Binge-Watching Nature
Fireflies, Moon-ATMs, Sun Lozenges, and Chlorophyll Eyes
The sun is such a lozenge this morning. And last night, the moon was a soup bowl for the richest and the sickest queen. There was that night when a frog sat on my forehead as I slept. Then leaped away silently when I woke up and screamed. And there is today, when I watched a rainbow after a decade.
The lockdown is a giant plot twist. For those with privilege, whose lives aren’t threatened, it has offered us puzzles of slight discomfort - cooking, cleaning, sharing of work, cohabiting in small spaces, and so on. One such slight discomfort in my life has been oddly revealing.
I have come to stay with my family for the lockdown. I’ve never spent more than two days in a row here. They moved to this village a few years back. Despite my affection for them, I couldn’t embrace the wilderness, and its unpredictable, unfamiliar terrain the way they did. This was hardly a home. Sudden power-cuts. Exaggerated weather. Chameleons playing peek-a-boo. Snails walking in as you bathe. And the one place where your phone catches two bars of network is the local snake’s hangout spot.
And me? Am I not a lover of the metropolitan skyline and its flickering music? I am mesmerised by streetlight patterns and flyovers at night. I cherish each curve of the wifi sign on my devices and having cabs and food at my fingertips. How was I supposed to adjust to insect bites and pitch-black nights?
It didn’t take me a second to strike at the little spider that climbed all the way up the trunk of my thigh, and then onto the journal on my lap.
Growing up, I was indifferent to nature. Even in the most picturesque of Shah Rukh Khan songs, my attention would linger on his face, not on the landscape behind him. On my first meeting with the sea, I yelled, “It’s coming! It’s coming!” at every incoming wave. I was illiterate in the language of water, as landlocked people often are.
When I became a poet, the moon became my ATM (any time metaphor) machine, but the city was still my muse. I felt threatened to read Mary Oliver’s insistence, that poets have an infrangible and historical link with nature. If I had lost my chance with nature, I didn’t want to lose it with poetry.
Once I saw a cow bathing in the sun. I was in the big city - on my way to work. My clothes without a crease, my forehead - not so much. I was so sure when I had stepped out. Until the moment I saw her black nose shining, quivering. Then I wasn’t, any more.
What killed any possibility of an affair with nature was comparison - giant trees and rare flowers in my friends’ feed, glistening green leaves of Belgaum trees rooted in dark chocolate mud, birds at Lodhi garden in Delhi. The more I liked pieces of nature I couldn’t really have, the further away I got from the nature that was right under my nose. I was blind to the beauty of short trees with frizzy ochre leaves, local birds and reptiles, of wildflowers that broke fashion rules with great panache.
I have never looked up at the sky so often. Never had an appetite for stars. Here are constellations I have only seen in textbooks. I even saw my first firefly yesterday. I had watched an entire documentary on bio-luminescence but I had never seen a single firefly! And today when I tilted up to snatch a few stars into my sight, a firefly flew across. I was torn with the dilemma - which light do I attend to? In an instant my heart was put back into my body. Because I realised I want all my dilemmas to be this simple.
It has been a month of staying here. I am not as rattled by flies and frogs as I was. I enjoy spotting parrots on the chichbilai tree. I am delighted when the curly fruit of chichbilai smells like it has a crush on someone cute. On days of pain, of which there are many, the soft ground lets me walk. Less wifi, more oxygen - seems like a pretty fair deal.
I didn’t know what the tree was named. So I called her Smita. Smita seemed like a good name for someone with a spine and lots of careless beauty.
I can’t explain this change. Maybe the lockdown forced an openness into me. It made me see that love needn’t exist only for people, but also for everything that glows and flutters, wriggles and hisses, rises and sets. And as Rebecca Solnit said, it is people who love nature ferociously, that can save the planet, if at all.
The metaphor of mother nature is dull and dangerous. How about teacher? The prettiest champa flower falls on its face every morning, and still smells good. Polar bears know how to release stress and trauma. We keep learning. How about nature as a ticket agent? Teleporting us to the present moment. Away from human chatter. The sparrows have wordless conversations, the puddle meditates.
May I allow myself to fall in love with something I hated and feared, and may it be dramatic. And non-linear. Complete with imperfections.
I have chlorophyll hearts in my eyes.
Chichbilai is also known as Junglee Jalebi and Vilayti Imli in other parts of the country :)