Thursday 19 August 2021

The Speaking Land

This was an attempt at writing prose-poetry for Alpine Fellowship Award. The idea was to try out a different style of writing using the Award as motivation.The topic was civilization and the wild and the post is about my experience with the last standing virgin forests in Chhattisgarh

The land spoke, the children of the land spoke. Only we could not hear, land’s children bred of civilization. 
 
She throbbed with an energy that no human commune, today, can bring to birth. Deep and ancient, it ran through the veins of the forest, held in the trees’ girth. The trees spoke of times when they grew with a wild freedom, carrying with them centuries of wisdom gathered with patience and groundedness. Were they there when our land was drifting in the great wide oceans, I could only guess. These ancient teachers: so old that my life, here on this land, felt just an exhalation long. So huge, their panoramic canopy I could fathom only lying on the forest floor. So tall, I felt like a grain of sand at the base of a Himalayan mountain. The soft winter sun filtering down threw shadows that reminded of a time when my ancestors roamed the land on all fours, their memories perhaps carried in our cells. It made me long, just long, for what, my heart then couldn’t tell. 
 
Oh, you speak of a land, imaginary and magical – you would say. Which ancient forest is left now that speak of age-old tales? It’s no fiction, I say, for its there, still there! Right in the heart of my country, a land of forests filled with tigers, elephants, and bears. Where jungle streams gurgle with happiness and flow with ease. Where tribes live among them deeply caring for others, away from things plastic or life filled with disease. 
 
But young towns nearest to the forests, slowly being fed on adrenaline that is money, were abuzz with the idea of wealth under their feet, forgetting that abundance not wealth lay in the nurturing land and wisdom of grandmother trees. They dreamt of a glitzy life and said rightly – how can you have a forest if you desire a city like Mumbai and a life of ease? 
 
I was following the trail of coal, Earth’s gift but civilization’s greed. And it led me here, India’s last wilderness untamed. Deep in the forest, peopled with innocence, were villages unaware of what civilization had in store. For hundreds of acres of this primeval land were marked for mining, and the rivers for dams to clean the gouged coal. They did not know that their home and a life of peace were being readied to be handed away to companies who termed mining – “clean and green”. 
 
Did anyone ask the land, these ancient trees, the people and other children of the forests, if they wanted their home plundered to fuel the lives of the rich? The forests, trees, rivers, and land are all a waste if not for the use of humans. And animals - are they really there or figment of tribal imaginations? The tribes who ‘are so backward’ as to not even know plastic, will be ‘compensated’ with money and given offers of manual labour to ‘improve their livelihood’, they would preach. 
 
As I stood carrying the weight of consequences, a deep ancient grief as old and huge as the trees, welled up in me. Desperate, I walked inside the forest and looked at the trees. And I whispered, “Sorry for all of humanity’s misdeeds”. In that moment, the forest fell deathly silent, no birds chirped and not a leaf stirred. In that eloquent silence, I understood, without a doubt, that the forest knew what her future held.
 
I turned away helpless, stricken by the collective loss. But even in that loss, I returned with a gift. For now I know that the land speaks and all children of the land speaks - of magic and wisdom, of non-judgment and compassion, of balance and a future shift. 
 
 

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