A foggy mind is nothing like the foggy forest of Nagarjun—cool, refreshing, beautiful and full of diversity, where trees rise, birds sing, butterflies flutter, monkeys leap from branch to branch and the five elements—Earth, water, fire, air and ether—remain in relative equilibrium even as the concrete jungle advances like Macbeth’s Birnam Wood.
Forget about writing; a mind at war with itself, a mind that has become its own Kurukshetra—a warzone featuring Russia-Ukraine, US-Iran, India-Pakistan, not to mention existential problems galore in a country in perpetual turmoil—cannot even think clearly.
Or is it writer’s block? What is this creature that has come out of the woodwork all of a sudden? Tyrannosaurus rex? Woolly mammoth? Has the Ice Age returned, or am I hallucinating? Most probably, Mahadev, the lord of the Devs and a principal deity of our locality, knows the answer, and so do the all-seeing eyes of Swayambhunath.
Writer’s block is that strange state in which words refuse to obey the mind. It is less a drought of ideas than a quiet rebellion of thought against itself. It is the fear of never writing anything enduring on life’s pages—a creative process slowed to the pace of Nagdhunga traffic before the tunnel.
Familiar territory....
So many rulers have ruled alike, wounded their heels and gone. So many heads have thought alike, mouths have spoken the same words and hands have written essentially the same things so many times under different bylines… What exactly is the purpose of this drudgery?
After all, so many creatures have lived remarkably similar lives across generations. Nay, this is going a bit too far. Rather than going deeper into the treacherous terrain, let me retreat and draw a pailful from the well within. Writing (the old way) is particularly healing, so it’s worth it, even if it does not come with a heavy paycheque. As not all people are born to set the Thames on fire, writing is okay, though the sad part is that it takes a huge toll on the forest.
The cuckoo sings perfectly without writing her songs, so does the nightingale and so does Maya Angelou’s caged bird. But humans have this bizarre desire to scribble, not to mention myriad other activities that leave a huge carbon footprint behind. Were the sapiens created to destroy the universe?
The pulp and paper industry, for example, has contributed to the loss of diverse tropical forests in parts of Indonesia and the Amazon, where natural forests have often given way to pulp plantations. Ah, how the forest beckons! What am I waiting for? For some auspicious signs, like a comet shower, the appearance of a star or the drop of a beautiful feather from you don’t know where? Or waiting for the forest to come to me? Such things happen in movies, not in real life….
Movies can wait; the woods cannot. For now, I head towards them, hoping to overcome this dense fog—writer’s block or what have you. On the way to Swayambhunath, I stop at the Mahadev temple to greet the deity, only to find him fast asleep with his family—Parvati, Kumar and Ganesh—and their divine mounts: Nandi the bull, the lion, the peacock and the tiny mouse, creatures that, in nature, are enemies of one another.
Just across Sanobharyang at Transport Nagar, a stationary tipper has a moving message with a beautiful picture of a mother and the apple of her eye: Amako maya matra tyasto aushadhi ho jasko expiry date hundaina. Indeed, a mother’s love is the only medicine without an expiry date.
Another tipper has Ma mare pani mero desh baanchi rahos—”Let my country live on even after I die”—written in its very heart, alongside the historic picture of the royal family consisting of King Birendra, Queen Aishwarya, Crown Prince Dipendra, Princess Shruti and Prince Nirajan, who were killed in the royal massacre of 1 June 2001, leaving deep wounds and unanswered questions in the annals of Nepal.
As I come across great lines amid unceasing traffic, I wonder if some of our budding literary figures may be hidden behind the wheel! On top of a muddied gully sits a graveyard of wildlife—a depot of construction materials like sand and aggregates—against the backdrop of a green cover just across the road.
Close by flows a little, muddy-red rivulet—a Ganga in her own right, for what is a Ganga without her tributaries?—through an urban sprawl, carrying filth, with no sign of aquatic life even in the rain-fed flow. Somehow, I smell gunpowder everywhere. Yet I refuse to surrender to its fumes. Accompanied by my two companions—walking and writing—I keep moving, hoping that eventually, the fog will lift.
Amid a faint flutter of pigeons and melancholic images of caged rabbits up for sale, Goma (9), her daughter Mala (4), Bagheil, a massive territorial male, and their cubs come towards me in all their majesty from a far-away Bardiya, and I freeze on the narrow street that wends through a concrete jungle just below the wilderness of Swayambhunath.
These creatures, while real in the wilderness of Bardiya, constitute frames from Tiger Island, a BBC movie based mainly on the struggle of Goma to raise her four cubs in a habitat quite close to human settlements amid the lurking fear of human-wildlife conflict and natural enemies within the wilderness. The loss of three of her male cubs to a cannibalistic male breaks the heart (it certainly broke mine while watching the movie at a recent screening event), a near encounter of cubs with the rhino has viewers on the edge of their seats, while the miraculous survival of her remaining cub and their reunion fill hearts with joy.
The sight of Bagheil, Goma and Mala raising the young together sheds new light on male tiger behaviour—a reminder that we may still be far from comprehending it. Whether we call it the Bengal tiger, the Royal Bengal tiger or simply the tiger matters little. The creature’s majesty does not depend on a colonial title—or two.
But raising a cub is no easy task, or is it? It takes an entire village to raise a child, goes an African proverb. Native American wisdom says: All plants and animals are our brothers and sisters. Our belief systems stand on the premise that even non-living things like rocks feel pain.
Let the tigers burning bright in the forests of Bardiya—and everywhere else—show us the way towards a sustainable future, one in which governments, including that of our own malnourished republic, see themselves not as masters of nature but as protectors of every living and non-living entity.
