Pankaj writes and I draw stories about the wonder of life and the many ways in which one can come to receive experiences in nature.
The Common Ancestor
For Jane Goodall, on her 88th birthday. An earnest note of gratitude from naturalists, conservationists, academics - the ones budding and the ones celebrated. From forest guards, writers, artists, people of science and anybody who has found wonder and inspiration in her incredible work spanning the past 6 decades.
Language of light
Like mothwings that wear the eyes of an owl staring back, threateningly. If creatures evolved to appear like fractions of the environment they spent their lives traversing, absorbing, observing... how distant is the notion that some of them, turned their heads to the night-sky and became what they saw?
As a species, we might well be the only kind who proclaim themselves Storytellers. Being that every living and dead cell that has made up our bodies has been an inheritance from the earth and space matter that has shapeshifted in and out of our bodies and will do so until we will exist in our temporal forms, it isn't strange to think that the act of storytelling is too, something inherited.
The earth recounts it's tale each day, in the crashing waves, in the shifting earth, in hot spewing magma, in the distant voice calling the geese home. In everything that exists, including us, the earth remembers itself. Because storytelling, before everything else, is an act of remembrance.
Hubris
Flower Heart
Few things demonstrate the fragility of flowers like a storm does - It doesn't exist.
When a storm broke out, two flowers of the same seed behaved differently.
The bloom that was older and had known the beauty and terror of a lashing rain folded in her petals and withdrew into a self-administered hug.
The one younger, on its first day of blooming, stayed open to the sky. Standing in the water like a boxer cornered and breaking under a rain of hard blows. Raindrops whizzed sideways like tracer bullets, colliding into its being, splattering streaks of brilliant yellow pollinia in every direction. Except for a faint misalignment of petals, the flower remained as it was.
Recording this in memory, I said , 'Two flowers of one plant responded differently to a hard rain. One stayed open, the other closed in.'
And then soon, rephrased : 'While the older flower resigned into herself, the one younger stood open, brave and eager to bear witness to her first rain.'
And then hastily noted, 'You cannot affix human emotions to a flower.'
But what if flowers could be like that. Like people. Wanting different things. Some might prefer bees over moths and some might like the storm more than light.
The world I live in conditions me to say that flowers cannot be like people. That flower hearts cannot hold human thoughts. They're incapable.
But what of this one flower? Who stands in the water now and has offered herself to the swirling grey storm, mad with wonder and excitement for her first rain, reminding that maybe flowers cannot be like people, but people can be like flowers.
Because you too have risen at dawn and looked to the sky.
Bubble-net
If the internet existed 2 centuries ago, there still wouldn't be images circulating, of whales blowing spectacular spirals of bubbles up to the surface to trap prey.
This is because the inner works of these giants have not always carried the manual to breathe bubble-nets into being. It is something learned: a method devised, experimented with and then performed with success before being taught to the young.
(The earliest known documentation of bubble-net feeding dates back to as recent as 1929, in the Norwegian sea).
Although Humpback whales and Bryde's whales are known to make bubble nets, not every pod knows how to employ the method.
While the 'Herders' drive a shoal into a tight circle, A 'caller' dives beneath to emit a sonic noise of about 180decibels which causes the fish to panic. The rest meanwhile blow a stream of bubbles that create a barrier that spirals up to the surface, trapping the mass of frenzied prey within the bubble-net. The pod then rise up to the surface to feed in gigantic gulps.
Today, while species other than our own are wiped off the surface and the depths of the earth, disappearing faster than they can be recorded, a cluster of whales emerge with their clever inventions, reminding that 'life's forward path is not without genius and transference.
Tumbleweed
In praise of the great adventure of the tumbleweed: a lifeform whose fantastic journey begins only in death.
Tumbleweeds die functional deaths - the turn of the earth and the tide of time have crafted them so that they structurally dry up and curl into sphere-like forms so they can roll with gusts that blow.
Before that, their roots underground let go by design at the base, where a layer of cells that make up the 'abscission layer' ensure that the break-off occurs uniformly.
Once set free, the tumbleweed begins its great journey, anywhere the wind blows. Seeds disperse as the rolling motion dislodges them across the landscape.
