Chapter
EIGHT
I GREW UP AMID OTHER PEOPLE’S VACATIONS. BEACHES, mountains, culture: Kerala has the classic trifecta of modern tourism. Travel writers have a hard time writing about Kerala and its tranquil rivers and manicured tea estates and golden beaches without using the word lush. Over the course of my childhood, Kerala cleverly disguised itself as a tourist paradise, a place where people discovered themselves anew while cruising in a houseboat or wandering through a spice plantation.
I did not grow up skipping down lush green plantation trails. In fact, that was the childhood my parents happily left behind, moving out of their villages in the hills of Kerala to set up home in the hustle and bustle and tussle of Ernakulam, a seaside city. There was nothing lush about Ernakulam. My parents embraced urban living with enthusiasm. Two train stations! Hospitals! Schools! My siblings and I were urban children; we knew how to clamber onto Ernakulam’s breakneck-fast buses. We attended a school where a tiny lawn was the only patch of green. We grew up on the sidelines of Ernakulam’s never-ending development, apartment towers stacking up precariously while the city ticked off construction megaprojects: an international airport, overpasses, a new metro system. For me, Kerala was Mahatma Gandhi Road, with its speeding buses and glitzy sari shops, restaurants full of loud conversation, the sound of the vaanku merging with chants from a Hindu temple. “What’s your native place?” adults would often ask one another, because so many of that generation had moved from their native villages to cities, in search of the promises of modernity.
So I learned to think of nature as something you left behind. My eyes were trained on bigger cities as I grew up. Since then, I have lived in Delhi, New York, and Istanbul: all cities with layers of history and fierce neighborhood cultures. A few years ago, I stayed with some writer friends in a mountain village in southern France. Other than Wednesdays, when a grocery truck visited, and monthly hunting days, when local hunters took to the mountains and then brought their spoils to the village square, the village was silent and peaceful. After two months in this village, I took a train to Madrid, arriving late in the night at a friend’s apartment. Early the next morning, I woke up and went to the window to look out at the street that was coming to life. Someone was walking their dog and someone else was going home after a night binge. I watched them almost collide, step aside, collide again, smile ruefully at each other. Watching from a second-floor window, I felt moved, nourished, revived. Cities, weird, wonderful cities, where strangers come together to make meaning out of collisions. How I love cities.
Nature, though, has always confounded me. For a long time, the urban park was about as natural as I wanted. When I came across rapturous descriptions of nature in books, my eyes skimmed over the paragraphs. Even just hearing about camping makes me want to take a hot shower. I have a city-dweller’s deep distrust of any place without sidewalks and air-conditioning and coffee makers. Plus, nature has snakes.
There’s a story in the Mahabharata about King Parikshit. While hunting in a forest, he gets lost and asks a sanyasi for directions. But the sanyasi is meditating and does not answer. So in a fit of impatience, King Parikshit throws a dead snake on the sanyasi. When the sanyasi’s son sees this, he curses King Parikshit to die of snakebite in seven days. The king fortifies his life against snakes and spends the next week at the top of a tower guarded by soldiers who are instructed to kill every snake they see. For seven days, the king’s priests chant prayers for his long life. As the seventh day winds to a close, the king reaches for a plum in a fruit basket and takes a bite. There is a tiny worm in the fruit. It immediately grows into Takshaka, King of Snakes, who kills Parikshit with a swift bite.
Ever since I read the story as a child, I have been wary of snakes. Having never flung a dead snake on a meditating sanyasi while out hunting, there is zero reason for me to worry so much. But I do. The Mahabharata is full of devastation, from bloody battles to apocalyptic floods, but the worm in the plum fruit has always been my favorite personal metaphor for utter devastation. It is climate change and nuclear annihilation, rolled into one intimate moment. It is walls with lead and roofs with asbestos, endocrine disruptors in toothpaste, microplastic in drinking water. Nothing is safe, not even a pasture-raised grass-fed organic fruit, served to a king on top of a tower.
So yes, I am terrified of snakes. Even writing the word snake makes my toes curl. Under every bush in nature, I am convinced, there are snakes. And people keep telling me stories of their snake encounters—a friend who had a craft store in a village in India told me that in the rainy season, snakes would crawl into her shop and cozy up inside swaths of fabric. Another friend who lives in the outback in Australia told me that she has to turn her boots upside down before she wears them, lest a desert snake has crept in during the night. These friends don’t know, but my brain has filed away these stories very carefully, and anytime I am not in a city, I am bracing myself to see Takshaka, King of Snakes, waiting for me: in a basket of fruit, in a toilet bowl, under a bed.
