CHENNAI: Sometimes the forest stretches her limbs, lets loose her hair so its tendrils unfurl — a little like territory flags, but those are human contrivances — into the places in our lives where we have forgotten her. She reminds us. She asks that we watch, and that we listen for her.
On certain city roads, there is an even keen of insect sounds that surrounds us for exactly as long as we ride under an arbour of embracing branches. Then we re-enter the sunlight and that forest essence vanishes. Do you hold your breath under that canopy cover? Do you slow down?
So I both wonder and don’t have to wonder what he’s thinking, the leopard who was caught in a Bengaluru school last week. He was tranquilised and captured, and has since fled his cage again. He is at loose in the Bannerghatta National Park, his habitat, as I write this.
It takes only minimal empathy to imagine why he might abhor his cell. Around the city, there other sightings.What could they be: tricks of the eye, wishful mirages, or truly: animals of the wild, wandering?
The forest seeps into civilisation in ways brutal and beautiful. Sometimes, both at once. In Munnar, mountain elephants stumble onto highways, lumber into jeeps and onto people. In the Sundarbans, tigers, whose ecosystems are ravaged by natural upheaval, seek human meat. Meanwhile, at the BRT Tiger Reserve in Karnataka, where Soligas live alongside them as per longstanding tradition, the tiger population doubled between 2010 and 2014, and no animal-people conflicts occurred.
In times of disaster, there are rumours circulated about beasts escaping captivity: about disintegrated walls at Vandalur Zoo during the recent floods, for instance.
Tell me, who among these is most brutal: the lost one, the lacking one, or the liar?
So one reads about these leopards, at a safe distance admittedly, and watches and wonders a little more. Sometimes, I sit with people and sense the sea in them calling. Or the mountains, or the starlight, once in a while, in the aura of a particularly battle-weary individual, the desert. Most of all, though it’s the sea — biologically our bodies are made almost entirely of water. A sun-kissed beach and a cliff-jagged coast will each offer a different conversation. But, it’s nourishment just the same.
The forest calls to me often, and even if I no longer chase its song, I know its resonance. Amid the vehicle horns in the city and its bandage of artificial light, I seek it. And in doing so, invoke it.
I am waiting for April, when a particular jacaranda tree will empurple my daily route. I am waiting for a dark crow taking shelter among tamarind pods on a day of rain. But most of all, I am waiting for escape, for the helix of a montane highway, for the bite of clear cold air, for a place where I can sink my feet into the lush red earth and know it to be a homecoming.
@ranyamanivannan
(The Chennai-based author writes poetry, fiction and more)