It started off as a speckle on the wall, almost dainty, like someone had spray painted with ink and a toothbrush. Then, like a set of haunted flowers, the speckles blossomed into larger circles. In a couple of days, they joined their faces till the entire wall was covered. The wall of our government-agency built house was battered by rain on the outside and blooming with mould on the inside. This played out every year despite what we did to stop it, our very own horror film.
The danger mould poses to us is surpassed only by its stubbornness. It regularly challenges both walls and our respiratory tracts. Unlike other perils, it doesn’t stay outside. It grows literally cheek-to-cheek with us in our most intimate spaces, the brick and mortar of our homes.
The monsoon is the time of the fungus, that organism which inhabits its very own kingdom, distinctly separate from animals and plants. Mushrooms emerge overnight, mould creeps, mildew writes its own letters on books. Some fungus is straight out of eldritch horror, making zombies of ants, or like the ‘dead man’s fingers’, resembling a corpse’s hand. To the touch, mould or mushrooms feel very silky, suspiciously so, repulsively so. And at this time of the year, older places, such as forest rest houses have so much fungal growth that even plastic curtains droop with lacy white formations. If you open books in old cabinets, the books fall into a fine dust, having been eaten and digested by mould. “A very literate creature,” I once told myself, having found my heirloom Phantom comics eaten by not rats, but fungus. Phantom was defeated, crumbled to nothing in my hands, even though no water had touched him.
Yet, it is also true that life on earth would be impossible without fungus. Fungus interacts with our lives in myriad ways, almost like a bind. Yeast makes bread, and most plants on earth rely on fungus in roots, the wood wide web, to grow and to transfer sugars and nutrients. We have always been taught that fungus is about death, disease and decay, but in breaking down things like wood and rock, fungus aids essential regeneration.
And despite their seeming abundance, not all fungus is thriving. Last year, the International Union for Conservation of Nature added over 400 fungal species to their threatened list of species, which means over 1,000 fungal species are threatened worldwide. The loss of old growth forests (a single tree can have many different kinds of fungus) and wildfires (a single fire can wipe out an entire habitat) are drivers of fungal decline.
Activists call for recognising the fungal kingdom—funga or fungi—not just in our words but also in our cultures, emphasising that we need to add a third ‘F’ to our protection regime, adding up to Flora, Fauna, and Fungi. In 2023, the United Nations Convention on Biodiversity asked on Instagram to include fungus in our conservation policies as well as language. “It is time for fungi to be recognised and protected on an equal footing with animals and plants in legal conservation frameworks… Language is important… Just like mycelium, mycologically-inclusive language will spread unseen but profound, permeating public consciousness to acknowledge fungi’s vital role in the grand web of life,” they said.
We may not like fungus, but we need not like it to understand its value. We may consider it as a harbinger of isolation, but fungus thrives on network formation. And in that, the third F breaks expectations and offers insights into the very act of living.
Views expressed are personal
