The Long Version of a Short Story

THE LONG VERSION

OF A SHORT STORY

written and illustrated by adwait pawar

Splice: The Iconic Joint Design, Environment and Law Laboratory at Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology www.srishti.ac.in/ledlab

‘The Long Version of A Short Story’ Original text, design and illustration by Adwait Pawar Editing by Arpita Gaidhane This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

THE LONG VERSION

OF A SHORT STORY

written and illustrated by adwait pawar

Birth of a Bubble

Prologue ‘So? How was it?’ you may ask of me after I’ve returned from a spate of traveling. Most of the time, this question is posed as segue into another conversation. Sometimes, however, it signifies genuine interest. My response at then would be dictated by what I perceived of your interest.

I would then tell you a story about my travels: ‘My journey started in the urban sprawl of Bangalore city, from where I travelled to the forest of Agumbe, took a bus to Udupi, walked to the fishing village at Malpe, took a ferry to St. Mary’s Island, and then headed back to Udupi to catch a train to Bangalore.’

You might even hear of my meeting with a six-year-old storyteller, of conversations with people met as strangers and parted with as friends, of dancing frogs, and of the difference between islands and continents. For all of that, it would still be the short version of the story.

Now, if you are genuinely interested in my journey, the pages ahead are meant for you. I believe that the path to finding a story is almost always more interesting than the story itself, and this is a good place as any, to tell you the long version.

Wobble

12

Beyond Balconies and Townships It was a slow evening, and the sun was about to set behind the silhouette of the Eucalyptus plantation seen from the window. Anāhat peered at the shades of orange tinted with pinks and purples. The past few days had been considerably cloudy and even if there hadn’t been any clouds, there was always the smog. The smog, which made the sun seem like a hazy night light that someone had forgotten to turn off.

As he peered through the clouds at the sun setting in the distance, Anāhat wondered what it was that drew him to the balcony so often. Maybe it was an escape into the open outside; as open as the gardens outside an apartment complex would allow, in any case. It was called a ‘township’ now - not an apartment complex.

1

As if ‘apartment complex’ wasn’t complex enough. They had to attach an even higher level of complexity to a house. Complete with a shopping mart, a doctor, a spa and the usual recreational amenities, they had built a walled city within a city.

It was in that moment that he realized that he had fallen prey to the nesting instinct; he had built himself a nest where he was comfortable, and wouldn’t have to leave unless he had to. It was this sense of suffocation that had drew him to the balcony on this particular evening.

As his eyes followed the graceful descent of a pair of kites that were circling one another, he reached for the book that he had set aside. It was a book that he had most recently procured from his infrequent excursions into the city.

His passion for travelling, fledgling as it was, was only rivaled by his passion for reading. The book described the city and how it had changed since its conception. It talked of Bangalore as it was, and as it is now - full of useful information based on which one could draw conclusions about the change. He liked books of that kind, where authors didn’t presume to force their ‘facts’ down your throat, but expressed their observations and let the reader decide what to make of it.

Anāhat currently lived in a suburb of Bangalore, known as Yelahanka 1. Although, as he learned from the book, Yelahanka 2

was the first established capital of the founders of the city, the center had shifted a good 70 kms in the thousands of years since, leaving it a suburb or ‘satellite town’ today. It was in Yelahanka that this ‘township’ was nestled - with a whole ‘river’ running through it to echo the ‘Venetian’ origins of its name.

History books often state that most, if not all civilizations have arisen around rivers or water bodies. Ironically, the city of Bangalore had to have lakes 2 ‘constructed’ for the water demands of the city to be met in its early days. Bangalore acquired water sources where it had none, and has flourished all the same.

This city, which had over two hundred and eighty lakes and tanks once, is now facing water shortage, while townships employ that water for ‘aesthetic purposes’ to establish the ‘authenticity behind the concept’. Currently there are approximately eighty tanks and lakes, which are in varying states of disarray. Some others have been repurposed so long ago, that 3

most

people

don’t

even

know

that

these

places

used to house lakes. Famous landmarks such as Kempegowda Bus Station and K R Market used to be lakes once upon a time.

Sankey tank is another landmark that people rush through on their way to Whitefield. Statistics such as theses are often used to convey a call for sustainability, but Anāhat found that spending time listening to the stories of someone whose family has lived in Bangalore for generations was so much more of an authentic and intimate experience.

Anāhat had recently heard a friend reminisce about an old ficus 3 tree. She spent a good half-hour recounting everything the old tree meant to her, her experiences growing up near that tree, how her father used to take her on walks around the tree every Sunday when he would tell her stories.

He wondered about all the things the tree had experienced.

As a seed it fell into an ancient forest. It wouldn’t have been an ancient forest then, just a home. It probably germinated in a community where people knew how to treat plants and animals as something more than ‘resources’. It probably lived around people who gave back to the forest as much as they took from it. It must have witnessed the arrival of civilization, the building of villages, towns, cities, and then a metropolis.

It had witnessed the trees in the forest around it torn down to make rafters and floorboards. It had seen the earth around it being mined for rocks and ores. Rocks and ores which went 4

into making its steel and concrete neighbours, the skyscrapers.

His thoughts drifted back to the eucalyptus trees that he was now looking at from his balcony. These trees seemed so young in contrast; they were lucky enough to not have witnessed the ‘rise’ of civilization. With his consciousness brought back to the balcony, he sipped on his coffee and recommenced the reading of his book.

This balcony is where our story truly begins and it is here that it will end, but what remains to be seen is whether it’s still the same ship as the one Theseus 4 sailed off on.

5

6

Theseus sets sail It was one of those perfect summer days, commonly seen in stories and seldom in the real world. The sun bathed the morning with soft warmth that made the presence of the cool wind pleasantly known. The weather was ideal for travelling, the bus driver proclaimed, partially as an unspoken apology for the malfunctioning air conditioner on the bus. But that hardly seemed like a problem to Anāhat. As the bus left the city limits in search of greener pastures, he thought that something didn’t quite make sense. He knew he wouldn’t figure it out by pushing, so he nudged the feeling to the back of his mind.

The weather continued to agree with the journey, the people on the bus weren’t overtly noisy and the driver was fairly competent. Everything said, you couldn’t hope for a nicer day to for a bus to break down. He had always enjoyed

7

the outside 5 of a journey a bit more than the inside. But when the outside comes to a standstill, the inside comes alive. Before the unfortunate burst of the rear tire of the bus, he had been sitting in his window seat with his earphones on. As he took them off he realized with a smile on his face that the music hadn’t even been playing. He had worn his earphones and found himself lost in the music of the plantations, the farms, the villages and the edges of the forest.

Getting off the bus, the first thing he noticed was how different the air felt, even though they were merely a few hours outside the city. It felt light, but not empty, it was like an olfactory canvas on which the different scents of the forest painted a scene. The fresh smell of the blades of grass still moist from the morning dew mingled with the soft aroma of the jasmine strewn on the ground. It wasn’t until he heard, “Sooo, where’re you frum?” that he was jogged out of his reverie.

