Shahnaz Habib
“You have to be very lucky to see a snake,” Sam said to me. “They are shy.” I was pulling on long gum boots to wear for a hike in the forest. Sam is the resident guide at a small guesthouse, set deep inside a forest in Wayanad, in the northern hills of Kerala. I had told Sam that I was afraid of snakes, and he was reassuring me that I probably wouldn’t see one. He should have stopped there, but he didn’t.
“Funny incident a few years ago. Two men were riding a motorbike down the mountain when they saw an eagle flying off with a cobra. But the snake was struggling so much the eagle dropped it, right on top of the passenger on the motorbike. Crazy, alle? The snake was so confused, of course, it bit the man. In the neck. He died. Poor man.”
In the Indian epics, the forest is where princes are unfairly exiled, usually for twelve years. Determined to make amends for my nature deficit, I was exiling myself to a forest, for a mere twelve days. Wayanad, with its fierce mountains and silent forests, had sounded like a perfect destination to immerse in nature. The guesthouse we were in, sitting two thousand meters above sea level, used to be the home of a British settler who cultivated spices on about five hundred acres. Now it bears little resemblance to a plantation; the new owners have allowed nature to take its course, and the forest has reclaimed the neat slopes where cardamom plants and pepper vines once grew. Dense clusters of ferns flourished in the shade of towering trees.
The guesthouse has a minimal footprint; it is staffed by preservationists and local Indigenous people, and all the profits go into taking care of the forest. There was only one road up the mountain, and we had been driven up in a semi-open Jeep while pouring rain soaked us and made the rocky road even more perilous. Now we were deep inside the forest, in an old house built on a clearing perched on top of the mountain. Clouds floated past the veranda, and trees covered every inch of the surrounding mountains like moss on rocks.
And here, dear reader, we have reached the limits of my ability to describe nature. Having skimmed all those nature descriptions in books means that nature will always be an impressionist painting for me. There are writers who can tell you about different leaf shapes and name the many trees that dotted these mountains. Unfortunately I will not be able to do that. Incoherence bubbles up inside me, choking me off. All I can tell you is that I was surrounded by mesmerizing shades of blue and green.
But the air. Let me try to tell you about the air. Air as cold and sweet as ice cream. Air so rich my poor, sad lungs, fed on smoke and exhaust and mold, felt like thieves to be breathing it so freely. Air so delicious that I finally understood why breathing, just breathing, could be a joy. Air that went hand in hand with the rich, deep silence of the mountain. I cannot believe that there was a time when all air was like this.
Of course, it is a dangerous fantasy to think that we can return to some former glorious past. It is especially dangerous in the context of postcolonial thought, because it is all too easy to romanticize a precolonial Edenic version, as if all evil, from racism to environmental degradation, were introduced by the colonizers. Kerala had been doing a terrific job at propagating caste and class inequities before the colonizers arrived, one after the other. But until British colonial rulers systematically razed forests to plant tea, teak, coffee, and spices, Kerala, like the rest of India, was mostly wilderness. The environmental activist Madhav Gadgil writes of how early British travelers described India as an ocean of trees. The colonial state appropriated virtually all forests, supposedly to manage them in an enlightened and scientific fashion. Taking forests away from the many communities that lived in them and near them and took care of them, they razed entire forests to the ground to facilitate the harvesting of timber and to facilitate plantation agriculture, substantially depleting forest cover by 1860. Postindependence India has largely continued this tradition, including the encroachment of tribal lands.
It would never have occurred to my parents to take us to a wilderness destination on a holiday. The few times we went on holiday, we took those long train rides to the big cities that enamored us. Monuments, shopping, eating out: this was our idea of a vacation worth spending money on. Besides, we had our native places: the villages my parents grew up in, still thrillingly (for children) and exasperatingly (for parents) remote and tree-covered in the 1990s. When we visited my grandmother’s village in those days, we had to take a train to the nearest town, catch a bus from there, then wait for an uncle or cousin to pick us up in a bone-rattling Jeep. I dreaded that final ride because the twisted mountain roads would make me throw up. Still, the first sight of the river, which I thought of as my grandmother’s river, would bring relief and comfort and the promise of jackfruit chips. Those villages had rapidly turned into small towns, and now my grandmother’s house on the river was next to a bridge that brought buses and trucks to her doorstep. My grandmother herself was no more, and the house was slowly crumbling.
My grandmother would have loved that bridge. Having spent a lifetime enduring weeklong power outages and racing against the local fox to scoop up chicken eggs, she would have welcomed all that it made possible—groceries trucked in, plumbers and electricians who could bike across from town, not being cut off when the river was flooded. The bridge was universally considered a blessing: even as it was being built, on my extended-family WhatsApp group, we watched it grow as if it were a fetus. Now that it straddles the river, we keep tabs on it from around the world, especially during the monsoons when the waters rise. The older generations in that WhatsApp group boast about having had to swim across the river to go to school. Now the bridge has opened up an array of schools and colleges as options for the young people of the village. It has spurred the local economy and made village life much more spontaneous. Yet something was lost too. And now all over India, parents like me are seeking out wilderness destinations for our children and ourselves. Every big city in India is now surrounded by a belt of getaways as more and more urban dwellers, exhausted by the daily grind that makes our lives convenient and comfortable, seek refuge in nature.
There are parallels here to the way the Industrial Revolution in England made tourism necessary and possible. But did that generation of tourists live with a quietly ticking clock counting the days down to the final glacier? The way we seek out nature now is tinged with mourning and alarm, and every time I looked out at the thick forests that covered the mountains in Wayanad, I felt the sad dilemma of being human in the twenty-first century. Reviewing Barry Lopez’s Horizon, Rachel Riederer wrote about how for a previous generation of travelers, traveling into nature was an absolute good, “undertaken without this modern anxiety.” From our perspective as inheritors and co-creators of a fully formed climate crisis, Lopez’s lifetime of wandering is a chronicle of ultimate luxury, she concludes. There’s also a genre of nature travel that is “last-chance tourism”—visiting places that will never be the same again or are about to disappear forever. But isn’t that basically every place on earth, sooner or later? Someday, I knew, Kerala would disappear. Sandwiched between the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghats, with low-lying backwaters already prone to floods, what chance did it have against rising sea levels?
An extract from Airplane Mode – Travel in the ruins of climate change.
Shahnaz Habib is a writer and translator based in Brooklyn. She translates from her mother tongue, the south Indian language of Malayalam, and has translated two novels, Jasmine Days, winner of the 2018 JCB Prize, and Al Arabian Novel Factory. Airplane Mode, her first book, was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Nonfiction.