Tired out by the daily flood of predictability and insanity in the news, it was a pleasure to come across Mahedra Rathod’s refreshed appreciation of Deepika Padukone.

Rewatching some of her later films, I looked for Chennai Express, but couldn’t find it. Netflix had some of SRKs’ earliest movies, though, and so today was a block of solid masala films.

Masala is a form that hides deep values behind its ebullient layers: things like love, persistence in the face of adversity, loyalty to family and friends (with loyalty to self as the basis for all other loyalties), generosity, playfulness, cleverness, and honesty.

Lost in the story and sound of SRK’s voice, I was surprised when a song rose up in me during Kabhi Haa Kabhi Naa. It was the sound and words of Oh Shenandoah. I tried to sing it, but realized I wasn’t sure of the lyrics. It turns out that because it’s an old, old song, it comes in several versions.

The performance shared here is sung, a capella, by Peter Hollens, in a video set in the country on a wet, snowy day.

The song’s simplicity, the celebration in its melody, and the longing repeated in each of its verses, express something that I also sense in masala movies, and the culture that makes them: a deep sense of place, and a parallel separation that results from social stressors like famine, invasion or war, as well as people’s curiosity, courage, and urge to wander.

That same sense of excitement, challenge, and homeliness is what makes me feel connected to the Himalayan orogeny and its many cultures and histories.

I feel that, living in the Catskills, a northern branch of the crystalline Appalachians, the setting of the Shendandoah River and its Valley, I’m somehow also tied to ancient lives and ways, in the Karakorum, the Kashmir Valley, the Pamirs, the Hindu Kush, Ladakh, the Himalayan foothills, and the orogeny’s watershed valleys.

It’s that connection that pulled Oh Shenandoah from a past usually weighed down by a sentimentality that I resist, to the front of my mind, where it showed me that that sentimentality is nothing more than a throw-away sketch of a genuine, more profound, reality.

People who traveled the subcontinent through the eons, especially when they moved through steep highlands and other difficult terrains, including the Himalayan region, made music with glorious yet simple sounds.

That is similar to what I hear in Oh Shenandoah.

Songs of leaving and coming home, being away and longing to return, supported the rhythms of feet, bodies and trekking animals’ strides, as people moved here and there. What beauty, in human wandering. What poetry, courage and caring, what hardships and love.

She was wearing surf shoes. He knew she liked to feel the ground underfoot, and would walk barefoot if she could do it safely. He wished she had dressed more carefully. Denim shorts and a lightweight striped-cotton shirt were not going to keep the bugs off.

She was walking west along the access road, shoulders slumped. Birds’ songs dropped into the forest, like celebratory mini-bombs. She seemed distracted, maybe even unconscious of the birds’ music.

To her south, the Sawkill gurgled over clusters of boulders left by thousands of years of thaws and floods. To her north, forest understory rustled when brushed by her knees and shoulders.

He worried, when she shortened stride and stayed more on her toes on slippery patches of moss. He worried, when the forest touched her shoulders, prime landing spots for ticks. He worried, as she walked, that she might not come home.

Though his following her was urgent, he didn’t want her to know he was there. So when when she stopped by an old wild-apple tree, he ducked.

She raised her chin to peek up into the tree. Her mouth was turned down. Maybe she was counting time lost, in her so-far no-vacations life?

A couple of squirrels lunged through the tall tree’s branches, making a muffled ruckus. Every few moments, leafy twigs or small, green apples fell through the tree, onto the forest floor.

Not a bird called, no animal moved. The Sawkill rippled beyond the fence, under a turquoise-and-lapis sky.

Trees seemed close, as if they’d taken a step or two in her direction, holding their breath, touching limbs, leaves quiet. No insects buzzed.

When a cloud blocked the sunlight, something shifted. Evening had come.

A rabbit ran from a neighbor’s yard to the mossy shed near the woods where its burrow lay. A couple of birds fought silently in a tall wild-apple tree. A banjo twanged, and then a chime-like bell. Dinner?

The evening’s action should have been on the lawn, spread out before her, its varied textures and colors mapping this tree root system, or that habitual block of shadow. But now, as darkness lowered itself into the yard, the tiny to mid-sized creatures that normally ran, crawled, hopped, slithered or flew through it were nowhere to be seen. The space between house and woods, theirs and usually safe, was this evening motionless, except for the rabbit and a newly-calling mourning dove.

Do wild animals have calendars? Do they tell stories and count time, around their equivalents of campfires?

For her, an earthy, bright perfume of peppermint, sweetening, and mixing with, soft sparkles of pine and a diffuse base note of general ripening and decay, plus the talk of crows and jays these past few early mornings, said autumn was on its way.

A chipmunk ran out to the edge of the deck. Its target was a clump of sage laden with seedheads. Firecrackers started up. It ran away. The crackers stopped. The chippie ran out again. The dove lullabied the evening with a sad, soft cry, while from far away came a big, though faint, sound of real fireworks.

This was where she lived. Her mind she saw as a purple martin colony house. Roof, floors and walls served to divide, to protect her feelings from stormy people, and predators. The doors connected her to the open world.

If life could be lived fearlessly, such a house would be redundant. She listened. Transition. Baby animals had their early-summer, hungry cries going. Wind teased the pines, their needles soft like smoke. A crow sat and held the topmost branch, whether for watching, or for food, she didn’t know.

A pale-yellow butterfly, a swallowtail, with black stripes and borders, but missing its tails, drank from scarlet lilies by the east fence. That bright but deep red, with a hint of persimmon, she hadn’t found a name for that color, yet.

The sage blooms were almost done. That baby animal cry came again.

“Watching,” said the crow.

A mate answered, “Watching, too.”

They talked back and forth.

Were they conversing, or were they saying, “That woman’s in the field again.”?

Then, some bird who chuckles. Some chirping, as you’d expect. Babies calling high but small. A thrush-type bird with a complicated song, delivered in couplets, sounding like a performance by twenty different birds in succession. And now a chorus rises. Have they gotten used to her, or is it their crepuscular habit? Whistles. And woodpecker hammers.

Sugar ants on the table: avoid the binoculars, please.

A small, dark shadow, emitting a low-pitched hum, five feet from her, at face height, looking at her, watching her surprise. Zooms off, with a long, low, “Z-z-z-z-z.” A first hummingbird.

Crow closer now, sending his call down into the yard, in her direction. Does he approve her stillness, appreciate her surprise? Is he a guardian?

Woods so full of birdsong and wind that the creek is almost inaudible. She hears it when she turns away.

The hollow where a rabbit lay last night. She hopes they’ll come again.

Till then, she’ll practice her cursive, which dances sometimes now, but otherwise stumbles, stutters and looks for a steady bass line.

Your emotions are clear, when writing slow, on paper. You can tell when something is too much. (Too little is no problem: a future open door.)

As she packs up, she notes a small, brownish bird, in the grass by the lilies.

No, it’s a baby rabbit. Maybe three inches long. It hops, and holds. She watches. It watches. She rises and takes her basket, and it holds still, still.

Too cute by half. Or more. No writing cursive anymore, can’t tell when it’s too much, now.

Love that little rabbit.