Roots

The flood of the monsoon tide has dug deep into one beach, creating a tall bank of sand where the tide mark ends. Here the row of casuarinas now cling precariously to the edge. You can see the roots of some of these trees in this wall of banked sand. In some cases, the sea has washed away all traces of sand and a section of roots stands forlornly in midair. There seems to be no one single tap root, but only many long thin roots crouching rather spider-like on the ground. It’s astonishing that these weak looking roots are able to hold the trees upright. Some of the casuarinas have toppled over with no soil to hold onto.

Elsewhere large old trees have been felled by the recent furious winds, the broken roots standing in the air much like leafless twigs.

Trees are uprooted more easily than the villagers here. No storm can persuade them to loosen their hold on their “native” land. Apart from those who have gone to sea, and the few who have gone to the Gulf to make their fortunes, most villagers have never been outside the state – other than on the odd pilgrimage to Shirdi in Maharashtra - and have no desire to do so.

This makes them somewhat odd in the modern world where constant movement is more common than not: from house to house, from one city to another, one country to another: across oceans and continents and time zones, forsaking what has grown familiar, and sometimes loved, for what is unknown and strange and often disorienting.

The sense of loss, even grief, that this inevitably brings about is unknown to the villager for whom the past is preserved in the present: the same house, the same trees, the same people: only a little more tatty, a little more dilapidated by the passing years.

In the essay Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie writes:

“An old photograph in a cheap frame hangs on a wall of the room where I work. It’s a picture dating from 1946 of a house into which, at the time of its taking, I had not yet been born. The house is rather peculiar – a three-storeyed gabled affair with tiled roofs and round towers in two corners, each wearing a pointy tiled hat. ‘The past is a foreign country,’ goes the famous opening sentence of L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between, ‘they do things differently there.’ But the photograph tells me to invert this idea; it reminds me that it’s my present that is foreign, and the past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time.”

Tree which are uprooted can sometimes – if the damage is not severe or the trees are still young – be replanted in the same soil. Mostly they just die. Human beings might die a little inside every time they are replanted. But they are sturdier and made sturdier still by optimism. What choice is there, in any case. To look back is only to know and remember that loss.

As the poet Elizabeth Bishop urges:

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

. . .I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

The hallucinating cat and other animals

Funny thing, this aching need some people have to get high.

It's such an irrepressible urge; it has so much force and persistence that psychopharmacologist Ronald Siegel has called it a "fourth drive", which functions much like our drives for food, sleep and sex.

Animals, apparently, have such a need too. And like humans – who will risk death and imprisonment to get intoxicated – animals too will go to great lengths to gain that pleasurable sense of well-being that only certain hallucinogenic plants offer.

In the Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan writes:

“According to Ronald K. Siegel, a pharmacologist who has studied intoxication in animals, it is common for animals deliberately to experiment with plant toxins; when an intoxicant is found, the animal will return to the source repeatedly, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Cattle will develop a taste for locoweed that can prove fatal; bighorn sheep will grind their teeth to useless nubs scraping a hallucinogenic lichen off ledge rock. . . Goats, who will try a little bit of anything, probably deserve credit for the discovery of coffee: Abyssinian herders in the tenth century observed their animals would become particularly frisky after nibbling the shrub’s bright red berries. Pigeons spacing out on cannabis seeds (a favorite food of many birds) may have tipped off the ancient Chinese (or Aryans of Scythians) to that plant’s special properties. Peruvian legend has it that the puma discovered quinine: Indians observed that sick cats were often restored to health after eating the bark of the cinchona tree. Tukano Indians in the Amazon noticed that jaguars, not ordinarily herbivorous, would eat the bark of the yaje vine and hallucinate.”

Birds do it. Bees do it and make honey that’s sweetly intoxicating. Certain elephants in Malay do it: travelling great distances to eat a vine that offers them a powerful kick. They will also trample on a palm that protects itself with long, tough thorns only to get at the intoxicating pith. Water buffaloes in opium country love to get drowsy on the cultivated opium poppies - though they are bitter and pungent to taste. Baboons love to eat datura. Cats love to hallucinate on catnip and go chasing phantom butterflies.

In places where khat, a powerful stimulant, is grown commercially, fields are protected by electric fencing to keep out goats who are mad about its leaves.