•
A few years ago, I was visiting an ashram in India with my daughter and husband. My husband, a journalist who was then writing about illegal sand mining in rivers, was interviewing a sanyasi who had become a river activist. As they talked, our daughter, then four years old, wandered off and sat down on the riverbank and started drawing in the clay with a twig. The swami looked at her and said, “Whenever a child comes to visit the ashram, this is what happens. They start playing with the mud. Children are immediately drawn to the earth.”
His simple observation went through me like a knife. What parent has not noticed that specific happiness that comes upon a child let loose in nature? Watching my daughter scramble around in parks and backyards, dancing in the mud and reveling in puddles, reminded me that a long time ago, I, too, knew how to take pleasure in mud and twigs and crunchy fallen leaves and logs and fast-flowing streams. It’s not just that children love nature. Children are nature. In the spontaneous joy they get from the earth and water and trees, there is a reminder of ancient animal impulses that we all carry within us. What had happened to me? Why did wilderness feel fearful to me? I started wondering then if my love for cities, at least partly, had something more sinister underneath it.
Fear of nature, known as biophobia, is a real phenomenon in our increasingly urban world. We spend most of our lives in buildings and vehicles, our leisure time is largely taken up by screens, and our environments have been denatured. Richard Louv, writing about how children suffer from the broken bond between them and nature, refers to “nature deficit.” As I sat there in the ashram with birdsong in my ear, world leaders were meeting to negotiate a climate-change agreement. It was easy enough to connect the dotted line between my own biophobia and the reluctance of powerful men and women to make amends for what we as a species have done. If birds and trees and rivers could sign documents, we would have stopped climate change in its tracks a long time ago. But humans, increasingly urban around the world, seem to have forgotten that we too are nature. The wilderness strikes fear in so many of us, and why would we want to be good stewards of what we fear? As glaciers melt and plastic piles up at the bottom of our oceans, I started wondering if my aversion to nature was actually a version of the banality of evil.
•
“You have to be very lucky to see a snake,” Sam said to me. “They are shy.” I was pulling on long gum boots to wear for a hike in the forest. Sam is the resident guide at a small guesthouse, set deep inside a forest in Wayanad, in the northern hills of Kerala. I had told Sam that I was afraid of snakes, and he was reassuring me that I probably wouldn’t see one. He should have stopped there, but he didn’t.
“Funny incident a few years ago. Two men were riding a motorbike down the mountain when they saw an eagle flying off with a cobra. But the snake was struggling so much the eagle dropped it, right on top of the passenger on the motorbike. Crazy, alle? The snake was so confused, of course, it bit the man. In the neck. He died. Poor man.”
In the Indian epics, the forest is where princes are unfairly exiled, usually for twelve years. Determined to make amends for my nature deficit, I was exiling myself to a forest, for a mere twelve days. Wayanad, with its fierce mountains and silent forests, had sounded like a perfect destination to immerse in nature. The guesthouse we were in, sitting two thousand meters above sea level, used to be the home of a British settler who cultivated spices on about five hundred acres. Now it bears little resemblance to a plantation; the new owners have allowed nature to take its course, and the forest has reclaimed the neat slopes where cardamom plants and pepper vines once grew. Dense clusters of ferns flourished in the shade of towering trees.
The guesthouse has a minimal footprint; it is staffed by preservationists and local Indigenous people, and all the profits go into taking care of the forest. There was only one road up the mountain, and we had been driven up in a semi-open Jeep while pouring rain soaked us and made the rocky road even more perilous. Now we were deep inside the forest, in an old house built on a clearing perched on top of the mountain. Clouds floated past the veranda, and trees covered every inch of the surrounding mountains like moss on rocks.
And here, dear reader, we have reached the limits of my ability to describe nature. Having skimmed all those nature descriptions in books means that nature will always be an impressionist painting for me. There are writers who can tell you about different leaf shapes and name the many trees that dotted these mountains. Unfortunately I will not be able to do that. Incoherence bubbles up inside me, choking me off. All I can tell you is that I was surrounded by mesmerizing shades of blue and green.
