The Saga of the Bamboo...

...continues... in these handicrafts skilfully created by
artisans/simple village folks, in obscure hamlets, beyond
the blue hills, across the vast green plains of my fertile
land--beside gurgling streams and seemingly placid rivers.
Sold for a song to middlemen in the nearest town, and later
sold in ritzy emporiums and wayside stalls, next to fabled
silk and expensive figurines. Or maybe with trinkets and
gaudy statuettes adjacent to a tea-stall with a blackened,
dented kettle on a smouldering fire and stale buns on sale.
In a land of contrasts, anything is plausible.
And as I write this, a craftsman could be working outside
his house, under the mango tree, cutting bamboo thin and
fine after a back-breaking day in the paddy-fields----
battling the mosquitoes that breed in our malarial rainforests.
But we have bamboo in our souls. I look at a basket and see
beyond that! I hear the distinct sound of a sharp knife
slicing through a fresh green stem, the raw smell evocative
of an unending green of a tropical jungle...the aroma of the
dish made of bamboo shoot garnished with herbs freshly picked
from a garden as fertile as a forest.
Bamboo-- so many images come; green, yellow, shoots, dense
groves, bees, birds,snakes, stakes, huts, fences, benches,
archways, bridges... it's a melange of images turning into
a slide-show in the recesses of my mind!