The fencing is a bit like prohibition in Gujarat. With a sign saying: Beware. Trespassers might die. In Goa, of course, there is no fencing. People get drunk all the time, even early in the morning. Maybe a little self-imposed fencing wouldn't be such a bad thing.

Rainmen

In the pouring rain, men and women draped in plastic are planting paddy. You see the bent figures in field after field as you drive past, snug in your car.

It looks like backbreaking work. Each figure, holding a bunch of seedlings (or should that be saplings?), puts one into the ground - and then another and another and another, never once straightening up during the process. In fields where the paddy has been planted you can see how neat the rows are, how perfectly aligned.

In the past, I have many a time gazed with pleasure at the tall straight blades waving in the fields around here. The green of the paddy is so bright and yet so extraordinarily soothing a colour that you can hardly bear to take your eyes off it.

I never once thought of it as food. Rice is something you buy in a shop, and it bears no resemblance to the paddy in the field.

Yet, to those who toil in the rain, standing in ankle-deep water, the relationship between their labour and the food they will eat is all too real. If they do not work now, if the rains are not sufficient, if the crop fails, then there will be no brown rice to eat for the entire year. Instead they will have to buy polished white rice in the market. And for a Goan who likes his fish curry and ukri (brown rice) that is a horror not to be contemplated. As a woman in the village once told me: Shop rice doesn’t agree with our digestion.

So paddy planters toiling in the rain - with their minds fixed firmly on the fish curry and rice they will eat - makes eminent sense. No work, no food.

But there is one other kind of person who must toil in pouring rain. You see him too, covered from head to foot in a raincoat, valiantly climbing ladders placed on electricity poles. It’s the poor linesman, an employee of the state-run electricity board. During the rains his workload trebles. He spends all his time fixing one broken line after another, day after day. And yet, we never see the fruits of his labour. No matter how much he works, the electricity supply still fails, again and again.

Darkness

Grey days continue, bleak and sunless. The sound of rain continues, almost without break: the battering on your red tiled roof and on window panes; the thundering cascades from the many furrows in the roof all around the house; the endless drip, drip, drip from trees.

All day and all night the wind moans and sighs and howls like some crazed Greek chorus, causing trees to dance wildly, scattering leaves as in some sacrifice.

The air is misty, as in a hill station.

One damp gloomy night, when the voltage is so low even the fridge stops running, all the lights flicker and die out. Through hazy sheets of rain you see a yellow light glowing dimly in the distance. It’s as you had feared. As a result of the downpour, carbon has formed on the wire connecting your home to the electricity pole. Yours is now the only house without electricity. Strangely enough, the fuse light on one power switchboard gives a ghostly red glow. You put the switch into the ON position and the light goes off. You would find this creepy if it hadn’t happened before. In the darkness you clamber onto a stool and switch off the mains in the fuse box to avoid the possibility of a fire.

You stumble through the dark house to call the electricity department. You unwrap the phone from its warm cocoon, but despite the blanket to keep it warm the phone will not work. You unplug it and take it into the kitchen. There, holding it a foot above the flame, you warm it gently over the gas fire. You try dialing again. This time the phone comes to life. But there is no hope for you tonight. The man at the other end of the line tells you to wait till the morning and to switch off the mains until then.

Your emergency lamp has run out of power. You have no candles, no torch.

Hopelessly you occupy the dark absolute void. After a while you think this is how it must feel for prisoners under torture in dark solitary confinement.

But why? - when darkness is a perfectly natural phenomenon. What is it that so unnerves us about being alone in endless darkness? Is it because we feel ourselves completely disconnected from that other outer world of reality? Is this the feeling of Absurdity described by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus?

In this brilliant essay (in which he examines the idea of Absurdity and attempts to answer what he calls the fundamental philosophical question: whether life is or is not worth living) Camus writes: "The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia. For a second we cease to understand it. . . The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage-scenery masked by habit becomes again what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us."

Yet, even primitive man lived in awe and fear of darkness. And then he discovered fire! What a great triumph that must have been. At last he had some control over the many strange forces that dominated his existence. Let there be darkness - god declared. And man replied: I don’t think so. Not right now.

In The Bible According to Spike Milligan: "God said: Let there be light; and there was light, but Eastern Electricity Board said He would have to wait until Thursday to be connected."

In this, Milligan speaks for all the state-controlled electricity boards in India. No matter how loudly the great god wanted light, the State did not will it. Let there be darkness in all the villages, the State said.