But the air. Let me try to tell you about the air. Air as cold and sweet as ice cream. Air so rich my poor, sad lungs, fed on smoke and exhaust and mold, felt like thieves to be breathing it so freely. Air so delicious that I finally understood why breathing, just breathing, could be a joy. Air that went hand in hand with the rich, deep silence of the mountain. I cannot believe that there was a time when all air was like this.
Of course, it is a dangerous fantasy to think that the past is a perfect place. It is especially dangerous in the context of postcolonial thought, because it is all too easy to romanticize a precolonial Edenic version, as if all evil, from racism to environmental degradation, were introduced by the colonizers. Kerala had been doing a terrific job at propagating caste and class inequities before the colonizers arrived, one after the other. But until British colonial rulers systematically razed forests to plant tea, teak, coffee, and spices, Kerala, like the rest of India, was mostly wilderness. The environmental activist Madhav Gadgil writes of how early British travelers described India as an ocean of trees. The colonial state appropriated virtually all forests, supposedly to manage them in an enlightened and scientific fashion. Taking forests away from the many communities that lived in them and near them and took care of them, they razed entire forests to the ground to facilitate the harvesting of timber and to facilitate plantation agriculture, substantially depleting forest cover by 1860. Postindependence India has largely continued this tradition, including the encroachment of tribal lands.
It would never have occurred to my parents to take us to a wilderness destination on a holiday. The few times we went on holiday, we took those long train rides to the big cities that enamored us. Monuments, shopping, eating out: this was our idea of a vacation worth spending money on. Besides, we had our native places: the villages my parents grew up in, still thrillingly (for children) and exasperatingly (for parents) remote and tree-covered in the 1990s. When we visited my grandmother’s village in those days, we had to take a train to the nearest town, catch a bus from there, then wait for an uncle or cousin to pick us up in a bone-rattling Jeep. I dreaded that final ride because the twisted mountain roads would make me throw up. Still, the first sight of the river, which I thought of as my grandmother’s river, would bring relief and comfort and the promise of jackfruit chips. Those villages had rapidly turned into small towns, and now my grandmother’s house on the river was next to a bridge that brought buses and trucks to her doorstep. My grandmother herself was no more, and the house was slowly crumbling.
My grandmother would have loved that bridge. Having spent a lifetime enduring weeklong power outages and racing against the local fox to scoop up chicken eggs, she would have welcomed all that it made possible—groceries trucked in, plumbers and electricians who could bike across from town, not being cut off when the river was flooded. The bridge was universally considered a blessing: even as it was being built, on my extended-family WhatsApp group, we watched it grow as if it were a fetus. Now that it straddles the river, we keep tabs on it from around the world, especially during the monsoons when the waters rise. The older generations in that WhatsApp group boast about having had to swim across the river to go to school. Now the bridge has opened up an array of schools and colleges as options for the young people of the village. It has spurred the local economy and made village life much more spontaneous. Yet something was lost too. And now all over India, parents like me are seeking out wilderness destinations for our children and ourselves. Every big city in India is now surrounded by a belt of getaways as more and more urban dwellers, exhausted by the daily grind that makes our lives convenient and comfortable, seek refuge in nature.
There are parallels here to the way the Industrial Revolution in England made tourism necessary and possible. But did that generation of tourists live with a quietly ticking clock counting the days down to the final glacier? The way we seek out nature now is tinged with mourning and alarm, and every time I looked out at the thick forests that covered the mountains in Wayanad, I felt the sad dilemma of being human in the twenty-first century. Reviewing Barry Lopez’s Horizon, Rachel Riederer wrote about how for a previous generation of travelers, traveling into nature was an absolute good, “undertaken without this modern anxiety.” From our perspective as inheritors and co-creators of a fully formed climate crisis, Lopez’s lifetime of wandering is a chronicle of ultimate luxury, she concludes. There’s also a genre of nature travel that is “last-chance tourism”—visiting places that will never be the same again or are about to disappear forever. But isn’t that basically every place on earth, sooner or later? Someday, I knew, Kerala would disappear. Sandwiched between the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghats, with low-lying backwaters already prone to floods, what chance did it have against rising sea levels?
