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A slice of wilderness

Photo: K. Jeevan Chinnappa

In the lap of nature Snapping ties from outside world and connecting to the nature is a divine experience

Tulips grow their petals, creepers muscle up the plants and walls, orchids kick higher, cactus kink wider, wild shrubs thicket and roses open up. Hari Narayan bubbles with joy.

“Well, there is hope,” says the wilderness lover. “Good god, the summer had ended with hopes of bountiful monsoon. But it tanked, except for occasional showers.”

But then nature doesn’t follow the pre-set conditions, much as plants in his patch of wilderness. The plants are free to grow as they like---that is, with reckless abandon.

Back in 1950 when he had an insight as a child of eleven, that there is a deep connection with the earth, water, sky and fire, he vowed to grow or let grow a wild patch in his home wherever that was in his long career as a railway employee. When he got his salary, he spent that, most of it anyway, on ‘plants and their comfort’. “Growth of a sprout, a flower in bloom, a creeper crawling up gives me ultimate joy.”

And when, approaching his 60 years, he began noticing the maddening concrete blocks that stuck out like hell’s fingers, multi-storied apartments that jutted out like jagged edges of a craggy boulder without any connection with the landscape --- conditions that make even the most daring wilderness lover wring his hands and beat his breasts. He wanted to have ‘a slice of wilderness’ in the midst of urban sprawl. He set about acquiring a piece of land (220 yards, “because I couldn’t afford more”). He constructed his house for a bare existence, “which my wife fully supported,” and went about living with the insight he had had as child. “There is a deep affective tranquillity to participate in the age-old rhythms of planting, harvesting, and finally dying, to be reborn -- The amazing self-renewal process.

His heart beats to the rhythms of the earth. His hands work the earth, scoop the mud and seed the ground. Since his childhood, he has been at it, planting or saving plants just ‘for love.’

In a way, “I wanted wilderness even to keep me rooted to the earth, to even keep my sanity.” The land gave birth to living, breathing plants. Beyond and up above the tangle of jasmine vines, spines, shrubs, a neem tree plays in the wind--- a flourish of eye-soothing, heart-warming green.

His little patch of wilderness helped him cope with a tragic incident. His son, a promising young man, met with an accident and lost his lower limbs. “To see him like that was unbearable,” he says, reflecting: “But the growth of the plants in spite of so many obstacles, taking from life and giving back to it helped me reconcile to the fact.” But for the age-old, ever-fresh miracle of plants, trees, creepers, vines, blooms, blossoms, “I couldn’t live”.

Hari Narayan goes into a wilderness nirvana; he goes there with a hoe, a spade, and a rake. He works the earth, scoops the mud, seeds the ground, lays sod, and tamps the fluff. Then he steps back and waits for the miracle unfolding over a period of time. “I don’t impose order, cutting and spurning,” he says, with love that is elemental. “I like it wild. Let nature have its way.”

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