And the poor people had no choice but to tremble in this darkness like primitive man.

Marooned

Four days of steady rain and winds blowing at 65 km an hour. You look out the shuttered windows and all you see is sheets of rain and mist. In the garden the neem tree has fallen and the sankeshwar with its bright orange flowers is partially uprooted. Elsewhere coconut trees have fallen and casuarinas. Tiled roofs have broken. The electricity comes and goes, and then stays away a long time. The phone has a dial tone, but cannot connect with the outside world. On the advice of the phone guy, it lies like a baby wrapped warmly in a blanket to coax it back into life. The roof drips.

Everywhere is a great salty dampness. It seeps into all your possessions. A few books have mildew already. The wooden furniture is damp and mildewy. Wet clothes flap eternally in the veranda. The sugar in its plastic container is slowly becoming syrup. The glass shelf which holds it has a patina of moisture. You wait for the computer to conk.

You dare not step out of the house with something as ineffective as an umbrella. You try it a couple of times and find the umbrella turns itself inside out. You fear that like Mary Poppins you will simply fly away, holding onto the handle.

When the thunder of the rain beating down on your roof lessens, you can hear the thunder of the angry sea less than half a mile away.

Food supplies are low. You eat rice and dal and potatoes and homemade bread. And more potatoes and rice and bread. You dream of fresh fruit.

You dream of sunshine and golden beaches and blue seas.

You are stranded on a desert island in the monsoons.

The white church

The ubiquitous white church - glimpsed through treetops as you drive through the hilly landscape of Goa, standing by the seashore or within the precincts of a ruined fort - gives the impression that Christianity dominates Goa. This is not so. Christians probably account for no more than a quarter of the population.

Yet these churches are seen everywhere: austere, silent and shuttered. Some are small, no more than chapels, some imposing in their dimension. Some are earthbound, others appear to be suspended over the village or town, with a flight of steep steps leading up to them. They are almost invariably white, a whiteness that dazzles - and beautiful in their uniform serenity and simplicity. They are also almost invariably detached and separate from their surroundings.

Local Hindu temples, on the other hand, are colourful and gaudy, often noisy. Apart from a few ancient temples which are quite grand, the temples are small, built by local villagers. Though several are present in every village, you don’t notice them as you do the white silent churches.

What do these different houses of worship say about the worshippers, not to mention the gods they pay homage to?

If the church is silent and almost forbidding, is the Christian god, too, distant and remote? Or do these churches merely present such a façade because they were built by the Portuguese, conquerors who desired to impress the land with the authority of their gods?

On Talpona beach is that rare sight: a Hindu temple. The small temple stands at one end of the long, curving beach. Adjoining it is the cluster of red-tiled cottages that forms the tiny village. Walking along this almost virgin beach lined with casuarinas trees towards this far end, you are not tempted to go right up to the temple. There is about it an air, not of worshipful reverence as befitting the house of god, but of the mundane, of the ordinariness of life. You imagine hens scratching in the dirt outside the temple, dogs sleeping, wet clothes flapping, small children with bare bottoms crawling about near the temple door. If god lives in this temple, he is very much a part of village life.

The difference with the white churches seen on most other beaches is stark.

Happiness is a little grass

The cow is a happy animal these days.

All day herds of them wander about munching on the fresh carpet of grass and shrubs that has sprouted magically in the rain. Delicately they nibble at the sweetest and most tender leaves before moving on to the next clump of green.

They’ve become fastidious eaters overnight, gourmets even. Where once they gobbled anything hungrily, now they fussily search for blades of grass and shoots that have freshly sprouted that morning. Yesterday’s new leaves won’t do for them anymore. Oh no. They’re much too grand for that now. Their long enforced fasting through the summer months is over. Now they have a feast provided by the rain gods. And the garbage bins wear a desolate air.

While the cows eat, I get the unmistakable whiff of another kind of grass. Someone, somewhere, is enjoying a smoke.

Funny thing how grass can make both cows and men happy.

And they put up signs saying: Keep off the grass! Tch.

The bus driver’s family

In the neighbourhood is a simple, hardworking Muslim family that makes nonsense of the poor, deprived Muslim stereotype.