Unfortunately, underneath the pain and anxiety I feel about all this, there is a layer of smugness I can’t seem to escape from—what a good person I was for caring, for having these high-flown thoughts about nature, despite what modernity had done to me. And beneath the smugness, a constant flow of irritation toward the leeches.
“Congratulations,” the irrepressible Sam said when he noticed me, within an hour of our arrival, trying to pick a couple of leeches off my elbow. According to him, the little bloodsuckers will purify your blood, so you’re lucky to have them. Just like you are lucky to see snakes, I suppose. Sam showed me how to get the leeches off with a salt stick (a bundle of salt wrapped in cloth and tied to the bottom of a stick). Clawing them off one’s skin does little; they simply leave some teeth in your flesh. Leeches are a fact of life during the monsoon in Kerala. When it rains relentlessly, they emerge from water bodies and start making their way up any warm bodies in the vicinity.
Every day we went for long hikes in the forest, equipped with salt sticks and nylon leech socks and gum boots. Every day we came back with leeches crawling all over us. Leeches find their way by sensing heat. Groping their way toward warmth, they make their way up animal flesh and press their three hundred tiny claws into skin to start sucking blood and sustenance. Soon I got so tired of trying to get them off me that I only picked off the most persistent ones. I got used to patches of blood leaking out of my body.
Sam’s love for the forest was infectious. “Elephants always stop to snack on this fruit tree,” he would say. Or “This is where the bison come to drink water.” Once, he picked up what looked like a twig and showed us that it was the needle of a hedgehog. The week before we arrived, he said, he had to wait for a tiger sleeping on the road to wake up and saunter into the forest before he could drive on. After a point, these stories started to feel mythical. Our hikes through the forest were always beautiful, but we never had any animal sightings that I can boast about. Except maybe one day when a little green snake slithered past us before I had the time to get afraid. “Very poisonous snake,” Sam said, looking at its tail fondly as it disappeared into the undergrowth. “Two or three minutes you would be dead if it bit you.” At one point he stopped and sniffed the air. “I smell tiger,” he said. I sniffed the air. Nothing. It was as if Sam had another set of senses. He had walked the land alone a thousand times. The forest was a book or rather a library full of books, and he was a scholar steeped in the study of it. Whereas I was forest illiterate.
One day Sam stopped to show us tiger scratch marks on a tree trunk. A few moments later, he showed us an animal skeleton that lay in a clearing. It was a baby elephant, he told us, likely killed by the tiger that then ate the elephant over the course of several days. The rain-washed white bones lay starkly on grass that still showed evidence of the animal’s fight. They looked like signs, and as I pieced them together—ribs, mud, bloodstained leaves—I felt like a toddler learning to read. On another hike, we heard a brusque percussive sound. It was sambar deer calling in the forest to alert other deer. A tiger was probably on the prowl, Sam calmly interpreted. Shouldn’t we return? I asked. “It’s nowhere near us,” he said. “If you see a tiger, the best thing to do is to raise your hands as high as you can, exaggerate your size, and make lots of noise,” he told me. “You have to be very lucky to see a tiger.”
He also seemed to have misunderstood my fear of snakes as a form of curiosity. Pretty much any innocent conversation with Sam degenerated into him whipping out his cell phone to show me pictures of snakes. Snakes snakes snakes! Snakes with gleaming black skin and yellow spots, snakes that looked like purple garden hoses, snakes that looked mildly taken aback to be photographed. Then one day, amid the barrage of snake photos, I saw a picture of a young woman with long black hair holding a smiling toddler on her hips. “Oh, that’s my wife,” he said, quickly moving past that one. Wait, wait, I wanted to know more. Sam’s wife and son lived in a town three hours away, because, schools and hospitals. The same reason my own parents had scrambled out of the villages they grew up in. There was one rocky cliff near a waterfall in the forest where, magically, sometimes we would find cell phone reception. Sometimes on our hikes, Sam led us there, and the three of us would all fall on our phones eagerly. And Sam would download photos of his son growing up without him. It was his wife’s labor as a mostly solo parent that made it possible for Sam to work his dream job.
