How Loving Him Taught Me to Love the Wild

Nestled among many coconut trees, Agonda village is located in south Goa. In the recent past, the beach at Agonda has seen a spurt of construction and is now home to many resorts. In 2021, I entered our room in one such resort and opened the door to the attached open-air bathroom. It was dark and I had not switched on a light. Tired after a long journey from New Delhi, I saw what I imagined was a silhouette of a cobra. I let out a scream. I was, in that moment, thinking of all the sensational footage of snakes I had seen. Every pop culture reference, from the nagin to snake charmers, from watching films on the anaconda and the boa constrictor as a young child, to watching animal horror as an adult city-dweller, flooded my thoughts. Having heard me scream, my partner rushed in. I told him, “I think there’s a snake in the bathroom,” and took a sharp breath.

Later, when I calmed down and realised that what I saw was a long, bent leaf of an indoor plant, he logically explained that screaming was nothing but a reflex to perceived danger. “But why should you feel threatened by such a cool species,” he asked me gently.

The trip felt remarkably different from all previous Goa trips. For instance, I had never seen dolphins up close or paid attention to the many creatures that lived by the sea. I slowly learnt to look at the sea as a habitat for creatures like seagulls. I noticed how Brahminy kites dived into the waters to hunt. If not for my partner, I would never have noticed the bats coming home to roost in the caves near the beach. They reminded me that nature’s way of time was circular. In a few years, we took several such trips. First, to work on our long-distance relationship, and later because I grew fond of the trips themselves.

I fell in love with my partner. And as I took an interest in my partner’s hobbies, I fell in love with nature too. His curiosity about the natural world grew on me. I learnt to recognise creatures as fellow living beings that share space with us. Once, on a date, he took out his camera in the parking lot at Sunder Nursery, a public park in Delhi. I thought he would ask me for a picture, and I would refuse, but he turned the camera to a green bug (most probably a weevil) on the ground. Later, in that same park, I learned that the “duck” I had spotted was actually a little grebe, sitting on its nest in one of the park’s artificial ponds. 

His knowledge about the natural world, his sense of adventure, and the belief that anything can happen in the outdoors, proved too astute an observation. We took several nature walks in the Delhi NCR area, including one at the Aravali Biodiversity Park, Gurgaon. I had learnt about the Anthropocene in books — the idea that human activity on Earth is just an epoch, one out of many the Earth has seen, an idea that also highlights how humans have obstructed the path of other forms of existence. But to hear about it in a jargon-free way from Vijay Dhasmana, a self-taught ecologist who has helped rewild the Aravallis, was another matter altogether. I heard him describe the native trees, bushes and shrubs that he had helped populate, and how each method of propagation is different. I observed trees such as the khair, kullu and babool among many others. He was politely encouraging and unfazed by my lack of specialist knowledge.

As a result of these trips, I started recognising my disconnect from nature and grew mindful of it. My urban and concrete jungle ways were very evident in my being. Once when my partner said he wanted to film people’s reactions to the barbet’s call, I was thrown off. I did not even know what a barbet’s call was.

That changed slowly. I learnt that I knew the barbet’s call really well. I just couldn’t name it. I now always listen for bird calls. My interest in birds grew from there. We procured Birds of the Indian Subcontinent – a veritable bible for birders. I read up on varieties of bulbuls, pigeons, cuckoos, nightjars, kingfishers, bee-eaters, sunbirds, ducks, quails, and more. I learnt to hold a pair of binoculars the correct way for a myopic person. I learnt that when going birding, one needed to be as quiet as the proverbial cat. And most of all, one needed to build stamina to walk miles, albeit slowly. I thought about getting fitter to be able to keep up with others on a long hike. 

The poems I wrote started to change too. From anger at the world, which was a deep part of my poetry, I was led to a sense of calm. On trips, I grew more creative. More poems appeared fully formed in my head than they ever had before. I wrote about how nature transformed me, about the need to listen to nature, about the disjunct between urban landscapes and natural ecosystems and about the harm that humans can do to the natural world. I learnt what William Wordsworth had meant when he talked of nature in his poems. Nature had caused in me, as Wordsworth had said, “a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”.

I encountered a meme that said “learning to be a birder is a lot like falling in love”. This deeply resonated with me. I was not only falling in love with my partner’s hobbies, they were becoming my hobbies too. I was giving a part of my soul to the birds. On the campus where I teach, I met an oriental magpie-robin. Alert by now to the calls of the usual crows, babblers and the odd parakeet, I heard an unusual call on campus, right at the entrance of the back gate. Soon, I discovered the source and took a picture to identify it! At another time, a bird I had seen visiting my balcony in New Delhi during the pandemic became the subject of much debate between my partner and I. Perhaps it was a sunbird or a barbet. To this day, we haven’t been able to agree on what it was.

I am a poet and a professor of literature. I am not a conservationist. I do not have the skills of a hiker. I cannot climb mountains. It is stressful for me to navigate rocky hilly terrain. When we went to a place nestled in the Himalayas, the steep steps gave me a thigh cramp. I falter.

However, the point I am trying to make is that I have learnt to appreciate nature, in spite of everything. Nature belongs to me just as it does to anyone else. More importantly, I belong to nature too. I saw the mahua tree and learnt how to recognise it by the growth of its leaves. I learnt that there is a great place like the Madras Crocodile Bank near Chennai, where I encountered several crocodiles, turtles, and snakes. There, I met the Irulas, indigenous people who are known for their knowledge of snakes and herbal medicine.

I taught a creative writing course that semester, and I suddenly found myself asking students to observe and write about what they had seen on a rainy day. I asked them to talk about trees more. Soon, I wanted to teach a course on Ecology and Literature, or on Ecofeminist Literature, and perhaps incite some love for ecology and not just literature.

Now that I know better, I am embarrassed of screaming at the cobra-like-leaf. My world has changed drastically. It now includes animals, birds, soil, rivers, and hills. My earlier doubts about how I could “fit in” as a nature lover have been dispelled. Nature is ever giving. Nature is not a clique; we are all a part of it.