The journey to Mala is best undertaken after the monsoon sets sail. The journey into Mala’s psyche, as well.
Mid-season squall, trees whipping, flipping. Thick clouds cruising low to the northeast. Silver of slamming rain, green of roughed-up leaves, umber of supple twigs. Wind-borne ocean dunking everybody. In the sodden detritus, leeches probe for blood, their throngs a scourge for humans.
One after another, cicadas whine rrrrraain, rrrrraain, rrrrraain.
To the south, Banasura Mala, a 6000-ft mountain in profile, its peak an upturned nose dipping to a small, round chin. Looking west: primeval forest frothing off the steep flanks of the ancient craton. Toward the east: plantations and home gardens. A road skirting the base of a ridge to the north, behind which another vertiginous drop. All around, small, rounded hills, crisscrossed by streams and rivers; narrow valleys opening to flat-bottomed, open swampy fields.
Through wild jack trees I walk toward the swollen Kallampuzha, the Stone River, beyond which is the old forest, Mala. Thrashing canopies steer the wind. Trunks rise like masts through foils of drip-tipped leaves. Roots hull the ground.
The Kallampuzha tumbles its waters out of the western slopes of Wayanad, a small plateau with rolling hills ringed by high peaks in the Western Ghats, a long sliver of a mountain range running down the western flank of the Indian Peninsula, by the Arabian Sea. I’ve long thought of the Ghats as a refuge. For rain and mist and clouds and frost and ferns and mosses and frogs and flycatchers and all cool-loving beings. The longer I live here, the more I see how the monsoon needs these mountains and these forests, and therefore how it needs all these creatures. How it needs Mala.
I’ve mentioned Mala several times. Context determines this word’s rich meaning. In old Dravidian, Mala means mountain. It can also mean a forested mountain. My friend Saji, a Paniya tribesman, calls this hill forest simply “Mala.” I’ve adopted that meaning too. Throughout the Western Ghats (a name invented by outsiders), “mala” is the local term.
Malayalam: the Mala language. Alam is abode. Mountain’s tongue, forest’s dwelling. Mala suffixes mountain names, like Banasura Mala. The people who speak this language of the mountains are Malayali. Thirty years I’ve been here, and I am still learning, slowly, the language of Mala. Maybe I’ll be a Malayali one day, a dwelling for Mala.
I’m a rainforest conservationist. I live and work at the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary, where a small team of dedicated ecosystem gardeners, skilled in various aspects of horticulture, plant conservation, and rainforest ecology, grow native plants of this mountainous biome, through techniques honed over four decades of experimentation and practice. We conserve plants that are highly endangered in the wild through a range of methods, from intensive care nurseries to outdoor habitats rich with flowering plants, tubers, succulents, shrubs, trees, creepers, climbers, epiphytes (plants that grow on other plants), and lithophytes (plants that grow on rocks). These plants were initially brought from different parts of the Western Ghats, mostly from areas that had already been degraded or destroyed. Much of our work is a search-and-rescue mission, and we refer to the plants as refugees, because they are similar to human refugees in suffering the depredations of war, displacement, climate change, and general toxification of their home environment. We also speak of species being rehabilitated when they form mixed-species communities that eventually become quite independent of our care.
Surrounding these “refugee camps” are once-denuded patches that, through our vigilance, are recovering to forest through natural processes of succession. Since we are on the edge of an ancient forest, still rich and diverse despite its small size, protection of the land allows for easy reforestation, as insects, birds, and mammals transfer spores and seeds. Beyond all this, we educate students and visitors about the centrality of the natural world, first to itself and then to human lives and the human economy—something most urban people seem to deny, to our collective peril.
Rain hammers down and sideways, tossing the trees and slamming the hills and valleys. The forest takes it all in, for it is older than the wind, older than the rain, and older even than the plateau. Long before the mountains of the Western Ghats were kicked up by the Indian plate’s docking into Tibet, there were tall trees here, most likely lycopods. No glaciers reached here. It was a forest then, and it is a forest now, one that shrank and expanded over eons. Numbers fly around when people guess its age. Millions of years, tens of millions, hundreds of millions.
I slip, slide, fall, get soaked. Treacherous mush of ripe jackfruit levels me. The air is rank with the candied scent of smashed-open arils, tiny flies swirling like smoke between raindrops. A gummy sweetness, smelling at once of different fruits, lures wasps, hornbills, elephants, giant squirrels, monkeys, worms, rats, and humans. The largest tree-borne fruit in the world is a staple of this refuge. The trees are splendidly cauliflorous, with forty-kilo fruits hanging heavy in this season. They can be cooked as a vegetable, eaten out of hand as a fruit, or stored as a halwa. The large rich seeds can be roasted and also made into flour. Jacks are useful trees, and sturdy.
By the crab month, karkidaga masam in Malayalam, the monsoon has been ferrying between the Indian Ocean and the Western Ghats for several weeks. Karkidaga masam corresponds to the period between July 17 and August 16. In the zodiac calendar, this overlaps with Cancer, also symbolized by a crab. This is the darkest and wettest part of the year in this region. Historically, when the monsoon behaved more predictably, human endurance reached its peak in this time. Weak or old people died, and infant mortality increased.
Everyone in Kerala curses the rain by mid-July, for six weeks of moderate to heavy rain has already passed, and karkidaga masam is worse. With the pores of the body so open, people are vulnerable. Diseases and death increase in this month. Famine and scarcity are common, with the rain hammering all plants, agricultural and wild. Snakes are flooded out of their hiding places. Frogs breed with astonishing speed. Streams swell and spill into the vayals, or paddy fields, and tiny fish surge in with the water. Pathila (ten-leaf) curry was once a staple, as that’s all there was: tagarai, cheera, thazhudhaama, thaalu, kumbalam, thumba, chembu, payar, manithakkali,and mattha leaves with fish and tubers. A monsoon diet, along with crabs and several kinds of mushrooms and pickles and coconut chutney.
