i love

Is it just me, or can you also see the sky-heart in the pic ?

The first thing you notice as you ride out past the township wall is that suddenly there are very few people about; even among those that go by, hardly anyone is on a motor- vehicle. What you see instead, are butterflies: small, quick, bright yellow ones, large slower orange ones, orange ones with white stripes, orange ones with black spots, black ones with white spots, mousy-grey which seem most ordinary till the sun reflects off their wings...  If you go slow they tease you, flitting about your handlebars, promising to land if you just held out your palm...
That's probably all the movement you get to see. Absolute peace and silence reigns.

You are immersed in a whole cacophony of green; a long time of admiring well-laid out gardens and orderly conifers in temperate woods had quite blurred my memory of how wildly diverse the sights and scents of a monsoon fed forest could be! There's the bright green of paddy fields in which rice has been just transplanted, the dark green of the Sal, and all the in-betweens contributed  by a hundred other species of tree and shrub and bush and creeper.

By the way, did I say silence ? I mis-represent facts.

The crickets are still chirping at noon, each contributing its own note to the general rhythm. A couple of birds call out to each other, you can hear the knock-knock-knock in the distance of what might be a woodpecker or a wood-cutter. The silvery tinkle of a bell tips you off about a herd goats passing by somewhere in the undergrowth, a deeper tong-tong-tong gives off the position of the herd of cows. From further off, the breeze carries the gurgle of the swollen stream, jumping off the rocks, exuberant with its monsoon bounty.

The Indian jungle has a music of its own.