He had never been much for small talk, preferring to keep to himself during his excursions. It had served him reasonably well so far, but he couldn’t feign disinterest as he noticed the person who had done the asking. It was an old lady who was dressed in a bizarre assemblage of clothing, given his barren expanse of knowledge pertaining to the world of fashion or rather anything beyond the extent of jeans and a t-shirt; he didn’t know what to make of it. She was wearing what seemed to be a thick shawl with mismatched earrings and an accent that did a lot more than hint that she wasn’t a local. Her accent was 8

9

10

as unreadable as her clothes. The only thing that betrayed her were her ‘o’s, they had a strange cadence to them, but that too was not entirely consistent, which meant she had seemingly6 lived in India for an extended period now and had adopted the local accents.

He gave the well rehearsed instinctive response, “Originally from Bombay 7, but I’ve been living in Bangalore for the past year and a half now…” He almost never called it Mumbai, even though it was officially called that now. He had grown up while it was called Bombay, and to him, that would always be what the city was named; no matter what it came to be called later.

Of course, it was also a fact the he actually lived beyond the boundary of Bombay in a city called Thane 8.

Now, usually, there are follow up questions ranging from ‘And, do you like this city?’ to ‘What do you do?’ So he was rather surprised when she asked him ‘what do you see when you look out of your window?’ The question fell reasonably farther than the purview of small talk, so Anāhat was tempted to respond in earnest. Before he could begin articulating his response, he saw the driver shepherding his flock of passengers back onto the bus.

It was his innate curiosity that led him to sit next to her.

He didn’t know whether it was the randomness of the question or the calm demeanor with which she listened, but he found 11

her very easy to talk to. His response included everything from the different types of houses they had passed to the shades of the trees that changed from the city towards the forest. He talked in length about the dams that they passed on the way and trees that were half submerged because of the water from the reservoir and about how it was a wonder that the trees had endured through their submersion. He talked about how there were some people who were listening to music aboard the bus, while some others looked out the window, and then there were people who were absorbed in long conversations with their co-passengers while others slumbered in solitude. He complained about the songs that the driver played and how loudly he played them. She listened patiently to his condescending rant about the way things were.

Once she was satisfied that he had had his say, she said, “Looking too hard makes it difficult to see. People these days take it upon themselves to know everything; it makes it difficult for them to understand anything. Understanding was never meant 12

to be an end, but more of a journey. In the seeking of knowledge minds are often forced to either become wide shallow ponds or narrow deep wells; and there are very few lakes out there.�

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14

Oceans to Islands As the bus rolled on he sat there pondering the depths of that statement and how it suddenly seemed like such a strange concept to be travelling to a forest in a bus, when a forest already surrounded the road. He wondered about the distinctions between farmlands and plantations and forest.

And as he mentioned these musings to her, she responded saying, “The answer lies in the name itself: Originally, in Latin they were called Foris which stood for ‘Outside’. Later on, as people became more civilized, they redefined it as Forestis silva, which literally translates as ‘Outside woodland’ and roughly translated to an area beyond the main area of administration, outside the common law. Skipping ahead a few centuries the term ‘Forest’ 9 was coined to represent ‘a wooded area kept for hunting’ or ‘a piece of uncultivated land’.

15

Forests had become equivalent to islands on maps as opposed to the oceans that they once were.�

They shared ideas back and forth and he talked of things as he saw them and she mentioned things she learned on her travels. It was rather refreshing to talk to someone with such an eclectic smattering of knowledge from so many walks of life and who could understand things on a deeper level than most of the people he had conversed with.

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17

His talks with conservationists and forest officials, and his preliminary understanding of how policy-makers work based on reading the policies they draft had left him with the same basic premise – that we must protect wildlife because it is in the best interests of the planet.

Now, it could be argued on one hand that species have been going extinct ages before human beings populated the earth, so we should not upset the natural order. On the other hand, species are going extinct 10 a lot faster because of human beings, so it is our ‘moral obligation’ to do the ‘right thing’ and save them. One could examine this second premise for a moment and all the assumptions it entails. It is based on the notion that animals should be preserved for their own sakes, which presupposes the fact that animals wish for a certain condition to endure. But as humans, it borders on arrogance to imagine and act upon what animals want for themselves.

It would then follow logically that conservation is selfish - we conserve because we want species to exist, either for our own pleasure or to alleviate our guilt at having ravaged their lives, Anāhat had concluded.

His conversations with villagers and a handful of people belonging to tribes had painted a different picture. One of the village elders in Bandipur 11, had told him about how they were connected with nature. When asked about humananimal conflict, the elder spoke in a matter-of-fact way about 18

how elephants wandered into their fields in search of food and this was a sign that Lord Ganesha had blessed their crops.

Even with the elephants feeding on their crops, there was still enough to sustain them. It was not human-animal conflict as much as a human-animal understanding.

The conversations rolled on along with the bus and it was noon by the time he arrived at his destination.

19

Stable

22

Metamorphosis Anāhat said his goodbyes, thanked the driver, got off the bus and stepped into Agumbe Village, of Malgudi Days 12 fame. Agumbe is a small village, with approximately forty households. As to what he was doing in Agumbe, we’ll have to rewind a few weeks.

While attending a talk at National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, on Art and Wildlife, he met Aaron who was researching hawk moths. He said that he was working at a research station based in Agumbe, which piqued Anāhat’s interest. Aaron explained that Romulus Whitaker established it so that researchers and scientists would have a place to set up base to conduct their research. He said he was going back there to set up a moth trap and continue his fieldwork on hawk moths.

Apart from appreciating the occasional moth that flew into his apartment, Anāhat’s interaction with the insects had been fairly limited. This seemed too good of an opportunity to miss, so naturally he asked Aaron if he could come and see him set up the 23

trap and explore the forest around as well.

Aaron confirmed that they could be there in a fortnight.

And here he was, two weeks hence. He found the trail that led to the research station after asking around and getting lost a few times. And since he had arrived early, he mused to himself; maybe getting lost was more of an opportunity than a mistake. The phrase ‘It is only when we are truly lost, do we find ourselves’ 13 wafted into his consciousness; was it from a Chinese proverb or an all terrain car commercial? It was practically evening when he finally chanced upon the ‘Agumbe Rainforest research station’ signboard. Walking through the trail, he entered what seemed to be a civilized niche in the forest. Unlike the village, which was an area that was cleared for settlement, the research station seemed to be trying to fit in with the forest rather than make itself stand out. He was greeted there by Aaron, who was carrying a lot of white cloth and a halide lamp.

Apparently it doesn’t take much to set up a moth trap.

He was given a quick tour of

the

research

station

and

introduced to the people there. A lot of time could be spent describing the research station itself; but 25

the people who worked there gave it life. People came to the forest as volunteers for surveys to help researchers; they came to study different species of animals and birds that lived in the forest, like his friend the Moth-man Aaron. He set up the moth trap; white sheets forming a box closed on four sides, open at the top and had a flap to enter it. He placed the halide lamp 14 and a couple of UV lights on the inside of the box to attract the moths. Now that the trap was set, they could go back at night to see who showed up for the party.

With their work done for the time being, talk turned to their origins. It always comes to that. AnÄ hat wondered if there was any significance to that line of enquiry. First meetings are always interesting. Strangers scout for commonalities in conversation, and dig up wells of information – where they are from, where they grew up, what their dreams were and so on.

