For the longest time (as some regular readers of this column know) I have declared I’m not a nature lover
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For the longest time (as some regular readers of this column know) I have declared I’m not a nature lover. My actions contradict this. The crystalline seas of Lakshadweep, the sunsets over Oaxaca, excitedly eating extremely sour apples off trees outside mountain homes, whose walls seemed to be made of packed petals from button roses, have all filled me with wonder.
Therefore, it must be surmised that I don’t hate nature. I realised it’s just that people who talk about getting away to be nearer nature have messed with my brain, implying that nature and the city cannot exist with each other. Presented as a dichotomy, in a monogamous world, it is suggested that you can love either cities or nature, just as it’s suggested you can only love mountains or beaches, cats or dogs. But that’s not how it really goes milaad.
After all, if urban dwellers hold homes in both cities and villages what’s so strange about city and nature intertwining? Not just as the prissy pots on our window sills (spoken as someone who has murdered many a methi, mint and mirchi plant despite good intentions), but in parks and trees and seasides and the awareness of these things as having a place within the city? What can be more beautiful than to be present in the world with all our sides intact? And why shouldn’t the city be imagined as having nature in it so that we protect our Aareys and make more Mahim Nature parks?
Outside my bedroom window is a big tree which everyone has forgotten to trim, so it has grown till it has completely covered my window and curly fronds have begun creeping into the house in an over-friendly fashion. If I sit on my window sill, It feels like I am living in a tree.
In the ever present rain of this monsoon, the wet green tree is full of layers and layers of birdsong. If I sit still and listen, I can hear an airy trill, a chatty chirp, a throaty whoop, a dry chirrup, prim cheeps, a call like a long whistle, a concentric call, notes following notes, like audio smoke rings, a whole phrase of crystal melody and the wry caw of crows.
I don’t know which belongs to whom though I see different birds — acrobatic parrots in the rain, mynahs hiding before the rain comes, sometimes those sun-birds with curved beaks and yellow breasts bouncing on a frond. In November, there is a bird big as two hands and the green of sugarcane juice, and in December, a kite always takes up a brief residence.
I don’t know the names of most birds either. But that’s how it goes in the city, no? You see people on the local train and you know them by sight and their taste in saris, but not much else and that’s fine too. That’s a city-style intimacy, which could be with nature too.
So, believe it or not — about five minutes after I typed the last paragraph, the cook informed me that a monkey has arrived in my beloved tree and is trying to get in. I ran to close the window. A staring contest between monkey and me followed, through glass, giving me a bad feeling.
Maybe I do hate nature after all.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevipictures.com
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