The family lives in a little tiled cottage with two pleasant little rooms, a small kitchen, a loo outside in the village tradition. The man is a bus driver. Every morning at 7.30 – Sundays included - he cycles to Palolem to begin his duties. Every evening round about 7 pm he returns looking tired. His wife is a big, strident woman with strong arms and a girlish smile. In the tourist season, unknown to her husband, she is a masseuse, using her strong arms to pummel the flesh of stressed-out tourists and thereby earn some extra money. For her children she has ambitions.

Afsana, the elder daughter, is a thin shy pretty girl with thick long hair. Two years ago she completed her tenth standard exams. Now she is doing a tailoring course, where most young Goan girls prefer to work as shop girls. Afsana does exquisite embroidery, so her plump younger sister Asma informs me. Asma is moonfaced and bright-eyed. She is in class eleven, likes studying, plans to go to college, and wants to be a teacher. Seeing her eager face you know it’s not just talk. The son Aziz, nineteenish, twelfth-standard pass, moonlights as a bus mechanic late into the night with the aid of an emergency lamp. By day he is doing a course in computers.

They are simple people, but the girls are always beautifully dressed and have wonderful manners, as does the son. Unlike most villagers, the bus driver did not inherit the tiny plot on which he lives. He bought it some twenty-odd years ago when land was cheap.

Down the road is another Muslim family. Two brothers, one a tailor, the other a ration shop salesman. Every evening the two little giggling daughters, heads covered with a dupatta, skip to the mosque for their Islamic studies. In the morning, dressed in neat brown pinafores, they go to the local convent school where, presumably, they sing hymns in assembly.

It only happens in Goa, I think.

Love of beauty

Somewhere in every human heart – even the meanest, surely – is a desire for beauty.

When the city-dweller articulates this love of beauty and seeks to satisfy it as best as he can, he is disclosing that he lives not in beauty but in squalor and ugliness. For, as Socrates says, you can desire only that which you lack. The greater the lack, the greater the desire.

The more I live in the natural world, the more I realise – despite everything – how truly and utterly I live in beauty, walk in beauty as the poet says. Sometimes, gazing at the immense arch of the evening sky over the sea or the green silent river that flows into it, absorbing the pervasive lushness of trees and plants, inhaling the fragrance of a flower, I am overwhelmed by this glorious, mysterious thing we call Beauty.

It is not as if there is no ugliness in the natural world. There are ugly creatures enough, yet even their ugliness seems to exist almost solely to make you note and appreciate, by contrast, the beautiful and sublime.

This is not to say that the man-made is not beautiful. As a result of man’s creative urge we have sublime works of art and objects of great beauty. Yet this is always an individual endeavor. The great mass of humanity seems to have no aesthetic sense. The love of beauty is deadened in the hurly-burly of living. Ugly buildings sprout as a result. Squalor and chaos reign.

There are those – some environmentalists, for example - who are accused of romanticising nature and opposing progress. The arguments and counterarguments fly fast and furious. Yet, somewhere in all this jungle of strident angry words there is – or so it seems sometimes - an inarticulate, truly heartfelt cry for something that appears to be in danger of getting lost in a world that everyday grows more unnatural and more ugly.

When, I wonder, did the natural human desire for beauty become this inchoate yearning? Did it begin with industrialisation, when, sickened by the belching chimneys and a grey landscape, by the overall degradation, men turned their faces away? Does it continue as the stress of living in crowded cities intensifies? In beauty there is harmony, a harmony that simply doesn’t exist in the mad world.

D H Lawrence – always a lover of nature – writes this, almost a hundred years ago:

"The car ploughed uphill through the long squalid straggle of Tevershall, the blackened brick dwellings, the black slate roofs glistening their sharp edges, the mud black with coal dust, the pavements wet and black. It was as if dismalness had soaked through and through everything. The utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the instinct for shapely beauty which every bird and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty was appalling."

It is undoubtedly true that man is losing touch with something deep and true within himself when he disconnects from the natural world and embraces all that is plastic.

To see a complete negation of beauty and harmony in our world is a horror that is hard even to imagine.

This little piggy stayed hungry

You have pigs, plenty of them, very black and truly ugly, running about outside rather ramshackle cottages near the beach. They are always nosing about in the mud and filth for something to eat, wagging their little skinny pig tails in enjoyment. They make you laugh, they look so ugly and greedy and foolish.