It seemed like such questions were intrinsic to understanding someone, or at least intrinsic in wanting to understand

26

someone. Aaron had been staying at the research station for a long time and visited Bangalore when his research was done, to compile data. He said that he had come to think of the research station as his home now. It was where he felt most comfortable and natural.

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Umwelten Making its way under the tall tropical canopy, the monarch of the reptile kingdom surveyed its territory. He moved purposefully as he spotted a rat snake lurking in the shade of a fig tree. As the narrator spoke on about the cobra being the longest venomous snake in the animal kingdom, Anāhat realized that most documentaries spoke about the nests of the king cobra, its mating habits, how it eats only other snakes and how it lives on the ground or in the trees and is also at home in the water. The king cobra is also territorial, like many other larger creatures in the forest. The same information narrated in varying baritones, shot from varied angles and accompanied by various background scores. Until of course someone disproved it, or proved something else entirely.

Anāhat wondered how anyone could understand the ‘habitat’ of the king cobra by exclusively looking at facts,

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30

without knowing its origins and everything that had happened to it. It felt like trying to understand music without using sound, dance without using movement, or language without using words. And even then just listening to the sounds is like glimpsing the edges of music, there is so much more to it.

Jakob von Uexküllby’s notion of ‘Umwelt’ 15 does a much better job of explaining the concept of home. According to him an organism creates and reshapes its own umwelt when it interacts with the world. This is termed a ‘functional circle’.

The umwelt theory states that the mind and the world are inseparable, because it is the mind that interprets the world for the organism. Lost in his thoughts again, it was only when Aaron said “Time to go see the nightlife of the forest!” that Anāhat was jogged back to reality.

As they walked back to the moth trap, Anāhat was pleasantly surprised to see a plethora of insects, arachnids and no fewer than three hawk moths 16 already waiting for them.

He spent some time admiring the shapes and sizes of the various creatures that paid the trap a visit.

Eventually, the fatigue of the journey 31

weighing down his eyelids won out over his fascination with the moths. AnÄ hat bid Aaron, who was planning on staying up documenting for the next few hours, a good night.

AnÄ hat woke up early the next morning to go to the Onake Abbi 17 waterfall near the Research Station. Outside the Research station, he noticed that the steel bars at the corners of the roof had a cobra motif, and wondered whether it was the handiwork of a quirky architect. As he walked through the village on his way to the falls, he noticed that a lot of the houses had the same motif on their roofs. And even after asking around a bit he could find no answer that sated his curiosity. He also noticed that there were these tablet shaped stones with snake motifs on them in some places

32

- snake shrines, is what he was told they were. These shrines were something he had seen often in his travels in Karnataka.

He also noticed that there was an abundance of termite mounds in the area. The most notable of which were a ring of termite mounds surrounding an ancient ficus tree. Some of the mounds in the village had threads tied around them, and flower offerings scattered on them. And though he knew of the religious connotations for snake worship, as snakes were commonly used as symbols of Shiva or Vishnu, he was unsure about the termite mounds. He resolved to find out the reason for worship before he left the village. As he walked, he noticed several trees with what appeared to be lines of earth going all the way up their trunks and disappearing into the canopy above. “They’re termite trails. They carve those channels to make their way up the trunk to make their nests.” said Aaron.

They walked onwards to the top of the waterfall, and after a long and tiring climb, finally heard flowing water.

They had reached the top of the waterfall. The cliff called to Anāhat, as most edges did. Looking down from the cliff, it was 33

34

exhilarating to see water cascading down the mountainside.

The spray from the falling water rose almost all the way up the mountain.

Once his ears acclimatized to the sound of gushing water, he heard a chorus of croaks coming from under the rocks. Before he could ask Aaron who was responsible for the music, he saw the Moth-man combing through the rocks with apparently the same question in mind. Aaron’s triumphant exclamation called Anahat over to see one of the recently discovered species of dancing frogs. He got a live demonstration of the dance 18 as the little creature in front of him stretched its hind leg away from its body and waved his webbed foot in a graceful arc.

With the culmination of his performance, the frog leapt away into the clear gushing water. They decided to call it a day as well and head back to the research station.

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36

Mountains, Mounds and Myths It was still early when Anāhat was woken up by the dawn chorus of the birds singing interspersed with raspy croaks of their amphibian relatives. The whistling thrush’s leisurely tune harmonized with the racket-tailed drongo’s sharp resonant chatter. Anāhat was headed for a temple that Aaron had insisted he visit early in the morning. Climbing up the stairs that led to the temple atop Kundadri 19, he tried to remember the last time he had breathed air so fresh. The wind seemed alive and spirited.

As he reached the top, it seemed like he was walking on the clouds. He could see white all around the hill and several other peaks pushing through the canopy of clouds.

A pond half full of water, home to a few turtles, lay on one side, and a sheer cliff face on the other side flanked the temple. He found a nice patch of rock and lay down

37

on it, deciding that this was as good a place as any to watch the sun rise.

The clouds seemed to shy away from the sunlight as it poured in over the distant mountains. Once the sun had taken its place high enough in the sky, it seemed as though the canopy of white had parted to let the sunlight touch the scrub of the forest below. The forest spread out and away from Kundadri, broken in a few places by roads snaking their way through. Anāhat decided to wander off in search of the story behind the termite mounds.

His information so far formed a mere stub of a story, and Anāhat knew that if he wanted to find out more, he would have to poke around a little bit. So he did what any prudent person would do, and walked up to the first door he saw and knocked.

A young girl of around six years of age answered the door, and looked at him with a disconcerting gaze that children her age have down to an art form. It is an age where children start becoming sure of themselves 20 and the things they know, and develop a measure of unshakable pride about the fact. When asked about why the people in the village tied threads around the termite mounds and offered flowers, she responded with an air of supreme confidence Once upon a time, there was this really bad man called Ratnakara. When people went to their grandparents’ or cousins’ 38

houses on the road like we go to Leela’s place, he would steal all their stuff and kill them.

One day, this really good man called Narada was walking on the road. He knew the gods and stuff so he also knew about the bad man. When Ratnakara asked for his stuff like he knew he would, Narada was really smart, and he asked Ratnakara why he stole like that.

Now the bad man was really dumb. He said he did it for his family - like his amma could ever be okay with doing wrong things!

So Narada said that if he could just confirm with his family that they wanted him to hurt people, he would wait right there on the road.

As

expected,

Ratnakara’s

Amma- Appa were horrified, and told him to make everything okay 39

with god. When he asked Narada how, the poor guy couldn’t tell him the mantra. Evil people can’t be given mantras, na!

So then he told him to say Mara instead. How sneaky! Try saying Maramaramaramaramarama…. See? It becomes Rama!

Ratnakara sat there Forever! An anthill grew over him! In the end, he figured out that he was actually calling the god Rama, and became the wise saint Valmiki, one born from an anthill. Amma says, if you do bad things by mistake, just pray to god and he will make it all better.

It was an interesting turn of events that led to a strange burst of information from an unlikely source. When Anāhat asked the girl whether she knew any other stories, he started off saying, “Well the other day I was hiding from my mother, because she had asked me to go clean the shed but what I really wanted to do was go play catch with the neighbour’s son...”