If you see a tumbleweed rolling in the desert plain, ask it questions. Ask the tumbleweed where it has been, all the things it has seen, ask it what it feels like to be nudged by the wind.
Path of Least Resistance
The path of lightning, is that of least resistance.’ My uncle said. Our interstate train hurtled across the vast plains on this stormy night. ‘What does that mean?’ I asked him as he placed an air-pillow under my head and softly tucked a warm blanket under my feet. It was minutes before midnight, all of the bogie was dark and quiet, except for the zero watt bulb that glowered meekly above us. ‘Like water flowing down a path; it flows in the direction most steep - the path of least resistance.’ he said, flicking the light switch off and climbing into his berth. 'Goodnight...'. I had eyes fixated outside, where the plains were so featureless, one could see bolts of lightning strike right into the ground and at once set fire to haystacks and dry bush. The flashes of light were so brilliant, I remember vividly, the reflections beating off the spectacles my uncle placed beside his pillow. So I drifted to sleep whispering his words now and again, ‘The path of least resistance..'. The memory hid in the shadows of my mind until a bolt of lightning struck again, more than 2 decades later. And then I remembered him; the train stampeding through the darkness, illuminated by electric streaks striking downward, i remembered that zero watt bulb, his gold-rimmed spectacles and the path of least resistance.
Ochre
When i think of 'Conservation', i think of the cupped palm of a mother 35000 years ago. She holds the pigment, ochre. Smearing on the cave ceiling beneath which her children sleep, she imprints from memory, figures of grassland beasts, bog-trees and swamp-birds : ingredients for stories she'll weave to lull her children to sleep as the fire burns.
I think of a father, 25,000 years ago. Perched on a boulder, safe at a distance, from the monstrous forms that roam below. He observes curiously : The arch of the tusks, notches along the trunk, the raggedness of fur, the undualting folds of skin - lines and shapes to etch up on a panel of bare rock in his communal sandstone-cathedral.
This was a time when one species wasn't obscenely devastating another...or barbarically erasing entire landscapes. A time when perhaps, species and spaces didn't need saving.
These ancient paintings inform us today of the life that roamed the earth in that period. This was a time when ideas on 'Conservation' did not exist. But perhaps, within these once fire-lit caves lie the very origins of conservation.
That we gather and fiercely protect the pristine wilds when they are threatened today - this visceral will to safeguard and preserve must owe it's origin story to the elders who did as little as gape In wonder, return and revel, record and remember, tell a story.
After all, 'wonder' evokes curiosity, curiosity invites observation, observation ignites investigation, investigation reveals truth... and truth, is something to love and hold dear... all things considered, we protect, only what we love.
Moth
What do you do when you spot a little hawkmoth drowning in a rain puddle? You lift her up. 'Come here, I've got you.'
And so I did. placed in the hollow of my palm, limbs twitched, drenched wings thrashed uncontrollably. 'Too much water inside',.
A few moments of frenzied convulsing were replaced by an abrupt stillness; wings froze solid, limbs still as twigs, silence. 'Too late.'
I turned her on her back, compound eyes, antennae and proboscis facing me. Then, placing the index on the abdomen, I began to pulse lightly as I could. Was I attempting CPR on a moth? 'Nothing to lose'.
Twenty, maybe twenty five compressions in, I gave up. no movement. 'Too late'.
I watched awhile and sighed. Beside the still body, there was a droplet of moisture just expelled. Wings flapped, eyes blinked and then she flipped up on limbs. 'You're alive...'
I wondered, if hawk moths, or just moths in general, exchanged stories, when they met, of the adventures they'd lived.
Humans do. But who would believe, if I said, 'I resurrected a moth.' That a moth had breathed back to life, beneath the ridged swirls of my finger.
How could i tell? the dead from the dying, the thorax from the abdomen? How much pressure was too much and how little was too less? How did I know? The perfect method to resuscitate a moth - I didn't. But it worked.
The droplet evaporated into the air above and concrete below. She rested a while and then flew away. 'Goodbye,'.
That makes two of us, who know this story... and nothing to show for it.
