Life, Death and Everything in between.
Journeys through time and space without moving an inch.
On route to Khonoma. Photo by Naveed Mulki
I stand here transfixed, rooted to the spot, finding layer upon layer of ridges in the many shades of a vivid green and a smoky blue. Hills to me have intuitively symbolized the meeting of the end of one road and the beginning of another. The road that I have walked upon is heavy, filled with long-forgotten emotion that once rushed through my blood, finding itself in the extremities of my fingers and toes, only to harden over time and settle unseen for years, like kidney stones. The road that awaits beyond a hill is completely unknown to me, it is a clean slate, it is darkness, it is blinding light. On the farthest peak that I can see, which I always believed was a midway point between my two lives, one part of me is abandoned and the other is found, but not before an embrace of the two. Like two lovers in the Angami tradition in Khonoma, Nagaland, who find themselves together atop a peak and sing for the future.
Love take to the peak Japfu,
Transforming and sitting together like the brightest star,
Wishing and watching over the coming generation. - Angami Folk song
Indigenous cultures like the Angami Nagas have always built a better vocabulary to describe the natural world. The word ‘hill’ in English is described merely as a stationary object. Whereas in languages that are built out of civilizations not intent on destroying the wild, it turns into a living being. Perhaps it is this understanding of the hills that draws me to such vantage points. Places that don’t just spread out as far as I can see but also expand within me.
‘The word for hill, for example, in the Native American Potawatomi language is a verb, ‘kwedake’. The verb form attributes aliveness to the more-than-human world. Hills are always in the process of Hilling, they are actively being hills.’ - Robin Wall Kimmerer
Like most things in my experience now, my mind rushes back to milestones that involve hills. I quickly abandon moments that are recent, and try flip back the pages of my life to the very beginning. I rush through glimpses of the tropical humidity of Kota Kinabalu in Borneo where even a slight change in gradient feels like a profound task given to a martial artist. The threatening ridges of the Wadi Rum desert where the quickly shifting narrow shade provides an apt metaphor for the borders in this region that have appeared and dissolved in the last hundred years. The stoical dismay of the Himalayas, which don’t even register your presence despite your every grunt and heave that pushes through their lowest points. The only places where migratory birds have evolved to follow man.
Soon enough, in my mind, I see myself as a child on a lone hill in the middle of Bangalore. A hill that then was home to a new temple built for Lord Krishna. I was amongst many other children from my school, all part of an outdoor excursion. Our ties loose, our shoelaces adrift, our T-shirts slipping away from our belts. We were all moving in different directions like goats, our teachers yelled out our names like clueless shepherds. There were uneven steps all around, a little temple stood at the helm, and a grand emptiness greeted us at the end. We could see for miles around us. The rolling plateau of Bangalore unfurled in front of us. When we were told of the story of Lord Krishna lifting a hill with his little finger, to protect the cattle and villagers from a flood, our legs shivered and our minds were dizzy, for we were now at a height. We all believed that we were on the exact same hill. There was no convincing us otherwise.
Krishna lifting the Govardhan hill. Painted by Mola Ram. Circa 1790. Source - The Smithsonian
Today, one wouldn’t even recognize this hill as a hill. The elaborate, beautiful white-grey tiled temple adorns its once sharp ridges, and the temple itself is dwarfed by high-rise apartment buildings that are four times its size. My metro train passes by this temple and my eyes inadvertently find it from the elevated track. It doesn’t matter if I am being squeezed by a crowd, or have to turn my neck around, I see it. I always thought it was a mere coincidence. Today I realise that it is the hill that calls out of me, for the hill still lives and breathes under all of that concrete and prayer. Its skin right out of the Proterozoic Era from a thousand million years ago, its long torso witness to the first signs of life on earth. Life that might still exist in its deepest crevices, if one looked carefully, in the form of fungi.
It is this relentless force of life that makes me stop in front of hills. I am rooted like a tall silk cotton tree, but my being is ready to move to plant itself elsewhere. Every part of me breaks into a hundred thousand silk cotton seeds.
Garden Funeral, Auroville. Photo by Naveed Mulki.
A few years later, the same relentless force brought me to a standstill yet again, but this time it came from the opposite end of that same spectrum, from the far-reaching claws of death. In my kitchen cupboard sat a frog, calm and unperturbed. It came as no surprise in the realm of the man-made forest of Auroville. Each house has its share of amphibians and reptiles that walk and jump and slide around freely. Conflict is rare. Watching this daily interaction, one might come to the conclusion that it is only habit that can bring about any sense of equilibrium. The space I live in currently is shared with bugs, endlessly curious lizards, rumours of snakes sliding around dried leaves, a hooting owl that I am yet to see and a palm civet cat that scratches at my windows and roof every night. Seeing a frog in a kitchen cupboard did not make me think twice. Yet a few days later, I see that it is no longer alive. It feels like it has been reduced to its bare bones overnight. This too isn’t a strange sight, for an unseen world of prey and predator are stumbled upon often in this little garden universe of mine. What is curious however is that it had remained in the same place for days. We had instinctively left the cupboard door open, for it to leave, in the event that it was trapped. Yet it stayed for days in the same spot before it quietly passed away.
‘Moths, once they have lost their way, since if you do not put them out carefully, they will stay where they are, never moving, until the last breath is out of their bodies, and indeed they will remain in the place where they came to grief even after death, held fast by the tiny claws that stiffened in their last agony, until a draught of air detaches them and blows them into a dusty corner.’ - W.G Sebald.
Away from the fight or flight mechanism of an animal, here I was introduced to the idea of an all-consuming grief. The decision to simply stay where you are, in the awareness of approaching death. Frogs are meant to be solitary creatures that move to breed and tend to gravitate towards water bodies. I couldn’t help but wonder about the thin line between solitude and loneliness that I was introduced to as a child. The crippling depression of my grandmother came after 13 years of solitude that changed to loneliness overnight in the company of others. She too sat still in the same place till death did us part.
As Sebald suggested, I felt an uneasiness at the idea of death being swept away, especially in times such as these where there is no space for respect and ritual for death in the seemingly unending grip of the pandemic. So, in the silence that was only broken by ambulance sirens in the distance. I took the frog to the garden outside, in a quiet patch of sunlight that slipped away quickly to another hemisphere. I said a few words, like we all did as children, playing funerals for fallen butterflies. Burials that had us stealing our mother’s jasmine flowers.
The next morning I went to see the frog and it was no longer there. Nature had consumed it whole, redistributing its life in unimaginable ways. The frog that was rooted to the cupboard till its dying breath, now lived as a million little pieces. Some of it in the sky, some of it in the soil.