She would have continued with this story for a while longer if Anāhat hadn’t stopped her. He asked her if she knew any other stories like the one about anthills. The girl seemed to have exhausted her interest in any enquiry along those lines, so she directed him to her grandfather, Narayana, who owned a store on the outer edge of the village, near the large ficus tree, which he remembered seeing earlier.

On his way there, he thought back to the second story that the girl had started telling him and wondered whether both 40

the stories seemed the same to her. Back in academic circles, stories are entirely as good as the facts corroborating them.

To the girl, though, a story of an event that happened a few days ago was the same as a story that she had heard from her grandfather. This brought back memories of a conversation that he had with a colleague 21 a few years ago.

She claimed that stories were the bones of civilization. All knowledge, implicit or expressed, is passed on through stories.

Anāhat had argued that a dry scientific journal with facts and collated data that was meant to prove something was not a ‘story’. She argued, that although it might not have been as gripping a story with its content, it was a story nonetheless.

Not having an argument to refute said claim, he had pushed it off as just another opinion, saying, ‘to each her own’. But now, years later, he realized the wisdom of her words. A Story, more than anything, represents a facet of human culture that has been predominant as far back as recollection allows, and if empirical data is to be believed, even further than that. And although his mind was wandering through the annals of time, his feet were taking him where he wanted to go.

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Stories or Truths Anāhat had been walking around the area for quite a while, so he knew the lay of the land, or at least the general direction that most important landmarks were in. The ficus tree surrounded by termite mounds was one of the places he had explored. He thanked the girl for pointing him in the right direction and proceeded to find Narayana’s store. When he reached the area, it wasn’t difficult to spot, since it was the only store with wooden hand crafted letters on its signboard.

Narayana was at the back of the shop drinking tea.

Anāhat made his way there and found the owner poring over a book intently, with a few dozen others stacked in the cupboard next to him. He had always agreed with the quote, ‘A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. A man who never reads lives but one.’

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So I would advise you to take lightly his decision to like Narayana before he got to know him. He introduced himself, and mentioned that his granddaughter had directed him here for further instruction in the lore of the land. This brought out a booming laugh, that one wouldn’t expect from a man with such a modest frame. The conversation took off from there, and they exchanged stories from their corners of the world.

Narayana made them both some tea, of which they ended up sharing several glasses. Anāhat found it strange that someone in a remote corner of the forest was afflicted with a deep of craving for the beverage, just like him.

Narayana’s stories spiraled from books that he’d read to stories that his elders had narrated to him and came to stories that he had invented to tell his grandkids, which were mired in philosophy at such a basic level, that they were difficult to tell apart from the other two categories. When Anāhat asked him whether he liked true stories over works of fiction, Narayana replied, “I don’t think of stories in such categorical terms. To me, they’re all true. Some of them just haven’t happened yet.”

He spent a good part of the evening talking to Narayana, and only begrudgingly mentioned needing to go back because it would be difficult to find his way to the research station in the dark. Narayana insisted that Anāhat should accompany him on his visit to the city the next day for the Festival at the Shri Krishna Temple in Udupi. He said that they would be taking the bus into the city and it would give them a chance to talk 44

more. AnÄ hat was not about to let an opportunity to gather stories slip away, so it was without hesitation and considerable eagerness that he said yes to Narayana.

Such a spontaneous travel plan might be difficult to understand for most people, seem a bit strange to some, but for AnÄ hat, it was as natural as breathing. Some people may also find it difficult to trust strangers and go on travels with them, but again, he trusted his judgment of people. Besides, after you have swapped stories with people and drunk half a dozen cups of tea 22 over the span of an evening, you get to know them a lot better.

45

So it was with an air of familiarity that he went on to the next part of his journey. He found Narayana waiting for him at the bus stop and was slightly abashed that a man who could very well be his grandfather’s age had gotten ready before him.

Soon he forgot all about this as their discussions started again.

Looking out the window, he again noticed several shrines with different types of snakes 23 . He had come across some similar shrines near the research station. These things, along with the Cobra motifs on the roofs, were something that he thought he could ask Narayana about. Narayana thought for a moment and said ‘These days, I have seen two extreme forms of worship. The first being of the primordial spirits abstracted from nature. This is a level where people can worship without priests and processions. The other would be the level of the supreme god, a visualized manifestation in human form and idolized in temples and the like. The worship of such a god entails elaborate rituals, performances and

46

priesthood. The first form is what you’ve seen in so many places like those snake shrines and termite mounds that you were talking about. People find it easier to worship nature because it’s all around them here. That’s the reason you find so many shrines in forests and near villages. Of course it isn’t convenience alone that drives them to worship nature, it is a much deeper connection to the forest and the things it embodies. People have often asked me which gods or goddesses I worship and I have always maintained that I worship the forest around me, because it has given me so much and it still keeps giving.

The village festival is an example of the second form, which is largely disconnected from nature now. I do not go there because I worship a certain god, I go there to see the outpour of religion in all its glory. I go to see the vibrant colours of the ratha 24 and the bright fires of the procession. I go to watch the performers at the festival enacting the famous epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. And this is something that I want to share with you, an aspect of our culture that is lost in most people from the city.’

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A Well-oiled Machine They reached the city in the afternoon before the festivities were about to start. Malpe fishing village was not too far from the temple. As there was a lot of time before anything exciting happened at the temple, or so Narayana claimed, he suggested that they take a walk in the fishing village.

But as they walked to the docks, they found them to be eerily quiet. Some men were preparing their boats and demarcating lengths 25 on the lines of the fishing nets. They were using a combination of insulation tape reinforced by nylon string to wrap around the fishing lines at regular intervals.

After walking around for a while, Anahat found that his surroundings were not as devoid of sound as he had initially experienced. He remembered a similar difficulty adjusting to the sounds of the birds and insects after getting off the bus at Agumbe. It seems like our ears drown out sounds that our minds deem less important.

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As he focused, he could hear the sounds of fishermen chatting, singing and detangling nets. He could hear the screeching of the few kites circling above scoping out scraps of fish. But there still wasn’t enough sound to justify the phrase his teachers had employed so often in school to shame children into silence – ‘Quiet down! This is a classroom, not a fish market!’ Unable to formulate any rational explanation for the lack of movement, he decided to ask one of the fishermen about it. This proved to be slightly difficult owing to the fact that his grasp on Kannada was shaky at best and his vocabulary even more meager. So with a little help from Narayana, who had grown up knowing Kannada and had picked up a few regional dialects 26 as well, he was able to circumvent the language barrier and ask about it. Apparently, most of the populace of the fishing village lived on an island off the coast, called Padukere. They were all preparing for the festival that was happening for the next few days. He said that it wasn’t a large island, but there was going to be a huge celebration for the festival the next day and they should definitely visit if they were still in town. Food prepared in huge vessels, pandals built with vibrant colours, 50

Anāhat could almost imagine it based on his descriptions. The same people who were preparing to fish the next day in one place were preparing to celebrate a festival in another. With little to see in a fish market lacking fish, they made their way to the Krishna Temple, their original destination.