Termite Farts
On this breezy winter evening, we bring you, the air expelled from the rear end of a termite: Termite flatulence, termite wind or simply, Termite fart. Does it smell like wood? Absolutely and fortunately not. Termite farts are odorless. Fortunate because a single termite releases about half a microgram of methane each day. Considering the billions of termites that live on earth, the collossal fart-mass would be something to endure.
Collectively, termite wind can make up anywhere between 2 to 5 percent of annual global methane emissions (Thought to be 30% earlier), thereby speeding up climate change!
However, only recently, scientists discovered that only half the amount of methane was actually escaping the termite mounds.
A microscopic peek along the walls of termite mounds will reveal to you the incredible lives of the gas guzzling Methanotrophs - a bacteria that feasts on methane for survival.
The methanotrophs constantly filter the gas rising up. Some mounds were even found to be consuming methane off the air around! It is now being pursued, to experiment with methanotrophs a bacteria found almost everywhere in the soil, to be employed to scrub the air off methane to battle climate change.
For every termite with a belly full of wood, there is a methanotroph waiting for dinner. How incredible are the equations between lifeforms that quietly exist in the microcosms flourished under the dust of our boots.
Turn sound on to listen to Aditya's rendition of the great symphony of termite flatulence.
Sunbeam
Every sun beam, before it has collided into your bare skin in a flourish of warmth, has travelled 148 million kilometers, hurtling across the outerspace at the speed of 299,792,458 meters per second. You would think, that something so tangible as a light beam, moving toward you with such velocity would so much as nudge you upon contact.
Can light move objects? It can. Called the optical force, in the 70s, scientists found that light can indeed move particles the size of a micron or a nanometer. Because light is made up of photons and photons do not have any mass, the force exerted is infinitesimal.
However, the sun's radiation in outerspace is so concentrated that even spacecrafts and asteroids are nudged off course.
Disappointed you're too big to feel the 'sunbeam-nudge'? Don't be. Imagine being thrown back off your feet everytime you walked out in the sun. Or feeling like you were punched on the head everytime you walked under a streetlamp. Or jabbed in the chest with a pool-stick whenever a torchbeam shone on you.
On a nanoscale, the sun prods, jabs, nudges and shoves us with its curiously warm hands each day - we just don't know it.
Scientists
When the tide was low, they waded into the ocean in search of gifts; shadowy forms that drifted in shallow waters - Seaweed, kelp, algae. Where the tide pools were, where the kelp forest grew - they knew.
But, little did they know, that centuries after they brought home seaweed and alage and pressed them delicately in their volumes, their collections would become the objects that scientists would study to learn about an infinitesimal fraction of earth history.
This band of curious women - walking the waters with imaginary, undrawn kelp forest maps - Seaweed pressers, hobbyists who scoured the shoreline in search of specimens to press in their books didn't know that their works would one day find their way to muesums, universities and laboratories as literal time-keepers of the ocean and the earth.
Because scientists have found, that pressed seaweed and algae from centuries ago are a portrait of the ocean at that point in time. Analysing Nitrogen, amino acid and protein costitutions among other things reveal details such as how warm the waters were and what species of fish lived abundantly. Comparing notes from these delicate, flowery specimens gathered at different points in time has also revealed the pattern of climate change over the past few centuries.
our 4th science story is dedicated to the earliest 'scientists' - women who unknowingly contributed to science just by going about their curious ways. The seaweed pressers, the cave painters, the pigment makers, the foragers, swamp-waders , herb-gatherers, hide-weavers, the stargazers, the sap gatherers, the moon watchers and mothers.
Bladderwort
Among questions we often ask, there is one that is sadly irregular - 'Who lives here?'
Yes, who lives in this ignorably faint depression on a rock-bed, collecting rainwater and root run-off. Lesser than the smallest pond and a fraction larger than a rain-puddle. This place is so ordinary, it has no name. 'Who lives here?'
'Come closer. I'm here', answers the Bladderwort. So with our palms and knees pressed in moist mud, we observe:
The Bladderwort is a carnivorous plant that pushes out miniature flowers above the surface so that pollinators may not be trapped by its deadly mechanism underwater.
