A Dispatch From The Rainforest
On he who knew all the bird calls in Sinharaja.
Hello after an inordinately large amount of time. I’ve been trying to write my thesis, which means I am occupying my energies in the kind of inane writing that sucks away all of my will to write anything else that is potentially more interesting. I’ve had a lot of ideas on the way and hopefully, these will germinate into newsletter editions later (how much later? Your guess is as good as mine). But meanwhile, I have finally convinced my dear friend Akshay to do a guest edition!
Akshay and I go way back. Back then, he had a goatee and wore basketball shorts that would put Kobe Bryant to shame. Like most friendships that last, I cannot trace ours to a singular point of genesis. But after a decade or so, it only seems natural that we call each other friends.
There is a lot I can say about Akshay. Enough that it makes the exercise of condensing stuff into this intro an utterly pointless one. I’ve loved everything he has ever written and shared with me. And, I have always maintained that it’s tantamount to a proper crime that he doesn’t write more.
The wry sense of humour in Akshay’s writing belies the curiosity and openness with which he approaches every experience. Only the curious can document so keenly, and only the open can truly observe. When I read Akshay’s piece, I marvelled at how his spare prose somehow reveals something base about humanity. It’s as if he is simply bearing witness to a moment. As if he has lived and then lived again on paper.
I’m really chuffed to feature Akshay’s writing in this space and I hope you’ll enjoy reading it. His writing rarely appears anywhere, so it feels like quite an occasion to feature his piece in my humble (and very very sporadic) newsletter.
“What is this?” he asked.
I told him it was a yoga mat.
Unfurling the grey mat, Gunasoma stood up, chuckling while half a dozen juvenile cockroaches fell out of the folds and scuttled away.
“Karapottha (cockroach) house,” he said, walking away with the mat in one hand.
Gunasoma is our cook, caretaker, and mentor all rolled into one. Everyone who's done field research in the Sinharaja rainforest of Sri Lanka over the last three decades knows Gunasoma. They know him as incredibly knowledgeable, hardworking and kind – but with an unfortunate weakness for drinking. His sisters will flip the order of importance - “Gunasoma is good, but drinking problem, no?” His father, the legendary Martin Wijesinghe, spared fewer words: “he’s a drunkard”, he mumbled one morning in early November. Martin would die a month later. Instead of attending his funeral, I would be in cold, cold New Haven, writing an essay on whether “functional traits predict demographic rates”.
Three months after he passed, Gunasoma invited us to the Daana ceremony (followed by a Bana). A Sinhala-Buddhist custom, it involves a haamuduru chanting overnight prayers for the Spirit of the deceased, while relatives of the deceased perform a more Earthly job of feeding as many people as possible – more stomachs fed equals more blessings received, apparently. And so I went, driving back in heavy rain from Ratnapura, everything wet except my phone and two kilograms of sugar: I had asked a colleague, and she told me that sugar is an acceptable gift.
We knew that Gunasoma was grieving. A few weeks after Martin’s death, my colleague David had seen him freeze mid-way through wrapping food packets with newspaper. On that page of the newspaper was a full-length article honouring his late father. Gunasoma had stopped, cut out the piece with care, folded it and placed it under his bed. A month or so after the daana, he would show me this article.
Gunasoma built his identity off of his father, working for researchers from the age of 16 and only doing other things when researchers were not around. He knew all the birds of Sinharaja by sight and call. He knew when the bee-eaters would arrive and what kinds of mixed-species flocks were around. In turn, I taught him to identify Green Warblers by call; the last time he assisted a bird researcher at Sinharaja, they were considered subspecies of Greenish Warblers. He probably knew more than his father but admitted to less, and he shared all he knew with boyish abandon. Yet David and I (two thirty-year-olds with our own issues) suspected that Gunasoma yearned for validation from just one person, and he never got that. Now, it was too late.