One day he showed me a picture in which he was “playing” with a baby cobra. When he saw my face blanch, he told me that cobras are far less dangerous than the Russell’s viper, a snake common in Wayanad. A cobra at least warns you with a hissing sound; the viper just makes its stabbing attack unceremoniously. Its jaws are strong enough to take out a chunk of flesh, but it also delivers deadly venom. “Many people have been killed by this snake,” he said with a kind of grudging admiration as I used my salt stick to tap leeches off me. You have to be very lucky to die like this, I could imagine him saying next.
We had such different ideas of danger. I have spent all my life trying not to be attacked. This sounds melodramatic if you are not a woman. But for women, the danger of wilderness is not just about encountering wild animals or slipping and falling into the rapids; it is also the danger posed by men. Even in the well-marked urban park outside my apartment building in New York City, I would never venture to be alone after a certain time of the night. There are paths I would never take in that park alone during daytime. During the pandemic, there was a string of attempted rapes in the park. For days after that, I could not bring myself to venture to the park for a walk, even during the day. The specter of violence follows women everywhere, and it walks out with us into the great outdoors. At least in part, my biophobia is also androphobia. So much of nature writing frames nature as an alternative space, an antidote to all the oppressions and distractions of built spaces. A place where we can tune back into our inner noble savage frequencies. In fact, who we are in built spaces is who we are in nature. How could it be otherwise?
In an essay titled “Black Women and the Wilderness,” Evelyn White writes of reckoning with her fear of nature during a visit to the Cascade Mountains of Oregon. “While the river’s roar gave me a certain comfort and my heart warmed when I gazed at the sun-dappled trees outside a classroom window, I didn’t want to get closer,” she wrote. “I was certain that if I ventured outside to admire a meadow or to feel the cool ripples in a stream, I would be taunted, attacked, raped, maybe even murdered because of the color of my skin.” The anxiety women feel in nature has additional layers for Black women, for other women of color, for queer women, for trans women, for women with disabilities—and none of it is because of snakes or slippery waterways. It is because the wilderness, too, has become a space where male privilege plays out. From hunting to natural science to wilderness tourism, men have claimed the landscape of wilderness and the metaphors of its ruggedness. The framing of wilderness as the antithesis of domesticity, of rule of law, of safety, has served men so well.
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“Did you see anything?” another guest asked me when I returned to the guesthouse one day after a hike. “No, I did not,” I replied. Which was not true. I had seen trees and plants and bushes; I had seen butterflies and mynahs and, of course, leeches. But we both knew what she meant—did you see any magnificent wild animals? I felt embarrassed that I had nothing to show for my exertions.
So much of nature tourism has become premised on the idea of the animal as spectacle. All over the world today, there are animal sanctuaries and even big-game parks that allow visitors to not just see but also touch, hug, take photos of, and interact with exotic animal species. But the idea of a sanctuary where you can interact with animals is an oxymoron. In many tourism-hungry places, there is also a tendency to slap words like sanctuary and refuge even on places that parade animals cruelly.
Natasha Daly reporting for National Geographic wrote about two different elephant sites in Thailand, not too far from each other. The first one is famous for an elephant that can paint. Meena the elephant is so good at painting that she can paint an elephant in the wild, which is then sold to tourists. Meena spends her days and nights in chains, and, because she has a kicking problem, her trainer has put one of her feet in a spiked ring so that she cannot rest that foot. Nearby is the Elephant EcoValley, where there are no performing elephants like Meena. Instead, tourists can watch elephants bathe in the river and buy paper made of elephant dung. Daly writes that it’s the kind of place where a visitor can feel a bit superior. But the same company runs both places and uses the same elephants. Elephant EcoValley simply targets tourists who would prefer not to see the animals suffering in plain sight. This is such a sadly apt metaphor for the way captive-wildlife tourism has become adept at catering to our fantasies—not just of interacting with animals but of ourselves as compassionate people.
At the heart of conventional conservation is the model of the American national park. The Indian environmentalist Madhav Gadgil writes of the influence of the top-down strategy modeled on Yosemite National Park, whose establishment in 1890 followed the forcible expulsion of the Native Americans who lived there. The history of “America’s best idea” goes hand in hand with the history of white supremacy over nature and the Indigenous people of North America.
In 1882, W. P. Hermann, the Grand Canyon Forest Reserve supervisor, wrote:
The Grand Canyon of the Colorado River is becoming so renowned for its wonderful and extensive natural Gorge scenery and for its open and clean pine woods, that it should be preserved for the everlasting pleasure and instruction of our intelligent citizens as well as those of foreign countries. Henceforth, I deem it just and necessary to keep the wild and unappreciable Indian off of the reserve.