Once upon a time all the land here, as far as the eye could see, was rainforest. Around AD 1800, colonists arrived to turn vast areas of these forested plateaus and mountains into plantations and to extract the trees for wood. Although there were Adivasi tribes here, it was Empire that cut away vast swaths to make tea, coffee, mahogany, and teak plantations. Settler migrants came when India gained independence. Soon after, the various states were formed, and the young republic unleashed its own consequences upon the land and the traditional peoples. Then came roads and townships, schools, churches, mosques, temples, and hospitals, and later still, shops, hotels, theme parks, and resorts. And along with all this came quarries and dams and power pylons, and telephone towers, and all the billboards and highway signs, the beguiling wonders of civilization, whose endgame is now planetary.
Another word for refuge is sanctum. A potent word leading to religious and political debates, by naming one place a sanctum and therefore desanctifying other places—sanctums to someone else. Now all life is either on the run, or fighting as it falls, or just subject to the impacts of industrialized humankind.
Something of holocaustic proportions is at hand. Not the Holocaust, but ecological holocaust, a complete and irreversible annihilation of creaturely existence through the fires of industrial civilization. Organisms, organs, cells, trees, old-growth forests, rivers, flowers, humans, winds, oceans, meadows, monsoon, and mountains—bam!
Refuge, sanctum, ark. Aboard the biblical one, guided by the bearded sailor and savant Noah who sailed in some faraway seas a few thousand years ago, there were two of every kind of animal. This ark, however, this monsoon-infused pod of life with a zillion creatures, is sailing nowhere, unless we consider the pace at which continental plates move. Moreover, it is proliferating as I write this: spores, seeds, sperm, eggs, saplings, larvae, nymphs, kickies, suckers, gemmae, pods, tubers, pollen, clones, rhizomes, buds, flowers and all. The ark, in other words, is the still-standing rainforest, a full-blown multispecies community, an ancient one begetting a modern one, unbroken since the beginning of time, it seems. Think of us like a little polyp on the side of a giant coral reef.
Most Indians believe the monsoon is unassailable, a wind system eighteen million years old that has breathed life into the subcontinent since the Himalayas rose. Those formidable mountains block the monsoon from traveling to Central Asia, condensing it instead into long, hard rain. The monsoon’s intensity varies from year to year, but we believe it will always blow. Ever since I have been here, though, for about thirty years now, I have heard people talking about how the monsoon has gone awry, that it is no longer what it used to be. We also know this from scientific data, and for us, crucially, we know this from the behavior of the plants and animals in our sanctuary.
It is widely understood that the forest needs the monsoon. But little thought is given to how much the monsoon also needs forests—although most people have an inkling that plants cool the land and that forests are intimately connected to wind, rain, and rivers. Scientists refer to rainforests, particularly the Amazon, as the planet’s lungs. The forests pull the winds in from the sea.
Yet deforestation proceeds unchecked. Kerala has lost half its forest cover over the past four decades. It is no wonder that the quantity of rainfall has also decreased. If we could reforest more of the land and protect whatever remains of old forest, we could keep droughts and floods at bay, as vegetation has an ameliorating effect on both. Everyone agrees that the monsoon is necessary for agriculture, but we hardly ever talk about what the monsoon needs. In an era when an Indian court redefines the Ganga and Yamuna Rivers as “living persons,” let me propose that we also look at the monsoon as a being, one with its own needs: cooler oceans and lands, glacier-bearing Himalayas, a robust and diverse Mala, a rewilded Indian subcontinent. Farther afield, it needs the Siberian permafrost to not melt. It needs the Antarctic to remain icy.
I fantasize sometimes about a perfect monsoon. Rain that is not too much or too little, lasting neither the whole year nor only a few days, arriving perfectly on the first of June and lasting till October. Rivers full and flowing, everyone happy and well fed, reservoirs lasting through the summer, and fields and forests growing lush and fecund.
I worry, though, that the monsoon, with its moods and savage powers, might cease altogether. Daily, I awaken to an inescapable prospect in the middle of paradise, this botanical sanctuary in Wayanad. Plant conservation is precious work, and it must be done. But what if the monsoon fails? What will happen if forests and drought are a positive feedback loop? What if drought leads to forest fires, which lead to less rain, and then to more forest fires, and so on? What, then, of rivers and the millions of people downstream?
The wind stutters and dies. Heavy grays shot with gold fade into chrome and dark silver again. Large butterflies glide peacock-blue around crimson pagoda flowers. Yellow bulbuls flash between young jamun trees. Low black clouds glide relentlessly toward the northeast.
I’m shivering. My feet are wet and bloody. My dog companions are sneezing. I pull out writhing, engorged leeches from their nostrils, and between their paws, and from their lips. If I don’t chuck them out, they will get sucked dry by the terracotta tiles. By morning the stiff and brittle leech corpses will be caught in macabre poses. I saw one yesterday that looked like a melted man stuck in tar, stretched as it tried to free itself. I feel sad when I find a leech who died like this. It would be a better death to feed them to fish. Blood meal is one of the richest meals anyone can have. If ever I ran out of my usual foods I’d turn to leeches perhaps, feeding myself on my own blood, and indulge in a kind of recycling via annelids.
Such are my thoughts on a rainy afternoon, of fellow critters and giant fruit, and defiant forests still growing, and mighty winds still blowing over millions of years. Of this ancient biome reckoning with the drawdown and overshoot of modern civilization. Of the Mala, from which the sweet waters of the Kallampuzha flow: my rain-drenched, life-bearing refuge. An ark. Sanctum.