As they entered the temple complex, Anāhat was struck by the stark contrast between religion here and how it was perceived back in the forest. There were flower vendors, jewellery sellers, clothes and a mart within the temple complex!

Even Narayana found the last one slightly out of place and he whispered conspiratorially, “Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and slaughters a visible Nature; without realizing that this Nature he slaughters is this invisible God he worships’ strange choice of words for a French Astrophysicist; but that’s what Hubert Reeves 27 said. Now I wouldn’t want to impose his

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views, nor mine, on anyone, but I feel that without knowing what a belief stems from, blind faith is actually detrimental to religion.”

Thoughts of the mart lead Anāhat back to the sleepless nights he’d spent at home in Thane, with music blaring through the night on account of the festivities on ‘Ganesh Chaturthi’ in his apartment complex. He laughed, remembering how he had wondered in his sleep-addled state why in God’s name anyone would play ‘Gangnam Style’ in a festival meant to honour Ganesha.

The procession was due to start in a few hours so he decided to take a walk around and explore the place. He was due to meet Narayana at the performance hall at five minutes to seven; just before the dance performances would start.

He followed the throng and got a chance to see one of the elaborately decorated Rathas near the entrance, before he was herded along into one of the temples. It was a blur of fire and 52

lights as he walked inside; people were offering their prayers and their money as tribute to the god. They walked around the ambulatory path and prayed again before departing to the next temple. As he came out on the other side, he noticed the tank that was near the centre of the temple complex. He was pleasantly surprised to see the same cobra motif in the centre of the tank that he had seen in the village of Agumbe.

There were other familiarities apart from the cobra motifs; he saw some of the same patterns that were on the stones in the shrines carved into the walls of the temple. Snakes have a lot of significance when it comes to Hindu mythology and religion. They permeate into multiple levels, from the Anant Shesha, who endlessly circles the world, to the snake around Shiva’s neck.

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The 1000 headed snake Shesha is know to uphold the world on its many heads and is said to uphold the resting Vishnu.

This particular temple was built for Krishna, the god who subdued the snake ‘Kaliya’, poisoner of the Yamuna.

On meeting up again with Narayana he had more questions than he did before he left. He wanted to ask him why people worshipped snakes, but decided that this particular question was based on the premise that he knew why they worshipped anything or anyone in the first place. He would need to find out why people felt the need to worship and how they felt that need manifest in what they did at temples. When he enquired this of Narayana, he was asked to go and talk to some of the people waiting in the performance hall, since there was still some time before the dances started.

Anāhat asked around, and the responses he received were varied. Some people said they worshipped the gods because they believed in their divine power, and that they were watching over them. Others worshipped because they wanted to achieve something, be it something material or something intangible like a state of higher being. Different people had different ideas of what worship meant ranging from but not limited to darshan, which means ‘sight’ of the deity or artifact in question, to yatra, which means ‘pilgrimage’ to the gods.

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There was a much more disappointing answer when he asked people the significance of snakes in the temple. As far as they knew, snakes were considered sacred, especially the Indian Cobras. Some told him that it was because snakes were representations of rebirth, although were unable to say why.

His inquiry came to a halt as the performances began.

AnÄ hat found out from people around him that, the performance inside the hall started in sync with the procession outside. There was horn blown to signal the start of both. The dancer who came on stage was dressed in a traditional outfit, and adorned with gold jewelry. He had heard from a friend that you could tell what dance form 28 was going to be performed by looking at the pleats of the dancer’s dress. Because his mind was preoccupied with questions, his eyes followed the movements of her hands and feet and the expressions on her face with a certain subconscious instinct. As he caught himself noticing the precise positioning of the feet, the stark changes in expression, he realized that this in itself was exactly the kind of answer he was looking for.

If anyone wanted to try and understand religion, it would be through this: Dance, a form of expression, with which they could begin. The complexity of the performance mirrored the concept of religion in his eyes, but to say it was the perfect metaphor would be limiting. He sometimes found himself in the strange position of being limited by language in situations 55

like this. In most others, it was a tool that had helped him articulate things meticulously. Religion, belief, faith, could not be quantified or expressed through a handful of terms and one could hardly understand the concept of worship without partaking in the process intrinsically. It would be like trying to understand music without letting it flow through your body.

With his newly attained realization, he left the hall to see the outside of the temple where the procession was taking place. His eyes were subjected to a flurry of lights and movement. Priests on the ratha with the deity were leading the way; the ratha was followed, not pulled, by an elephant.

It was a relief to see the temple elephant not being exploited as a draught animal. There was an odd assortment of priests and followers behind the ratha chanting together in a familiar rhythm. The smell of the burning camphor placed on the path to light the way pervaded the atmosphere. One could only experience the procession in all its glory if all the senses were receptive. The sounds of instruments, the chanting of the priests and the sound of hundreds of feet moving to that music, was something truly overwhelming. The flames of the 56

lanterns that the priests were carrying seemed to have a life of their own, seemingly fueled by the words being chanted.

Words could never be enough to evoke such an atmosphere in its entire experience.

Anāhat was startled into a realization as his thoughts went back to the feeling he had pushed aside on his bus ride from Bangalore: for the first time, his standard response to certain experiences – ‘it doesn’t make sense’ 29, didn’t emerge spontaneously. In an instant insight he realized that when he felt that way, he was trying to capture into words his experiences without engaging fully in the moment with all his senses. As he did so now, the words didn’t matter – the experience was complete and he was content.

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Order in Chaos The next day, as AnÄ hat alighted the bus at the fishing village, it was completely transformed. You could relate it to the transformation that a forest undergoes just after the rains arrive. Trees change as the dirt from the leaves is washed away and they’re imparted with fresh shades of green. In this case however, it wasn’t his eyes but his nose that drew his attention to the change. He could smell the fish market 30 before he even reached close enough to see the boats.

As he entered, he was overwhelmed by the number of people that populated the same space that was so barren the day before. There were all kinds of fishes, invertebrates and shellfish. People were shuttling the catch between the boats and the sorting areas. They were being sorted into different grades, based on their size and some other

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factors, which one could only guess at. The sorted fish were either being packaged in iceboxes and put on trucks or being sent off somewhere locally. He spent a good part of the morning walking around, looking and talking to people.

It was when he was about to leave that Anāhat saw a method to the madness. Each and every person handling the fish was doing so with clear intent. The so-called chaos of trajectories of crates, iceboxes, trucks, people and fish was ordered. The different areas of unloading, sorting, packaging and distribution were almost clearly marked and the people moving between them did so with a purpose. People often use the term, ‘it worked like a well oiled machine’, but even well oiled machines are doomed to rust or be replaced. This fishing village had functioned effectively since its conception and continued to evolve organically with the needs of the day. It was more like a colony of ants, each with their own duty, each moving with a purpose in mind.

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He walked around the edge of the fishing village to a jetty.

There were boats to St. Mary’s Island from the Jetty every hour. Having read so much about the island before coming to the village, it was one of the places that he was extremely excited about visiting. As the scents of the fishing village faded, he could smell the salt of the sea a little more. While he waited for the boat to arrive, he looked around at the people waiting to go to the island. It was an unconscious habit he had inculcated when he was a child; maybe it was the fact that he was an only child and observing people had turned into something of a hobby for him. People, however, had always been secondary; the things that he usually noticed first were elemental in nature: the wind, the play of shadows and light, and the pattern that droplets of rain made on his window.