He was talking about the Havasupai. For centuries until European colonization, much of the land along the Grand Canyon’s South Rim was occupied by the Havasupai people, who freely roamed over its 3 million acres. By 1882, the U.S. government had restricted them to a minuscule reservation at the bottom of the canyon. The Havasupai village is one of the most isolated Indian reservations in the United States, accessible only by walking or mules or, for those who can afford it, helicopters. During the summer, the villagers raise crops in the gorge, and during the winter they travel to the canyon’s plateaus, where they hunt and graze cattle.
Almost a century later, in 1971, the National Park Service, in collaboration with the Sierra Club, proposed that the Havasupai people should be further restricted. The park had its eye on the plateaus where the Havasupai had permits for winter activities. According to the proposal, “There is a continuing concern for providing sufficient camping capacity for tourists who are within and moving through the region . . . Private campgrounds are meeting some of the demand. Indian reservations offer a great potential for this and other recreational activities.”
On May 18, 1971, the National Park Service held a public hearing regarding its “Master Plan for Grand Canyon National Park.” Without the traditional grazing lands that fell outside their reservation, the Havasupai would lose whatever economic autonomy they had. But it was not just a question of income. For the Havasupai, their land is their body and their spirit. They were not invited to the hearings held to discuss the master plan. Nevertheless, they showed up to advocate for themselves. Stephen Hirst’s book I Am the Grand Canyon: The Story of the Havasupai People documents this remarkable moment.
After all the bureaucrats and conservationists had spoken, Lee Marshall, the Havasupai tribal chairman, addressed the gathering: “I heard all you people talking about the Grand Canyon. Well, you’re looking at it. I am the Grand Canyon.”
Even the Grand Canyon is not the Grand Canyon after all.
Kerala, too, has its own shameful history of committing violence against Indigenous people, appropriating their lands, and forcing them into slavery. One of the bloodiest incidents took place in Wayanad, about an hour away from where we were, in the Muthanga forest, the traditional homeland of many Adivasi groups. Long ousted from the forest so that it could be converted into a sanctuary, the Adivasi communities of Muthanga were forced into penury and landlessness. In 2002, they reentered and occupied Muthanga. The face-off between the community and the government ended when eight hundred policemen entered the forest and opened fire on the fifty-odd Adivasi families. Only a month before this incident, the government had organized a summit for foreign investors, where it put up tourism in Muthanga as an investment opportunity.
From Uluru to the Grand Canyon to Muthanga, the tourist walks freely through lands that Indigenous people have been evicted from. This is the superpower of tourism: it can masquerade as a public good while legitimizing land-grabbing.
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The ecologist Suprabha Seshan lives and works at the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary in Wayanad, a forest community focused on rewilding. Seshan has drawn attention to how forest conservation should go beyond simply increasing tree cover. Forests are not just trees and tigers. They are ferns and frogs as well. Seshan and her team have been painstakingly cultivating the biome at the sanctuary, bringing in endangered species of plants from around the Western Ghats to Gurukula. “We refer to these plants as refugees, similar to human refugees suffering the depredations of war, displacement, climate change and general toxification of the environment,” she wrote in Scroll.
Elsewhere, in an interview, she recalled a conversation with a visiting Japanese botanist, who marveled at the diversity of Gurukula’s forests and compared them to the homogenization of vast areas in his country. I was struck by this comparison—I thought then of all the cities I loved and their tolerance for weirdness. A forest is like a city in its tolerance for the weirdness and wildness of biodiversity. As Kerala filled up with malls and apartment buildings, here in its forest was a final refuge for its most vulnerable inhabitants, a place where poisonous snakes can slither through the undergrowth and cicadas can live and die anonymously, and tigers can have multicourse elephant meals.
•
My thoughts kept circling back to that baby elephant whose skeleton we saw on our first walk. The way its heart must have lurched when it felt the claws of the tiger, the weight of its hunger. And at first, every single one of my thoughts was about feeling sorry for the baby elephant. But then I started weighing the cuteness of baby elephants against the tiger’s need to eat. How absurd it is to use the metrics of sympathy to understand this encounter. And even more absurd was whatever it was that made me think my opinion on this was important. Nature is indifferent to the cuteness of baby elephants and the overwrought emotions of biophobes.