A few months after the daana, Rupavahini, a popular Sinhala television channel, telecast a ten-minute feature on Martin. The entire feature is an ode to Martin – a meandering interview with Martin interspersed with a famous painter, a musician and a researcher. Each of them reminisced about their time with Martin: flute and bird song in the background.
About two minutes into the film, Martin is seen waving at a set of shade houses. A young Gunasoma steps out of one and waves.
Reads (long or not)
Vijeta Kumar is one of my favourite writers and I’ve often recommended her writing here. In Hiding Behind Language, she writes about the many ways in which language and thoughts are often interlinked and then not so much. How this relationship can be constructive and destructive too. It’s really revealing. Do give it a read!
Personal essays are, in my opinion, very difficult to pull off. It basically demands the writer to be vulnerable, unspool their thoughts and lay bare their feelings. The best ones are honest. And the most honest ones make you feel. Both, Scenes from an Open Marriage by Jean Garnett and The Love Of My Life by Cheryl Strayed had this rare quality and stayed with me.
For some reason, I hadn’t yet read Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction. Recently, I read the first few shorts from her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection - The Interpreter of Maladies and absolutely loved it. Her prose is simple yet vivid, making it an apt listing for this edition of the newsletter. I read Jerry Pinto’s new novel - The Education of Yuri. It’s not as moving and affecting as Em and The Big Hoom, but I was part of Yuri’s world for a couple of days and didn’t feel like leaving it.
I learnt a lot about Bruno Latour and his incredible work in this nice profile - Bruno Latour, The Post-Truth Philosopher, Mounts a Defence of Science.
To Watch
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s film - Shoplifters is totally worthy of all the hype. Kore-eda’s characters aren’t morally black or white. But, no matter their shade of grey, he treats them with empathy.
My roommate and I binged through Nathan Fielder’s HBO show - The Rehearsal. It’s unlike anything I have ever seen. Nathan’s approach to understanding human motivations and desires is unique and I completely bought into it. We then watched a bunch of episodes of Nathan for You, his rehearsal show for The Rehearsal. S04E07 - Finding Frances is like a mini-movie. It totally broke my heart.
Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person In The World is one of my favourite films in recent memory, in large part due to Anders Danielsen Lie’s stunning performance. I dare say, he is even better in Trier’s earlier film from his Oslo Trilogy - Oslo, August 31st. Someone on letterboxd said that the movie felt like being hit by a bus. I haven’t gotten hit by a bus, but if it’s anything like this movie, I’d imagine it’s quite painful and will give me a lot to ponder over.
I think Vineet Kumar Singh is a fantastic actor. His work with Anurag Kashyap in the short film Murabba and then a feature film Mukkabaaz is terrific. I liked his candid interview with Samdhish Bhatia. In the same vein, I liked Tabu’s interview with Anupama Chopra and Tillotama Shome’s interview with Rajeev Masand.
To Listen
Roger Goula’s OST for All That Breathes is brief but so so good. His other album Overview Effect is quite brilliant too.
Johnny Greenwood’s score for Lynne Ramsey’s somehow poetic and violent film, You Were Never Really Here is also somehow poetic and violent. My hot-take is that Greenwood is a better film score composer than Hans Zimmer.
Maybe this poem by Wendell Berry will bring you a moment of peace as it did for me.
The Peace of Wild Things
by Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Two Paintings titled - The Kiss. The first by Edward Munch is unmistakably Munchian. The second by Gustav Klimt is very different in mood and style.
Thanks for reading this edition of the newsletter. This newsletter is a potpourri of random thoughts littered with recommendations galore. If you liked reading it, do consider subscribing and sharing it with friends. Also, this newsletter tends to appear in Gmail’s Promotions tab. Consider filtering it to Inbox for easier visibility.
Follow me on Twitter here. For more of my writing, a portfolio of published work is here. I’d love to hear what you think about the newsletter. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you think there is something I could do better, or just to say hi.