As he waited on the jetty looking out into the watery expanse, he noticed a small speck on the horizon that he assumed must be the island that he was headed to. He wondered if since an island looked like a point on the horizon from the mainland, whether the mainland would look like a line on the horizon from the island. The boat arrived shortly after, and the question receded to the back of his mind.

A lot of the people boarding the boat seemed to be doing so with an air of bored competency. Not having been on one since he was about 11 years old, and not having too fond a memory of the incident, did not help AnÄ hat as he boarded 61

the boat. Once he was on and the boat left the jetty, it was a different picture altogether. The waves were slightly turbulent near the coast and then settled down as the boat pushed past.

The cool shades of blue, glinting softly in the sunlight calmed his nerves. The vast expanse of the water surrounding the boat made it seem different from the other means of transport that he had used so far. The water gave the boat a purpose. Short of swimming across to the island, a boat was the sole means of reaching the island from the coast. He wondered about the fishermen from the fishing village, for whom the activity of taking their boats out to sea must be akin to putting on a shirt in the morning.

Moving deeper, the water changed shades 31 from muddy, to blue to cyan and other shades in between. The speck on the horizon that was the island started growing in size as the boat drew closer to its destination. Even from a distance, he could see the peculiar rock columns that made the island a ‘geotourism hotspot’ as it had come to be known. The boat drew 62

close to the island, and he noticed that the water was much cleaner at the beach.

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Land and Water The water wasn’t the only thing that was clean; the sand was also thoroughly free of garbage. Anāhat had expected all tourist destinations to be littered with refuse based on his previous experiences. It’s a sad commentary in itself that a clean beach was something surprising. As he walked inwards onto the island, the edges seemed to extend outwards and envelope him. He was now looking at things from a different point of view. The endless expanse of the ocean in front of him seemed similar to the scene he had seen from the coast at the mainland.

Dictionaries define an island as ‘a tract of land surrounded by water and smaller than a continent’. By this definition alone, it would mean that continents are just enormous islands.

But he had been living in the city for too long a time, and been part of academic circles for a little

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longer, to believe something simplified to such a degree. So he proceeded to explore the island and to prove his hypothesis that continents were just meta-islands, in a manner of speaking. For that, he had to examine all the factors that go into making a continent – land, primarily a large extent of land seemed to define a place as a continent.

The island was bereft of buildings, fences or shops: three main things seen at any tourist destination. There were, however, pavilions, which supposedly offered unique vantage points for the curious rock formations. There was no denying the fact that the hexagonal columns of basalt

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were spectacular. AnÄ hat walked around on the seashell-strewn beach, where shells of different kinds, shapes, and sizes, in various states of wholeness were scattered in abundance. Most places have beaches created by broken quartz deposits carried by paths of rivers. Over time, the courses of the rivers shift, resulting in bigger beaches.

This island, however, was a different matter altogether. Since the base structure of the 66

island was columnar basalt, there was little sand, so most of the ‘sand’ that was present was formed out of seashells that had been broken down over the ages.

Anāhat’s thoughts went back to continents and islands.

Even though the connection between land and water was supposed to be different in both places; on close observation, it appeared to be quite similar. At the coast especially, the island was indistinguishable from the coast of the mainland.

As he walked around, he noticed that the same Brahminy kites that speckled the sky at the fishing village were perched on the basalt columns with their eyes on the hermit crabs that scuttled in and out of the rocks below. The same coconut trees that lined the beaches on the mainland populated the uninhabited island of St. Mary’s. In fact, the Island was known as Coconut Island for that very reason. Human beings have an inherent need to categorize things based on differences and similarities, Anāhat thought. Categories are made based on differences and then similar things are put into the same category. But it is the similarities across categories that we can glean the most information from. In this case, the similarity was in the land-water connection between two different types of landmasses – a mainland and an island.

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The Scent of Civilization Anāhat realized that there was one key element missing from his previous line of inquiry – People. The handful of tourists on the Island didn’t count as a settlement. For that he would have to go to Padukere Island, off the coast of Malpe; the place that the people from the fishing village had mentioned the festival was happening as well. A couple of boat rides later, he was stepping onto the jetty at Padukere. There was a distinct change in the structure of this Island in comparison to St. Mary’s Island – it had an unmistakable scent: a mixture of petrol from the docked boats and the concrete jetty baking in the sun.

There were boards announcing the festival in their highly digitized glory. As he made his way along the stretch of the Island, he noticed that as he walked away from the coast, it started seeming like any other coastal village.

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It could have even been on the mainland. There were a few marked differences though: there were a few vehicles on the island, mostly two-wheelers, unlike the areas near the fishing village where there were all kinds. The houses were quite similar, in fact, to the ones in Agumbe. They had the same type of clotheslines hanging out behind. A marked difference here was that these houses did not posses any kinds of compound or boundary walls. Anāhat guessed that when you’re living on an Island in a close-knit community, you develop a certain trust that you probably wouldn’t anywhere else. This realization made him consider the fact that there were different levels of civilization, and that some were a lot more sustainable than others.

Anāhat had questioned the premise of civilization, especially industrialized civilization in its current state, being sustainable. Sustainable was a word that had been thrown around a lot in the world. While it could simply be understood as something that can be long lasting for generations to come, nowadays its usage had shifted to fit the environmental, political and socio-economic contexts in which it was being used.

He had seen this trend of shifting meanings with many words 33. The birth of the word ‘boredom’ had come up in a ‘boring’ commute with an eccentric friend. Apparently it came into being in the 17th century with the industrial revolution.

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Before that, experiences may have been boring, but were rarely categorized into an all-pervasive state of boredom.

Anāhat thought a bit more about the industrial revolution and the effects it had had on the world. Wielding language as a subtle weapon, it had created a nexus of capitalistic living centered around getting things done. He had heard that there was a tribe 34 that did not have a word for ‘time’ in their vocabulary. He wondered how that shaped their view of the world, and whether they saw their actions as more than just items on a checklist.

Because of the deification of ‘time’ in the industrial world as something to be hoarded, people the world over had come to think of their life purpose as being a lifestyle projected by the propaganda of hurry co-created by the media, governments and industries, in order to maintain a profit-making system regardless of themselves and their friends, who became mere resources in the system.

He thought about how the media is often found quoting experts on how there needs to be a change in thinking. These experts try to convince the general populace by portraying facts and awful statistics with the hope that they will inspire change. It’s quite strange that we need experts to convince us of things that we already know. And our reliance on such ‘experts’ to tell us what to do is exactly what has us blinded to 72

truths – truths that we look at everyday, but can’t see clearly because of the haze of propaganda.

His eyes moved from one hoarding to another on his way back to Udupi railway station. Housing schemes promise better lifestyles, cosmetics promise better looks and fast-food chains promise better food. Advertising has us chasing things we don’t need, with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like, he mused. The railway station was a welcome sight, after being bombarded by the subliminal messaging that advertising embodies. Having spent most of his childhood travelling in trains, he had grown quite accustomed to the experience. But every station had its own character, its own story; and Udupi was no exception.

