Today Avi has begun exploring a small canyon that we have named Shiprock. It is a maze of narrow gullies between jagged rock walls about 40 meters in height. Avi has already mapped it from the air; now he is methodically mapping details from the surface level, moving up the walls, along the canyon, poking his antennae into holes and cracks.
I am remembering, as I clamber up and down the terrain with him, the time I spent with my grandfather during summer holidays in my final year of college. He had returned to our tribal lands the year before. The refinery had ruined the land in the 20 years of his exile, and now the mining company wanted to extend the open-cast mines. My grandfather’s village, my people, were all scattered by the initial displacement, but they had come together to fight for their land. The police brought the company goondas with them, looking for the agitation leaders. This is what they call an “encounter killing”— cold-blooded murder that is reported as a killing in self-defense. Four people, including my cousin brother Biru, were killed the week before I arrived.
I can’t talk about it still. I have been insulated from the troubles of my people for so long because my mother took us children away when the refinery displaced us. Most of my childhood was spent in Bhubaneswar. I was good at studies, so she got me admitted to a Corporation school, even though my grandfather was against it. They had such arguments! But my mother won. She had seen too much violence and death in the war against our people; she wanted me to be safe, to get a modern education. My grandfather didn’t speak to her for three years. Then he was forced to come to Bhubaneswar to find work. It proved my mother’s point, that we could no longer live the way we had for thousands of years, so why fight and be killed? When she realized my grandfather was still active in the struggle she shook her head and said he was a fool. I never paid attention to all that, only to my studies. Only when I went to Delhi for university I realized what it meant to be Adivasi. I was so integrated into modern life that I had forgotten my native language and customs—but with my black skin and different features I was seen as backward, someone who had come to a top university because of the reservation system. I joined an Adivasi resistance group, and slowly began to unlearn the Corporation propaganda and learn again the language and history of my people.
That summer I went back to Odisha to see my grandfather. I still remembered the green hills and the clouds that would sit on top of them, and the plain, which used to be crisscrossed by small rivers and streams. But so much had changed. I stood in the dust and heat of the foothills and hugged my weeping aunt, as the bodies of the “junglee terrorists” lay before us. Biru lay on his side as though sleeping. Blood had seeped from the gunshot wound on his head into the ground. That day I understood for the first time the reality of being on the receiving side of genocide.
In the terrible days that followed the raid, our relatives, the hill tribes, hid us from the police. I went with the fugitives into the cloud forest. The narrow trails were filled with the calls of unfamiliar birds and beasts. Up there under the shadow of the mountain god, eating wild mangoes from the trees while a light rain fell, I had a strange experience: belonging. I looked at my grandfather’s face, lined and seamed from decades of suffering, and laughing so defiantly despite all our sorrows, and I finally understood why he fought for what was left of our home.
In those days my head was filled with all kinds of grand ideas. I was a budding intellectual, all the worlds of knowledge were opening before me. I was writing a thesis on extensions of Walker Indices, which are a set of parameters that try to tell how alive something is, from a rock to a mountain goat. My grandfather was proud of me, and always wanted to know what I was studying. In his village he had been a man of wisdom and power; in the city he was an activist by night, and a gardener for hire by day.
But he was the one who taught me to see in a different way. My vague ideas of semiotics grew sharper and more vivid during that time in the forest. I didn’t put it all together until some years later in my first academic paper—but what the forest taught me was that Nature speaks, that living and nonliving communicate with each other through a system older than language. In fact, physical law is only a subset of the ways in which matter talks to matter. When my grandfather went foraging for medicinal plants for the injured people, I saw him come alive to all the life around him. I had never seen him like that. I realized there is a way of being alive that we have lost by becoming civilized. I published my first paper in my final year—a very technical one on extensions of Kohnian semiotic theory—but the basic ideas, they all come from that trip.
What I am trying to do now—immersing myself in this alien environment—is because of those long-ago forest treks with my grandfather. Whenever I used to ask him how he knew something about the forest, he would say that he just paid attention. At first I used to get irritated. Now I understand better what he meant.
