CHENNAI: I write from a place where I manufacture hope for myself — and for the world — out of nothing but with all of me, the way a silkworm spins a cocoon from its body, or the way the sunlight-catching gossamer that a spider weaves from itself becomes at once its home and its art. May you find in this time of constraint that you have more will and more heart than you usually have recourse to. May you draw from old wells of strength, and may they show you how you have been here before, and how you lived through it.
The circumstances may be amplified, but the feelings are familiar. You have felt helpless before. You have known isolation. May you receive this while bolstered by that memory, just as I send it to you from a place of periodic equanimity, gained by experience and with the sense that all the world has slid now to the level of disquiet I always live with. And having lived that way, I can tell you that you can too. If you have the bare minimum to stay alive in this adversity, you can still find or make mirth, romance, creativity, comfort. I know that somewhere in this city, the boughs of mango trees must be ladening with ripening fruit.
The season for them has surely arrived, as seasons do, even out of turn in this time when ecospheres evolve. Soon, the rare jacarandas — you may know where amidst these many streets suddenly empty of our urgencies and our vanities they are rooted — will prosper in purple. Have you noticed how many words in the English language for this colour borrowed from the names of flowers that carry it? Lilac, lavender, violet, periwinkle. Jacaranda is not one among them, both tree and tint.
How beautiful to think of them all: summer’s bounty — the flowering trees, the fruitbearing boughs, the weeds, a wild luxuriance. They will loom radiant in their posts, whether we can see them, or touch them, or take from them or not. I write from a place with no foliage in my sight, for the first time in over a dozen years. It’s enough for me to know it thrives out there, away from our plucking hands and our polluting vehicles. Remember that nature has its own rhythms, and that you can conjure them up in thought. They susurrate within you. They are you. May this find you in a place where your water, your electricity, your subsistence and your Wi-Fi are blessedly stocked.
May you have enough. May you know that your coffer of courage, your vault of ingenuity, your repository of goodwill, and your larder of intuition are renewable resources. You do not have to fill them as we did before, using the ways we took for granted. There are other ways: gentler, simpler, more generous, more connected from afar. May you know that you are precious, and so is each life. May you know that if you are lucky, it is disgraceful — as in, incognizant of the universe’s grace — if you do not use your survival to make the world a better place.
SHARANYA MANIVANNAN @ranyamanivannan