One day, while lounging on the veranda, trying and failing not to feel virtuous about “being in nature,” I noticed a faint movement. It wasn’t a tiger or an elephant. It was a green cricket struggling in one of the spiderwebs hanging delicately from the wooden beam above me. Even as I watched, a wasp swooped in, plucked the cricket out of the web, and carried it off. How annoyed the spider must be, I thought, to have the lunch it worked so hard for so unceremoniously snatched away.
It dawned on me then that I was waiting and waiting for a grand wildlife sighting—a red-carpet welcome from Mother Nature, a parade of elephants. And it was not going to happen. My forest hikes changed. We walked quietly through the forest, savoring its deep strange silence and the brooding darkness. The more I did not see, the more I felt seen. The animals were there: behind trees, in hollows, under the rocks, watching us. They knew instinctively that their lives depended on not being seen.
Conversely there were all the animals I would like to not see in my everyday life. The roaches that infest a certain generation of New York City apartments, the rats that lurk behind restaurants everywhere in the world, the bony street dogs that skulk at the corners of Indian streets, the mosquitoes that turn outdoor dinners into slapping festivals, the microbes that infect and rot and mold. How strange that I had never thought of them as nature. How strange that I had never thought of myself as nature.
Slowly my fear of nature was turning into awe, a grudging admiration for the forces of life and death that are at work in every tree, for the animals that knew how to be invisible and frustrate us while we walked through their habitats, even, dammit, for the leeches blindly groping their way toward heat, determined to live.
Twelve days after we arrived, the Jeep bumped us back down the road toward the small town at the base of the mountain. We were on our way home. Our driver braked suddenly and pointed across the valley. On the mountain on the other side, an elephant duo was slowly walking down toward a canyon. A mother and a child. They moved slowly, the mother unfurling her trunk to grab at branches and the child imitating her. They were so far away. I screwed up my middle-aged eyes and pointed the animals out to my daughter, wishing we were close enough to . . . to what? To see them better?
Now, you should know that I have seen a lot of elephants. They were a common sight on the streets of Kerala when I was growing up, and even the most fearless trucks and buses would slow down and shrink toward the sides when sharing road space with an elephant. I loved the dignity of it, the elephant calmly striding down the street, indifferent to all of us gazing in awe. Ironically, many of these elephants worked in the logging and sand-mining industries and were used to haul heavy loads. My mother’s uncle owned a couple of elephants, who were often hired out like any other livestock. When these elephants were brought to the river to bathe, we children, visiting for summer vacations, would run out to watch, hoping the mahouts were in a good mood and would let the elephants frolic in the waters. Sometimes they were rented by temples for festivals. Even churches and mosques in Kerala would line up a procession of elephants at festival time. The taller the elephants, the longer their trunks, the grander the festival. Some of these celebrity elephants had their own Facebook fan pages. Yes, I have followed elephants on social media. All this is to say—elephants there have been aplenty in my life.
But these elephants across the valley were the first ones I had seen in their home. And even from this distance, I could tell that the mother elephant, confidently swirling her trunk to reach for leaves, was another species of confidence and grace. Her very gait as she floated among the trees, offering leaves to her child, trumpeting love notes, signaled such a lavish freedom that it was not freedom anymore—it was the fullness of her existence. And it was only when I saw this elephant in the wild that I realized that every elephant I had seen until then was simply putting one foot in front of the other, grimly making its way through life. What I thought was dignity had been mourning.
I felt grateful then that we were not closer. That this elephant and her child could loiter without feeling the human gaze on them. They were in no danger from me and the rest of my species. I hoped for her a long life and I hoped for her freedom from captivity and I hoped for her the great mundane joy of keeping her child alive.
As she walked farther away from us down the canyon, the elephant became smaller and smaller. Soon, in the vast panorama of the valley, she looked like a tiny bug. A leech. Like a leech climbing up a warm leg, the elephant and her child moved, slowly, feeling their way through the mountain, alert and trusting. I felt a soft movement on my own leg and looked down. Predictably, there was a leech climbing up my leg, alert and trusting. To the leech, I was the Grand Canyon.