beautiful forest? You have no partner?”
I could see the man time-traveling to his lost love, which he jokingly shared, “You reminded me of my wounded past.’
My wife signaled at my Uncle to stop like a daughter warning a father when the jokes become hurtful.
The language debate died its natural death as the Tamil wise man slowly climbed down the SUV to the firm footing of the Malayalee land in an India-government funded national park.
The irony seemed to have lost on the wise man.