Looking the Tiger in the Eye
The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable was Amitav Ghosh’s first book of nonfiction after his marvellous travel memoir and quest to unpack history, In an Antique Land (1992).
The opening chapter of The Great Derangement contains this passage on the Sundarbans, that mangrove forest region where three rivers run into the Bay of Bengal:
The Sundarbans are nothing like the forests that usually figure in literature. The greenery is dense, tangled, and low; canopy is not above but around you, constantly clawing at your skin and your clothes. No breeze can enter the thickets of this forest; when the air stirs at all it is because of the buzzing of flies and other insects. Underfoot, instead of a carpet of softly decaying foliage, there is a bank of slippery, knee-deep mud, perforated by the sharp points that protrude from mangrove roots. Nor do any vistas present themselves except when you are on one of the hundreds of creeks and channels that wind through the landscape—and even then it is the water alone that opens itself; the forest withdraws behind its muddy ramparts, disclosing nothing.
That description transports me there, forces me to care when it would be so much easier to back away from the book’s big questions.
Why, Ghosh asks, do we have so much trouble writing about climate change? His book discusses the crisis itself, and explores the role that imperialism played in leading us to where we are today. It’s a personal meditation but it’s also a writerly interrogation of our time.
Ghosh refers to a folk epic of the Sundarbans, the story of Bon Bibi, and that in turn Ied me to two titles from Tulika Books because big ideas are always worth exploring in the realm of picture books.
In Bon Bibi’s Forest by Sandhya Rao, illustrated by Proiti Roy, a tiger’s tail swishes across the half-title page. The people are busy, the water is “salt-laced” and the shadow of a greedy monster hangs over the opening. “Everyone” quickly narrows down to a Sufi saint, Ibrahim, and his wife, and their twin children, and from that point on, how can you not care? The story voice is confident and confiding, aligning repeatedly with the reader, a recursive invitation to follow the story in the manner of a watercourse finding its way. The reversal at the end has real meaning for our extractive economies and our relationships with natural places. Who is the monster, who the guardian?
This thing we’re dealing with, the monster we’ve made, which is unleashing fearsome consequences, is resistant to our limitations. They are limitations, Amitav Ghosh suggests, not just of habit but of deeply entrenched inequities. In the end if we don’t wrap our minds around it, the true monster will be a failure of imagination.
The mythic forest becomes the edge of home in Jhupli’s Honey Box written originally in Bengali by Achintyarup Ray and translated into English by the author, illustrated by Shivam Choudhary. Here’s the opening paragraph:
The mango tree stands bowed over the thatched roof. A storm last summer left it a little bent. Jhupli scampers halfway up the tree, swift as a squirrel, and looks towards the river shading her eyes from the sun. In the river is a motorboat, a launch, two fishing boats and water everywhere. On the other side is dense forest.
This is the very forest, “dense, tangled, and low,” of Ghosh’s deep dive into climate change, only here we see it through the eyes of a young child fearful about her father's safety every time he goes into its tangles to collect wild honey. The small, perfect details of this family's life are the invitation into this tale. Its resolution takes shape in a child's idea, heard once and passed along—the kind of small idea that can grow and create change in life as in the pages of a picture book.
In the story world of perfect coincidence where writers sometimes find themselves, Ray is also the Bengali translator of Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide.
Both Tulika titles tap that sense of looking into the eye of the storm—or the tiger. It's an experience that results in an unexpected recognition of something we once knew but then forgot.
Ghosh asks:
Can the timing of this renewed recognition be mere coincidence or is the synchronicity an indication that there are entities in the world, like forests, that are fully capable of inserting themselves into our processes of thought?
Raising similar questions is a very different evocation of the human place in a forest world, Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree.