It holds a simple structure of floating stems that carry bladder-like contraptions along the length. These 'Bladders' can open and close like doors. There are Bristles skirting the opening and when a waterflea, a tadpole or some stray bug disturbs the bristles, the bladders are triggered open and the prey is sucked in and digested.
Say the word 'Bladderwort' and in the time it will take you to do so, this tiny carnivorous plant would have opened its traps, sucked in prey and closed them shut again three times in a row.
Unfolding within 1/3rd of a second, this is one of the fastest actions in the plant-kingdom. The quickest yet being the Bunchberry Dogwood, which opens its buds and shoots out pollen in less than half a millisecond.
Today, we urge you to ask.... and ask often, aloud, wherever you choose to roam. Call into hollows of trees, to carpets of moss draping gnarled trunks, call to the canopy and whisper in your own homes - 'Who lives here?'
Thanks to Sandilya Theuerkauf for introducing us to the Bladderwort.
Tubeworms
Here you are. Under the Arctic ice. Precisely 750 meters below the surface, investigating the sea floor, where it stirs, churns and spews. In darkness darker than absolute, breathes steadily a volcano unlike any you have ever seen. This here is a mud volcano; a vent in the earth's surface endlessly spewing methane. Conical walls of superheated mud form the countless bellowing mouths.
Here you are, experiencing the story of a most incredible kind of Volcano. Completely blind to the presence of a shy ceature who holds a story perhaps more fascinating than the mud volcano.
Clustered around Vents, anchored to the sea floor so as to not be swept away by the deep sea current, softly swaying in the tide, is the incredible Tube Worm - a creature that calls this lightless place its home. Only a few centimetres long, its soft body withstands not only the immense pressure and freezing cold water of the artcic, but also the scalding heat of the gasses searing up the vents. Here, In a place you considered the most inhospitable for life, it thrives.
It has no mouth, no stomach, no limbs, no anus - it hosts a bacteria in the the walls of its skin that convert the methane or sulphide absorbed into energy - 'what a strange life form!', you might think. But, to a tube worm who hasn't seen light or known of bipeds or the anthropocene, how odd the shape of you hovering in the water must appear. This here too, is 'life' on earth, as strange and wonderful as every species that has existed or will come to exist.
The Beaufort Tubeworms that were found in the 80s, were found to have grown achingly slowly to 2 metres long in about 250 years.
Here you are, under the Arctic ice, experiencing a darkness more dark than absolute, in the presence of a creature that has quietly lived, felt and listened to the deep rumblings of the earth's womb for more than two centuries.
And now, it has listened to you.
Aditya's composition of a 250 year long soundscape distilled to 30 seconds.
Ball Lightning
What do you do when you witness something you didn't know exists? Imagine, on a stormy night, coming across, or rather, being come-across by a spherical ball of light gliding through the air, vaporising through walls and doors, drifting by its own accord, without an observable pattern of movement. Before choosing to quietly float through or speed up unannounced as It explodes with a violent crack, into nothingness, leaving behind only a putrid smell of sulphur...
'Ball lightning' is a rarely occurring phenomena observed sparsely through centuries. Known to occur in storm-conditions, the orb of electric light has confounded women and men of science owing to its elusive appearance, behaviour and dissapearence. know to have exploded on decks of ships, killing deck-hands, apparating through church walls, descending down chimneys, dancing above misty lake surfaces and following pilots through storm clouds in WWII.
Of the countless witness reports through centuries, Tsar Nicolas II, the last emperor of russia recorded his own around 1900,
"Suddenly it became quite dark, a blast of wind from the open door blew out the flame of the candles which were lit in front of the iconostasis, there was a long clap of thunder, louder than before, and I suddenly saw a fiery ball flying from the window straight towards the head of the Emperor. The ball (it was of lightning) whirled around the floor, then passed the chandelier and flew out through the door into the park. My heart froze, I glanced at my grandfather – his face was completely calm."
(Swipe)
What do you do when you witness something you didn't know exists. You make room for it in that tiny fissure in your brain, reserved alone for the mysteries you have yet to uncover.
Voiced by Rijul Ray
Sound design and typography by Naveed Mulki