A Naturalist's Column

Fungi transformed in our imaginations after the Wood wide web was discovered and described by the forest ecologist Suzanne Simard. And later powerfully evoked by writers like Peter Wohlleben and Robert Macfarlane. We now know that they connect forests, live in the ocean's depths and thrive in nuclear waste where nothing else can live. Their structures and lives confound our understanding. Their presence on the planet is almost all pervasive, that the dominion of any other life on here turns illusory as we study fungi more deeply. This poem is written from astonishment, terror, enchantment and a range of other feelings fungi can conjure. Fungi Let me throw you a riddle. Us, I, all of me. Bedrock, sky, all in between. Big, bigger than any dinosaur. Deep, deep as ocean floor. Life and life's reverse, death and death's converse, comprehension's curse, webwork, network, sub-soil universe. Underland's ancient internet, Underground's riddle-vers...

Bark can appear barren. But when you go closer, things start moving, its pieces start shifting. So much life lives hidden in its interstices, or garbed with its looks. This is a poem celebrating these rugged vertical landscapes. Bark Bark, you call me, I am a biome by myself, a stretch of sheer curvature, a tree's unique signature, the very meaning of texture. Abode of a diverse creature community, lichen-tatooed, moss-draped, fringed by fern, singed by fungi. I am life whether I stand or lie, pressed on Earth or bridged to sky, home to bark-gecko, bark-mantis, bark-beetle, bark-others, who wear my looks and garb my features, I'm a basking spot for snakes and lizards, grooming post for elephants and leopards, nesting place of wasp, shield-bug and spider, snack bar of barbet, nuthatch and woodpecker, ladder and staircase for vine and creeper, morning hideout for many a midnight creature, a squirrel playground and katydid podium, a civet haunt ...

Palaash Blossom and Rosy Starlings If not every day, then during every transiting month, the human being who pleasures in taking long walks and communing with the landscape, has something or the other to anticipate excitedly. March is almost upon us and the Palaash trees everywhere are full of buds, making their branches sag. Very soon, when one looks up one morning, they would have suddenly bloomed altogether, overnight. And the tree would then bear not a sole leaf. Not a tinge of dark green would be seen on its crown, for it would have replaced every single one of them with its tongue like kesari-orange flowers curling towards the sky. From a distance, with some imagination on my part, the tree could well be a titan’s arm reaching up with his palm spread wide, his crooked fingers dripping with magma, having broken through the crust. The roads and walkways below are carpeted. The canopies of the smaller trees around are topped. Its flowers bob all along the shores of a pond...

The Life in a Paddyfield There have been times when I have sat alone and dreamt of living an agrarian life, not for anything else but for the closeness to Earth such a life offers. Not that my body is built for the arduous routines of farming. When the rice planting is happening at Pathashaala, on a few occasions, I, along with some students, have volunteered ourselves to also participate in it. We are given a contemptible corner of a field far from the main planting. The village women who come at daybreak to do the rice planting continue till the evening. But in my case within half an hour of bending my back about a hundred and fifty degrees from my hip girdle, I start noticing strong symptoms of vertigo and my backbone refuses to return to their original position for a long time. When not too many eyes are looking, I quietly walk out of the field like an Australopithecus. Some of the kids, who have been waiting for the chance to do the same, while also not wanting to be seen as...