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Burst

The Dawn of Realization

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The Beginning of the end of Anahat's Journey

The platform was familiar, but instead of the sounds of passengers and vendors there was an almost natural sense of quiet

as He sat down to listen to the silence, he'd hear something new everytime 77

The fabric of Anahat's jeans seemed to perform the same function as animal fur

He swept the seeds away, with the hope they might start their own forest somewhere.

The train was almost as empty as the platform 78

He always picked the side upper seat, so he could choose between being gregarious or reclusive

Out of sight, out of mind

He felt the train jerk into motion 79

Udupi to Bangalore

On his journey back, forests gave way to farms, farms gave way to houses. Is this how it began?

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He wondered whether the displaced people fared better than these trees

Listening, sleeping, looking, waiting.

Anahat wondered what their stories were.

He'd forgotten to carry a book!

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"Waterfalls sculpt their stories in the land"

"The clouds carry stories across the sky"

Children inherit these stories from their elders 83

The train would stop for twenty minutes

salvation!

Chaiwalas usually have the most interesting take on everything 84

yet another termite mound

Do they worship snakes everywhere?

No wonder goddesses are named after rivers, people rely on them for so much 85

The Gopurum of a temple pushes through the canopy of buildings and oversees the town

Maybe the mainland is an island after all 86

. Looking down at the remnants of the ocean

Looking up at the kites circling above

wondering what they see 87

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...the forest outside the city or

a city inside the forest...

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The Beginning It was a slow evening, and the sun was about to set behind the silhouette of the Eucalyptus plantation seen from the window. Anāhat peered at the shades of orange tinted with pinks and purples. The past few days had been quite cloudy and even if there hadn’t been any clouds, there was always the smog. The smog, which made the sun seem like a hazy night light that someone had forgotten to turn off.

As he peered through the clouds at the sun setting in the distance, Anāhat wondered what it was that drew him to the balcony so often.

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Author’s Note This book came about as a result of organized and calculated study. Whether or not it was apparent while reading what might look like the random meanderings of my mind, would change from reader to reader.

You may have noticed the crux of this long version of a short story: the bubble. I loved playing with bubbles as a child, and would delight in the colours and the inevitable burst, looking forward to that moment when I would be sprayed with soapy water after attempting to prolong the stable state as much as possible.

Many years later, I returned to the much loved bubble again, this time slowly savouring the beautiful steps that just are as much a part of the bubble as the stable transparent orb. All bubbles have a birth, a wobble, a stable state and then the burst.

The simple, beautiful metaphor of the bubble rings true over and over. As I looked, I kept finding that all around me was the inevitable birth, wobble, stable and burst (or realization, depends how you look at it) of things. It’s not simply the destination, but the journey that gives meaning.

I hope that you found and realized your own bubbles in the pages afore, and that they are able to help make your journey more meaningful.

Endnotes Beyond Balconies and Townships

1. Yelahanka was the Capital of many dynasties, the last of which was the Gowda dynasty (also Yelahankanadu Prabhus). The famous Kempegowda I shifted the Capital to Bangalore because of its strategic importance and slightly cooler weather.

2. The annals of history point to interesting conflicts regarding the usage of tanks and lakes. A British official commented that Bangalore is without any lakes, and therefore named all water bodies here tanks. Interestingly, the definition of tank is: Tank (n) c. 1610: Pool or lake for irrigation or drinking water. It is a word originally borrowed by the Portuguese from India, sourced from Gujarati tankh (cistern, underground reservoir for water) or Marathi tanken or tanka (reservoir of water) and perhaps ultimately from Sanskrit tadaga (pond, lake pool).

This definition, rather than clarify, increases ambiguity, ultimately resulting in the conclusion that tanks and lakes meant the same thing but were derived from different languages. Today, however, the meaning of tank has evolved to become synonymous with artificial reservoirs.

3. That ficus tree is now near a graveyard, which slightly altered its viability as a picnic spot.

4. The ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus’ paradox, is a thought

experiment that questions whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains the same object fundamentally.

Theseus sets sail

5. The Outside of a journey is made up of the weather, landscape, buildings, etc., while the décor of the bus, interactions with copassengers, music, food etc., make up the Inside.

6. Anahat had friends who had shifted accents because of their travels, and he found it fascinating to notice the fading and adopting cadence of sounds.

7. The name has changed over the years - Mombayn (1525), Bombay (1538), Bombain (1552), Bombaym (1552), Monbaym (1554), Mombaim (1563), Mombaym (1644), Bambaye (1666), Bombaiim (1666), Bombeye (1676), Boon Bay (1690), Bombay (17th Century), Mumbai (1995).

8. Having around 30 lakes, Thane is also known as the City of Lakes.

Oceans to Islands

9. ‘Forest’ came to be known as an area kept for hunting by the king.

It went from being an area that encloses to an enclosure itself.

10. Holocene Extinction: There have been five mass extinctions.

Nearly 99.9% of all species that have existed are extinct. We are in the throes of the sixth mass extinction and there is a high probability that we are the cause of it.

11. Bandipur National Park, established in 1974 as a tiger reserve under Project Tiger, is a national park located in the south Indian

state of Karnataka. It was once a private hunting reserve for the Maharaja of the Kingdom of Mysore. It went from being ‘an area kept for hunting’ to ‘an area kept from hunting’.

Metamorphosis

12. Malgudi is a fictitious town in India created by R.K. Narayan in his novels and short stories. It forms the setting for most of Narayan’s works. Narayan has often asserted that Malgudi is a fictional town.

But as per one of the writings in his book, he loved Malleshwaram and Basavanagudi, two prominent and old areas of Bangalore, and used the first few letters from Malleshwaram (Mal) and last few letters of Basavanagudi (gudi) to create Malgudi. Director Shankar Nag decided Agumbe as the town that fit the bill of the fictitious town of Malgudi.

13. The quote was in fact based on “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.” - Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club 14. The saying ‘Like a moth to a flame’ is usually used to describe an unswerving and self-destructive attraction. Though it remains applicable to humans, it is actually less true for moths. Moths didn’t evolve around bright lights or flames; they evolved at a time when all the light on Earth came solely from the sun, moon and stars.

They use a form of navigation called transverse orientation, which is flying at a constant angle relative to a distant light source, such as the moon. But around man-made lights, such as campfires or candles, the angle to the light source changes as a moth flies by. This confuses the moth, and inevitably leads to its demise.

Umwelten

15. The umwelt of the organism includes all the meaningful aspects of the world for any particular organism. It could be water, food, shelter, potential threats, or points of reference for navigation. An organism creates and reshapes its own umwelt when it interacts with the world. This is termed a ‘functional circle’. The umwelt theory states that the mind and the world are inseparable, because it is the mind that interprets the world for the organism. Consequently, the umwelten of different organisms differ, which follows from the individuality and uniqueness of the history of every single organism.

16. Nearly every species of moth has a set of host plants that they feed and pupate on, but most species feed on more than one species of plant. Hawk moths generally go under the soil or cover themselves up with leaf litter before pupating, to make sure that they are well camouflaged when they are at their most vulnerable. As adults, most hawk moths feed on nectar; one species is even known to feed on honey.

