Pipal tree, bodhi tree, ashvatha, avasi. So many names for Ficus religiosa! It is the tree which marks a public space in many Indian villages, since it clears out a space as large as a football field around it. In this clear space people can gather for a market, a public meeting, or just generally come to socialize in the evenings. We looked out at this tree from our balcony for decades and saw it grow and put down aerial roots. We saw its small red berries attract parakeets. Saw kites and barbets sheltering in it. Even flycatchers would dive into its canopy when it rained.
The Family asked me, “Don’t you have a photo of its flowers?” Oops. I’d missed that. There must be flowers, since there are fruits. But for the life of me I couldn’t remember what they looked like. But then I remembered that a “fruit” of a fig is an inflorescence. The berry encloses the flowers within it. The Buddha couldn’t have chosen a better metaphor of a tree to meditate under.
Long ago Douglas Hofstadter asked readers to imagine our senses if all our neurons were astronomically long. A single person’s brain, the seat of one’s consciousness, would then be tenuous webs that were strung across the solar system. Would such a being think that it was located in one place? Taking things to extremes is an ancient method used to examine the meaning of things that we take for granted. Socrates used this method too.
So why don’t we imagine the threshold of a door widened so that it spans an entire continent or ocean. Maybe you could open a door in your flat in San Francisco and step out into another in Seoul. If a door is merely an opening from one place to another, then this could be as good a door as any. By this logic the new Howrah bridge, now nearly a century old, has long been a door into Kolkata. People arrived by train to Howrah station on the far side of the Hooghly river, and immediately crossed over into Kolkata. I had the lovely view that you see above from a ghat on the Hooghly.
Another thing you can do with a door is to close it, and claim a space behind it as your own. The door to your house, the door to your room, they are of this kind. Then the shutters behind the flower seller are a door by this definition. The person who sleeps in that capsule at night shuts it to claim the space below the kiosk as his own.
A rather popular spot for wedding shoots in Goa was a little temple built into the middle of a jungle, with steps leading down to a small stream. I stood on the bridge above the stream looking for kingfishers, and taking ambush photos. Thinking about it later, I realized that the reason that spot on the steps was popular was because it was wild. Wild, but tamed, looks good in photos. If you picture a retreat you might think of a little hut in the middle of the woods, a sunny glade with flowers, or wild mountain peaks behind an Alpine meadow.
But a true wilderness has none of that slightly asymmetric beauty that looks good in a background to a selfie. True wilderness is totally weird. When we travel in the wild we bring back carefully selected photos which others will find beautiful. But a typical scene is like this. A web of lianas blocks your way. If you are sensible you will not hack your way through it into the leech infested understory below the trees which are each vying to reach the sun.
It is a jungle out there. A constant bloodless battle between trees for their leaves to reach the sun, and for their roots to reach nutrients. The battle to reach the sun makes for highly imbalanced trees, and branches break and fall, creating barriers for those unfortunate humans who roam the jungle with cameras. But this dead wood is a veritable feast for some: fungi in humid forests, termites in drier climates. These are creatures about which I know little, but would like to learn more. But it’s pretty certain that their domain would not yield good photos.
Even when you find a sunny opening in a forest, with a little stream flowing through, it is not a place that you can sit down in. There are pebbles and stones strewn over the open ground. If you dislodge one you find a nest of fire ants bubbling under it. There are ends of hard roots poking out of places. This looked nice in a photo, but it wasn’t a place where you could sit down for a wedding photo shoot. If you look up statistics, you read that every square kilometer of India has 488 people. But about 39% of the area is either forest or desert, and has aesthetics that is totally different from ours.
From the edge of a large patch of shallow flooded field in Goa we could see hundreds of these typical brown ducks. Lesser whistling-ducks (Dendrocygna javanica) are found in large flocks across south and south-east Asia. While their numbers are declining slowly, they are in no immediate danger of disappearing. As a result of this lack of urgency, they are not priorities for study in these days of declining science budgets.