In this brilliant, comic description in The White Peacock, D H Lawrence brings these pigs to life:

"I met George tramping across the yard with a couple of buckets of swill, and eleven young pigs rushing squealing about his legs, shrieking in an agony of suspense. He poured the stuff into a trough with luscious gurgle, and instantly ten noses were dipped in and ten little mouths began to slobber. Though there was plenty of room for ten, yet they shouldered and shoved and struggled to capture a larger space, and many little trotters dabbled and spilled the stuff, and the ten sucking, clapping snouts twitched fiercely, and twenty little eyes glared askance, like so many points of wrath. They gave uneasy, gasping grunts in their haste. The unhappy eleventh rushed from point to point trying to push in his snout, but for his pains he got rough squeezing, and sharp grabs on the ears. Then he lifted up his face and screamed screams of grief and wrath unto the evening sky.

"But the ten little gluttons only twitched their ears to make sure there was no danger in the noise, and they sucked harder, with much spilling and slobbing. George laughed like a sardonic Jove, but at last he gave ear, and kicked the ten gluttons from the trough, and allowed the residue to the eleventh. This one, poor wretch, almost wept with relief as he sucked and swallowed in sobs, casting his little eyes apprehensively upwards, though he did not lift his nose from the trough, as he heard the vindictive shrieks of the ten little fiends kept at bay by George. The solitary feeder, shivering with apprehension, rubbed the wood bare with his snout, then, turning up to heaven his eyes of gratitude, he reluctantly left the trough.

"I expected to see the ten fall on him and devour him, but they did not; they rushed upon the empty trough and rubbed the wood still drier, shrieking with misery."

Passion

Some months ago I planted a passion fruit creeper. The purple flowers of this creeper are strange and exotic, different from any flower I’ve ever seen - and I eagerly looked forward to the blossoming of the passion flower and later of the fruit.

When the creeper died soon after for no reason I could fathom, I took it as a bad sign.

What is life, after all, without passion?

Those free-marketeers who claim their mantra as “greed is good” have got it wrong. It’s not greed, but passion that built Microsoft or Porsche or any of the great companies.

It’s an individual’s passion for his or her art and craft that’s given us great painting, literature, music, theatre, film. Passion is behind all remarkable scientific discoveries and inventions, behind the sportsman’s achievements, behind every dream and aspiration.

Anything that truly matters in this world, anything of any value is touched by passion. It’s what makes us live life more fully, enables us to fulfill our deepest and noblest desires.

To push files in an office, to sell an insurance policy or vegetables needs no passion. The mundane is carried out almost mechanically. Its driving force is the need to earn money.

They say that human history is but the struggle between passion and prudence. And only when passion triumphs do great things result.

The day we stop feeling “the intoxication of passion” as one philosopher put it, is surely the day we die a little. Like my poor creeper.

Fear of freedom?

In Toad Philip Larkin writes:

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison –
Just for paying a few bills!
That’s out of proportion. . .

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff
That dreams are made on:

Economics may be the basis of life, but all too often it seems to become the stuff of life itself, the stuffing even, particularly for the average middle-class Indian. Lives today are dominated by home loans and car loans and pension schemes and children’s school fees and saving for the future.

Who, nowadays, renounces everything to follow his heart?

Why is it that so few individuals today can be like Paul Gauguin, for example? Gauguin was a successful stockbroker and then one fine day he simply dumped his old life, children and wife included, and took off for Tahiti in order to paint.A young French girl I know has gone off to live in a tent in Australia. I observe the foreigners who live here and often think how free they seem compared to us Indians, with what ease and joy they embrace their freedom.

It would be all right if individuals preferred security to the perils of freedom. It would be all right even if one were happier living the consumerist existence. That is a choice. The sadness is when they postpone the dictates of their heart to an indefinite future. One day, they say.

And the days pass, and the years.

And then one day they are confronted with this (Larkin again):

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Oh solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the field.

Save me from the environment

It was World Environment Day some days ago. And as usual I was somewhat bemused by all the exhortations to save the earth and save the environment.

Living in a village I’ve got accustomed to thinking just the opposite: that it is I who need to be saved from the environment.

This might sound absurd, but I’ve learnt that the natural environment is not only about pretty trees and flowers, birds and butterflies. It’s also harsh, tyrannical and frightening. So much so that existence here is still a primitive battle against nature and the elements.

