Sometimes I think of what that learned one told me as I moved through the city’s avenues, sound-sieged and sun-bleached but for intervallic canopies of leaves. “Vana is ‘city’ too,” he told me, a woman with a forest in plain sight in her name. Vanadurga is She of the City then, another kind of wilderness. Etymologies rearrange things. I think of urban briar and bramble, some danger always underfoot. The frightening t hings gridlocked into the city’s rhythms the way traffi c engorges its roads. It makes sense: Vanadurga’s temples are supposed to be open to the air. No sunshade, no crown of verdure. It is the primeval forest goddess, Aranyani, who has no temples at all, who resides deeper within and without human consciousness.
She is remembered only by the beauty of ancient words made to praise her. Sometimes potted plants are too obvious a metaphor for things that grow — or try to — wherever they are given, in containments disconnected from the bounty of the earth. Other times I wake unto my gallery of green and am grateful for their tenacity, their thirst, their sheer splendour. The way bougainvillea the colour of sweet mango fl esh arcs beyond the trellis, fl agrantly fl irtatious. The way water poured on parched soil brings forth the smell we wrongly identify as rain, for petrichor is only the scent of mud being made. On the street, besides the stump of a tree we lost in the last cyclone, a vivid frond announces an uprising.
Life goes on — “grows on”, someone said. There’s something immutable about this fact, despite the other one: everything changes. Aranyani walking through cities, through what has become of the landscapes of her dominion. Redolent of bark and blossom, the tinkling of her anklets lost amid the noises of this feral place. If only the summer could still do to me what I see it do to the pods and buds on these trees. I borrowed the line from Pablo Neruda, and that’s why I reject its original preposition. I cannot type his “do with” without remembering what he did to the Ceylonese woman he employed while a consul on the island. Reader, he raped her.
Don’t tell me you can know that and still be softly stirred by “I want to do with you what the spring does with the cherry trees”. Yet, why then did I forget, for awhile, what Derek Walcott too had done as every timeline fi lled up last week, in eulogy, with his exhortation to the rejected lover to feast on their life? No, the summer is probably doing with me everything it always has: season of quenching, of moisture, of the quotidian pleasure of undressing. Season when the skin sings. I can’t see the brazen bougainvillea bursting over my balcony from behind my French windows. Am I like that too, in blossom but unaware? Disentangling the wrong etymologies. Seeing cities of trees and forests of conurbations while seeking some other kind of proof. I’d like to fl ourish again as if it was the fi rst time, as if I need not be grateful, as if I did not know too well that seasons turn.
(The Chennai-based author writes poetry, fi ction and more)