Escape From the City: How I Found a Home in the Wilderness

Six years is a long time. Long enough to adjust to a new place. But though I created a small, wild place for myself in a terrace garden in Bangalore, I never quite managed to adjust fully or get comfortable. My last wild place in Bangalore resembled an unkempt zen-like space, bustling with activity from purple-rumped sunbirds and cinereous tits. Bird’s nest fungi never failed to appear with the rains, and occasional large-billed crows visited hoping to steal bone or marrow from my dog’s feast. In this tiny haven, I felt insulated from the happenings of the crowded metropolis beyond. It was a refuge for me and Noah, a German-shepherd-mix dog I’d adopted from a city shelter when we both needed each other the most. We tended the motley garden of bamboo, fungi, aloe, passiflora, dragonfruit, various grasses, and the assorted arrivals and refugees. Some came invited, others uninvited, but all were welcome. Those years were a lesson in how much life a little impoverished soil could support — a lesson in waiting. But I yearned for life beyond the city where I felt I could truly sink roots and breathe easy; six years was too damn long to be in the city. Running helped and kept me functional. Just being functional was a lot I could hope for, having known mental illness intimately for many years. The ceaseless restlessness was a constant. The yearning to be elsewhere wouldn’t go away. In my scheme of things, a city was no place to feel rooted. The itch to be closer to the wilderness wouldn’t subside. I knew that being in a place I loved would contribute to my general wellbeing and soothe frayed nerves and a restless mind. Living somewhere in the shadow of a mountain or close to a river is what I secretly hoped for. Someplace I could soak in birdsong and monsoon rain.

I had been nursing thoughts of moving out of Bangalore for a while having endured the first pandemic lockdown in 2020. In March 2021, when an opportunity arose to move to a magical little place called Mala on the western slopes of Kudremukh National Park, I jumped at it. This was freedom for Noah and me. 

Mala is a sleepy little village panchayat spread over the foothills of the Kudremukh range in Udupi district. Dendritic streams with sources high up in the rainforest-clad slopes crisscross this landscape, like roots searching for ways to grow lower. If the light of day reveals the layers of hills, plantations, and rainforests cloaking them, the dark of night is even prettier. With very little light pollution, the astoundingly clear night sky puts up quite an interstellar show — enough to leave most people awestruck. 

Our first walks in the area revealed bird’s nest fungi littering the roadsides, something I considered rare in the city. The sweet songs of grey-fronted green pigeons wafted through, along with the raucous sounds of rufous treepies and the cackling laughter of the Malabar grey hornbills. Fruiting trees like fig, kokum, mango, and jackfruit were aplenty. As our first summer progressed, we witnessed intense thunderstorms rolling up the hills from the coastal plains. The house sparked in the darkness, and peals of thunder reverberated up from the floor. And then the monsoon moved in, dark and heavy, and there was a transformation of life, land, and habits.

It was like standing under an unrelenting cascade and living under an umbrella. The place then truly belonged to fungi, mould, leeches, and frogs. Water made its way everywhere and trying to stay dry was futile. Walks with the dogs meant a thorough soaking. Clearwater streams were replaced with coffee-coloured torrents, their sound drowning everything else. During intense rain spells, even the sound of the rain would be drowned by the roar of the stream rushing past, moving immense amounts of water and silt along with seeds, leaves, deadwood, and flow-smoothened rocks. It wasn’t just water that moved but nutrients from the national park are transported to the largely human-dominated coastal plains. This part of Udupi district is the first real obstacle to the heavy rain-bearing monsoon clouds coming in from the Arabian Sea. The rainforests upstream, above us, soak up the rain like a giant sponge and release it into the network of veins coming down. Here, it is easy to imagine the water cycle — running downstream to the sea and coming up the hills from the same sea.

Our home, an old, red tiled-roof house was an extension of the landscape around it. We are far from the conveniences of ordering food via an app, and are not even in a village but a few kilometres outside one. We don’t have to go looking for wildlife; if we’re attentive enough, we hear — a Ceylon frogmouth calling from the valley or sambar alarm calls from beyond the stream. Malabar giant squirrels fire off their machine-gun-like chirps most mornings. The omnipresent but hardly visible Malabar whistling thrush may call at dawn and dusk. In the gathering darkness, I sometimes see a dark blotch — a whistling schoolboy diving into the vegetation.

Being on the edge of the Kudremukh National Park, Mala is full of surprises. Though we’re in the shadow of the national park, we hardly encounter any mammals. Months after moving here, the only mammal I’d seen was a few fleeting glimpses of the Malabar giant squirrel. Gaur were nocturnal visitors to the plantations; I had encountered them on an earlier visit, but not this time. There are no signs of large predators though the disappearance of a couple of dogs from the neighbourhood was blamed on leopards. There is a reason why the animals are elusive and their numbers are low — hunting. Numerous times I’ve heard gunshots echo in the night, and once I encountered a hunting party of men out with dogs. To the untrained eye, the forest looks magnificent and intact. With a little time, you understand how serious a problem hunting is. Many local people are familiar with otherwise elusive animals like mouse deer, slender loris, pangolin, porcupine, and barking deer — all of them hunted.

Kudremukh National Park’s terrain encompasses steep mountainsides and valleys. It receives a torrential monsoon when streams turn impassable, and the forest floor is crawling with leeches. It shares a large porous boundary with human-use areas. All of this makes the protection of this large but vital landscape difficult. Despite these issues, it has also witnessed some heartening conservation success stories such as the closure of the hugely destructive opencast iron-ore mines, voluntary relocation of some communities from within, and increased protection of critical areas. A responsive forest department has ensured swift patrolling every time an alert is raised. If hunting can be curbed, wild populations will recover. A forest of animal sounds was something I keenly look forward to.

In the city, I had begun to feel a deep disconnect with issues (both conservation and political) in other parts of the country, which had led me to inaction and paralysis. I was far removed from them — mentally rather than physically and had left me feeling drained and lifeless. Moving out of the city was a way of reconnecting with the land under my feet to the larger landscape of the place and to my mind. I was now a part of it, much like the brown fish owl, the white-bellied woodpecker and the Malabar tree nymph. Now, I had a mountain, a rainforest, streams, and wildlife to care for and worry about. I did not feel alone and isolated any longer. It was now time to climb out of “survival mode” and start living again. My search for the last wild place brought me from a crowded city to a green Eden. From crowded thoughts to an easy calm, from pandemic isolation to a landscape of hope. This place had its own share of problems, but there is also a sense that things can turn for the better. However, somewhere deep inside, I still know that the last wild place is a corner of my mind, reachable yet unknowable, and that’s how it will be no matter where I am physically.