I have to deal with snakes and bandicoots and monitor lizards and rats. There are black-faced monkeys who are no better than vandals and thieves. There are frogs who don’t allow me to use my own loo, who want to sleep in my bed and jump into my food. There are leeches and scorpions; not to mention the million strange insects which appear as soon as you switch on the lights in the rainy season, or the hungry lizards crawling the walls after them, or the hundreds of big red ants marching across my dhurries with the dead. Walking along the beach you have to be careful of jelly fish and blue bottles, sea creatures that stick to your skin and don’t let go. If you’re unlucky, you’ll even have a bull in a frenzy charging you.

The natural environment considers man a trespasser. What, after all, do all these creatures understand about manmade boundaries, about property titles and the like?

And though we may no longer be living in primitive times, it is with primitive terror that I endure the monsoons. The torrential rains in Goa are almost always accompanied by gales, by crashing thunder and lightning. The lightning sometimes goes on and on for hours, tearing the sky apart with its unearthly white light. Flashes sometimes float into my little cottage, followed by the most tremendous crashes of thunder. The winds blow at such terrific speeds that trees are uprooted every season, destroying roofs, disrupting electricity and creating chaos. If I believed in god, it would be easy to suppose – as the ancients did - that all of this is god’s fury directed at sinful mortals. Last year my modem and UPS blew as a result of all the lightning. The moisture in the air, coupled with the fluctuations in electricity, destroyed my monitor and mother board. My tile roof began to leak, as it always does when the wind is particularly fierce. And then the monkeys came, jumping on the roof, breaking some tiles and causing rain to fall inside.

This is Mother Nature, who does not need me to save her.

As for the greenery, you can go on trimming trees and bushes in an attempt to control the almost frenzied growth that takes place in the monsoons, but it’s no use. Everything springs back into life, thicker and more lush than ever. Even branches of broken trees continue to sprout leaves. The villagers sometimes use these thick branches to prop up trees that have bent in the gale, and over the years these branches acquire a life of their own, growing with the tree they’re supporting. Life after death, you could call it.

I once attended a lecture in Delhi by Leon Louw, a South African economic, political and environmental scholar. Every year in the monsoons, I recall the ‘crack in the pavement theory’ he spoke of when I watch the weeds mysteriously sprout. Where do they come from? What is the secret of their insatiable, maddening growth?

And how can we say the environment is being destroyed when it seems infinitely more powerful than puny man?

Nature's call on Palolem beach

When the tourist season is over and the shacks come down, Palolem beach, often described as one of the most beautiful beaches in Goa, looks an ugly mess.

Sheets of blue plastic are seen everywhere, covering whatever cannot be removed and must be protected from the rains. Ugly stumps of brick and cement stand among the coconut palms, a reminder that the manmade will always scar what is natural and beautiful.

Most ugly of all is what remains of the loos.

I climbed the low hill beside Palolem beach, which offers a panoramic view of the sea. The few shacks that dotted the area were gone. But there, scattered among the coconut trees, were little square slabs of cement, each surmounted by a commode, each looking like some bizarre headstone on a grave.

This cemetery of shit pots will remain till the tourists return next season, offering an ironic twist to the term “answering the call of nature”.

Natural colours

Yesterday it rained, and the garden was flooded with the strange bright clear light you sometimes see late in the evening, just when you feel it’s time for twilight.

My garden is very tiny, but wild and unruly. And after the heat and unexpected rain – all the greens washed clean and glittering in the strange light with droplets of water - it all seemed unbearably lush.

Almost dazzling to the eye were the colours of the flowers. The bright yellow of the sankeshwar and hibiscus. The deep red of the bougainvillea. The shocking pink. In all that lush green they glowed vivid and alive in a way they never had before, as if I had popped some LSD.

Colour, if you think about it, belongs entirely to the natural world, particularly to flowering plants. All the colour we see otherwise is merely a reproduction. The city is filled with this synthetic colour. You see it in cars, buses, hoardings, clothes, shop signs, buildings – everywhere. It’s paint. Artificial, unnatural, plastic, sad.

It’s something you get so used to that you never stop to think it’s merely an imitation of the colours of nature, the colours that city people almost never see.

Yesterday I stood for a long time absorbing the bright yellows and reds and pinks and greens. And it seemed as if I was back in time at the very beginning of creation, in my own tiny garden of Eden.