Since they prefer shallow waters, they are commonly visible in rural parts of south Asia. It is only in parts of south-east Asia where local populations are under stress that there is an effort to study their habits in order to stabilize their populations. This study not only confirmed their preference for shallow waters, but also for places which dried out from time to time. Peripheries of Indian villages are the place to head to if you want to see them. So little is written about them that you will certainly find something new about them if you watch them closely for a week.
There aren’t many places on WordPress where bird watchers can share posts. If you post any photos of birds this week (starting today and up to next Monday), it would be great if you could leave a link in the comments, or a pingback, for others to follow. You don’t have to post a recent photo, nor do you have to post a photo of the same bird as mine, but do use the tag “Bird of the Week” to help others find your post. For more information see the main landing page for this invitation.
On my last Sunday morning as a resident of Mumbai, I wandered out for breakfast. A new cafe had opened in a corner near the big bookshop. The coffee was terrific, and the only thing I could find to complain about the croissants were they were oversized. After the nice breakfast it was time to walk to the bookshop and take a last look at the display, and exchange pleasantries for the last time with the man behind the counter.
A spreading tree in a little square in a little town in Goa still holds a Diwali lantern. There was a cheerfulness about the scene which made me believe that the lights of Diwali will only be renewed at Christmas.
This interesting wildflower (Vignata vexillata, sometimes called wild mung, and less confusingly, zombi pea) can be seen towards the end of the monsoon in the Western Ghats. If you take a pencil and press down on the yellow spots, the part of the flower shaped like an elephants trunk bends down to touch the pencil. Just so, when an insect lands there and reaches down into the nectar pot, this tube brushes on its back and completes its pollination. Amazing to think that flowers evolved so that insects could be used as an intermediary for sexual reproduction.
Back in the village of Colva, we wandered aimlessly in the afternoon, looking for lanes that we had not explored when we visited in the monsoon. Another chapel! This one stood in a small ground, and looked taller than it was broad. It had interesting doors, shut tight.
Earlier, just outside the pleasant cafe where we’d spent a nice hour after lunch, we’d come to the large village church and its graveyard. This section was recent. I looked at the names on the gravestones. Fernandes, Rodrigues, Mascarenhas. Familiar names, common across the Portuguese speaking parts of the world. Interestingly the Portuguese had exported family names along with their brand of Christianity. Once someone took the religion and the name, they would be considered a citizen of Portugal. This was a very different style of expansion than the extractive empire that the English and the Dutch developed.
We continued walking down the narrow lane past the chapel. Here the houses were set far back from the road. The lane wound between tall and dense stands of garden flowers trying to escape. When these I see these feral flowery plants growing tall I wonder whether plants find any advantage in becoming a woody tree. Maybe the competition to grow taller than any overshadowing neighbour eventually drives stems to become more rigid and woody. Is the capacity to produce wood hidden in the genes of every flowering plant?
Walking on, we came to a fork in the road. One way led further into the village, past the kind of local houses that we admired. The other led on to the beach. I looked a question at The Family. She nodded towards the beach. It would be silly to come to Colva and not take a long walk on the beach at sunset.
Ecologies advance slowly but surely. A house abandoned will be grown over in less than a generation. Insects and animals will explore the abandoned space. Bird droppings and remnants of hurried meals of rodents, the accumulation of seeds by ants or windblown grass seeds will take root. Shoots will break through floors. In a generation the roof might cave in. In two generations only a few walls will remain standing. After a while only the foundations might remain.
Jungles do not even wait for human structures to be abandoned. Roots constantly explore the environment around them, advancing in the direction of moisture or minerals. Roads through forests are disrupted often. Even if you clear out everything within a few meters, the jungle tests your resolve instantly by encroaching on that boundary. And if you do not come back to check often enough, the invasion will happen again.
I naturally think of the jungle invading our domain, but we should perhaps remind ourselves that in the instances whose photos you see here, it is us who invaded the jungle. Perhaps it might make more sense to build elsewhere, think of places where the cost is less. This kind of adversarial thinking is actually also cooperative. Strange thoughts like these float through my mind when I sit at the edge of a jungle waiting for birds to appear.
Don't hold your breath 