Green was the silence...

This is a book about those who speak to plants. It is about lonely people who must find themselves. With language that's intense and layered, this is a saga that glows like a rare emerald.

If a simple reading can provide a masterclass on freezing a thought or a moment in fiction, this is the book that instructs even as it illuminates. With language that glows intensely, words that are layered and yet cascade like music, no praise for Everything the Light Touches by Janice Pariat may be high enough. As readers and book buyers, essentially consumers, we are obsessed with the blurb, with the broadest outlines, with takeaways, and with wanting to reduce a work to mere descriptors.

Whereas literature evades every definition creatively. A delightful book could be on anything arcane that the writer coaxes the other to taste, and enter an obscure fictional landscape to know as intimately.

Is it too much to hope that writing of this calibre may also deal with issues burning or potent? Crazy as it may sound, the general provenance of this book matches the brilliance of the author’s craft. For this is a book that will glow like a rare emerald on any bookshelf in the world and still be relevant.

Forests and journeys

For those burning with questions about what this book is about — its bare bones form a multilayered story through the experiences of four main characters from varied timelines and backgrounds whose stories and ideologies enmesh. This is a book about forests, botanists and those who speak to plants. It also is an interrogation into the strictures of science as it has evolved in the West and what elements crucial to knowledge its watertight definitions have discarded or undermined. This is a book about women’s journeys and sisterhood. It is about lonely people who must find themselves as much as what they discover. Underlying the narrative is a concern for the environment told as a constant battle between toxic progress and the natural sustainable lifestyles of our ancestors. Also a book about great minds we know of but hardly enough about — Carl Linnaeus and Johann Goethe.

Suddenly out of a job and rather directionless, Shai chooses to return home to the bungalow atop a hill in Shillong. Her mother is uneasy and wants her out of Meghalaya. Her father is tying himself to pines in the forest beside their home in a bid to sway public opinion about plans to fell them. Her old nurse has taken ill in a remote village and Shai believes it is urgent enough to travel out to meet her. The village in the Jaintia hills is a different world. It begins to grow its roots around Shai. The people there, whose version of Khasi differs from hers, teach her ancient tales of their land.

In the early 20th century, Evie travels out from London as a bonafide member of the “fishing fleet” of women seeking alliances with Englishmen posted in India but her travels have a hidden agenda and it has nothing to do with men. A botanist by education, she chafes against the narrow elbow room permitted to women in academia as also the soulless manner by which living things are reduced to their parts, to cold calculations and classifications that rob the process of all light.

A green haze

Carl writes of his travels solely in verse. How to Hunt a Bear, one of his poems, is the briefest and most direct: “Do not miss”. He speaks of his travels too, of learning, explorations and of plants. Except, he is Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy for the universal system we all know as binomial nomenclature, genus and species. How lyrically this collection provides its high point!

And the great German poet Goethe tires of his day job as a civil servant and decides to travel leisurely and mostly incognito towards Rome. Here he finally confesses to his all-consuming passion for botany that he must now pursue. Underlying this is his desire to evade the fame of The Sorrows of Young Werther as much as Charlotte von Stein, the woman he must forget.

Each of these journeys becomes the reader’s as well. The nuanced study of plants, by an agriculturist, a gardener and a scientist, underpins this passionate quest. Not just the lives of the protagonists enmesh, ours do too in their knowledge and in the green hazes of botany.

And there are people too, those who love and share and stand tall as trees do. Through it all, an indistinct set of codes for life emerges, like a forest of saplings.

Which asks a booklover the all-important question. How do we elevate the stature of literature in our country? Buy and champion books such as this so quality writers and quality books become the norm.