17. The word Onake meaning pounding stick, an instrument used by villagers to pound grains to flour. This semblance of form gives the waterfall its identity. Abbi means cascade or a series of waterfalls.

18. The dancing frog’s footwork also comes in handy for pushing rival males out of the way during mating season.

Mountains, Mounds and Myths

19. There is a legend that a demon chased Lord Krishna (in disguise) and he to the top of Kundadri, where seer Kundakundacharya was meditating. As soon as Lord Krishna spotted the seer, he put his

jewellery (several statues atop the hill have been defaced in search of this supposed hidden treasure) around the seer’s neck and he hid in the vicinity. The demon mistook the seer for Krishna and kicked him. As the seer opened his eyes, his gaze reduced the demon to ashes.

20. The years between 6 and 14 are a time of important developmental advances that establish children’s sense of identity.

During these years, children make strides toward adulthood by becoming competent, independent, self-aware, and involved in the world beyond their families. Biological and cognitive changes transform children’s bodies and minds. It is during this period that children develop a sense of self-esteem and individuality.

21. The question of stories was part of a long-standing debate. She maintained that stories contained within them more meaning than could be logically explained, no matter how much ever intended towards clarity. All words contain within them the stories that have allowed their users to arrive at the particular meanings that they wish to derive from many usages and contexts. For her, nothing could be purely objective, every word had an umwelt.

Stories or Truths

22. Some cultures deign the closeness of people based on how many cups of tea they’ve shared.

23. Nāgas form an important part of Hindu mythology. They play prominent roles in various legends: a. Shesha, the 1000 headed snake upholds the world on his many heads and is said to be used by Vishnu to rest. Shesha also sheltered

Krishna from a thunderstorm during his birth. b. Vasuki allowed himself to be coiled around Mount Mandara by the Devas and Asuras to churn the milky ocean creating the ambrosia of immortality. c. Kaliya poisoned the Yamuna River where he lived. Krishna subdued Kaliya by dancing on him and compelled him to leave the river. d. Manasa is the queen of the snakes. She is also referred to as Manasha or “Ma Manasha”, “Ma” being the universal mother. e. Ananta Shesha is the endless snake that circles the world. f. Padmanabha is the guardian snake of the south.

24. Ratha-Yatra is a Hindu festival that involves transporting deities on a chariot. The festival originated in Puri in the State of Odisha.

The ratha (chariot) carries Lord Jagannath, and due to its massive size, weight, and sometimes seemingly unstoppable nature, has led to the English word juggernaut to refer to an unstoppable force.

A Well-oiled Machine

25. The fishermen marked the ropes that dragged the nets so that they knew at what depth the nets were, relative to the markings when they were submerged. Different fish are available at different depths, so knowing the depth of the net is quite important.

26. The dialect spoken in the fishing village seemed to be a mixture of Kannada and Konkani.

27. Hubert Reeves believes that in astrophysics as well as other

fields, something else must come before numbers and theory. That missing factor is observation. First comes the observation, he says, then the theory. Ultimately, the theory allows us to do calculations that lead to more observations that confirm or improve the theory.

It was this “dialogue” between what we see and what we think that fascinated Reeves.

28. The jewellery, parting of the pleats of the dress, postures, rhythm of movement, etc. are just a few of the factors that might help a trained eye discern the difference between the varied dance forms of India.

29. Sense (v) : perceive by a sense or senses Make sense (v) : be reasonable or logical or comprehensible.

If something makes no sense, it means that it is illogical, nonsensical, and unreasoned. We can make no sense of it. But this line of reasoning is limiting, as it only allows the use of “logic”, as opposed to allowing sense perception to have equal authority in experience.

Order in Chaos

30. The fish market was a cocktail of scents and smells - the concrete baking in the sun, the exhaust fumes of boats and trucks, the assortment of sea creatures and a hint of salt from the sea.

31. Everything from the quality of the sunlight, to dissolved minerals, to the microscopic organisms living it the water contribute to the color. Some sunlight is reflected off the surface of the water, and reflects the blue color of the sky. Of the sunlight that penetrates, much of it is scattered. This may cause the ocean to appear a certain

color, based upon how scattering is occurring. Generally, the deeper the water, the bluer it is, because blue has a much longer wavelength.

The scattering effect disperses much of the lesser wavelengths.

Land and Water

32. Columnar Basalt is formed when Lava cools evenly and contracts in a certain way. When objects contract, they often crack or fracture.

When contraction occurs at centers that are equally spaced, a hexagonal fracture pattern develops. These columns form in a variety of sizes– some are fairly small, and some are wider and much taller than people!

Scent of Civilization

33. The etymology of a word often tells us so much more than just how the word evolved. The word might have originally meant something, but as society changed and the context for usage of that word became irrelevant or the word itself became redundant it’s meaning itself may have changed over time. It’s a curious thing that we are often told in schools to refer to dictionaries as if they are the final authority on what words mean, while they are in fact authored as well, and are just as liable to subjectivity.

34. The Pirahã and Amondawa people of Brazil don’t have a concept of time. There is no future to worry against and all life is lived in a world of events.

Acknowledgments

To Dr. Geetha Narayanan, the Director of Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology for creating a space where all this was possible.

To Deepta Sateesh, the Director at Design, Environment and Law for being exactly the kind of mentor and guide that I needed in this project and for teaching me to listen before I spoke.

To Dilip da Cunha and Anuradha Mathur, for helping me find a new vocabulary for speaking my thoughts and teaching me to look at things differently.

To Everyone at Agumbe Rainforest Research Station for a truly immersize experience with the night treks, waterfalls, grasslands and mothtraps.

To my tutor Matt Lee for his invaluable feedback on my illustrations and layout.

To Ayisha Abraham, Vivek Dhareshwar, Pithamber Polsani and Debjani Banerjee for giving me insights that helped shape this project.

To my loving Family for supporting me in my journey and being so understanding about all the times I didn’t call home because I lost track of time.

To my wonderful partner Arpita for being there for me through it all, for telling me the things I needed to hear and for being the first editor for my book.

To my friend of old Ojas for being the unabashed critic I really needed to make this book what it is.

To the Splice Girls - Moyee, Sanika, Priyanka, Henal and Namrata for being part of my journey into the Western Ghats and for their beautiful photographs which I have judiciously interspersed with my own.

To my mercurial set of friends Spenta, Chaitrali, Shruti, Sumit and a handful others who have seen me in various states of insanity and stood their ground.

‘...for the first time, his standard response to certain experiences ‘it doesn’t make sense’, didn’t emerge spontaneously. In that instant he realized that when he felt that way...

If there were two things that helped in making sense, they would have to be travel and reading. Travel, the great leveler; it allows you to see things from different perspectives, meet people, learn languages and teaches you to see the inner workings of the world. But even the most widely travelled mind can only see so much of the world in a lifetime; this is where books come into the picture. Reading lets you live a thousand lives, it teaches you to think, reason and understand and helps you understand the inner workings of the mind.

The Long Version of a Short Story offers an eclectic narration of Anāhat’s journey through the Western Ghats. The book takes you on a journey through his mind as much as much as the Ghats themselves.

If you liked the book, would like a copy or have any other feedback...

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