On his first visit to such a large congregation of trees, my three-and-a-half-year-old nephew asked about the name of the place we were in. This is how the conversation went:

“What is the name of this place?”

“It’s called a forest.”

“That means we can rest here.”

It takes a child to prise open obvious etymologies of words and expose us to the sharp edges of our chairs. I had never thought of a forest as ‘for rest’.

Inside every forest is a little boy lost. We had come to find our little boys.

“In the middle of the forest there’s an unexpected clearing that can only be found by those who have gotten lost.” That line is by Tomas Tranströmer. Truth be told, we had come to the forest to get lost. ‘Lost’ has two different meanings: one in the forest, and another in civilisation. The forest seems to inevitably exist as one half of a binary. On the other side is a library or museum, a university or gymnasium — trees versus books as educators. Why have hermits and thinkers gone to the forest to surrender to its stillness?

“The forests await the little boy who will become the artist,” writes Bibhutibhushan in Smritir Lekha , his diary notes from Bhagalpur, in August 1925. What is it about the forest air that no artist has bothered to investigate and no entrepreneur bothered to bottle and sell?

The forest as a “state of mind” is perhaps the religion of every dendrophile, a cult of people who feel changed and converted by spending time in a forest. There is a lovely word for it in Japanese: “shinrin-yoku”, forest bathing, or being bathed by a forest; its meaning is so terribly poetic that even mentioning the word seems like a moment changing experience. Is Krishna’s romantic playfulness, his wisdom, his extraordinary powers of empathy, his sense of comradeship, and even his insightful statecraft a product of the forest? We are, in spite of our lack of education about the anthropological origins of various institutionalised religions, intuitively aware of the difference in the temperament and teachings of forest religions versus, say, desert religions. The little boy being nurtured by the forest is a tale with many versions — sometimes that boy is Tarzan, sometimes Mowgli, at other times Krishna. I cannot help noticing that all of these are boys growing up without their biological parents. The forest as parent in one’s childhood turns to the teacher and later, with the accumulation of dead skin on soles of feet, an unlikely dependent. The forest needs me as much as I need the forest. The symbiotic nature of this need took me years to comprehend. In the Sukna forest at the foothills of the eastern Himalayas, for instance, I felt wondrously happy and calmed but also guilty, this for years, for I felt like an interloper who was disturbing the forest during its sleeping hours. That is the sense I always had as a child — when asked to imagine Kumbhakarna, Ravana’s brother from the epics who slept for half the year and ate gluttonously during the other half, I inevitably ended up imagining the demon — a man — as a sleepy forest. A waking forest would be a calamity, I was certain, from my diet of Bangla fiction that usually came to me in my father’s baritone, so sombre and throaty that it continues to be the voice of the forest for me.

Moving in the forest was like playing with a parent’s body as he or she slept — I moved around secretively, hoping not to be caught in the middle of some mischief. Waking would lead to the end of the game and also possible punishment. Buddhadeva Guha had made a career out of his passion for forest living – in the Riju- da series of stories and novellas. They were thrillers that derived their energy not so much from the anticipation of the climax of revelation at the end as from the hidden secrets of the forest coming in instalments. Behind every tree was a shadow that could be anything, or even nothing. Every sound was a call to alert, every step a trap. These two lives — faces, personalities — of the forest seemed so contradictory to me that I did not know what to make of them. There were the forests of these adventure stories that made nerves so taut that had someone pricked them, a fountain of nervous energy might have erupted out of it fiercely and immediately. Those forests of literature and films almost never interested me — there was too much busyness in the world outside in any case. The other was the calm, ‘for rest’ forest, where my mind felt relaxed in its nudity. I wondered why there were no stories of little girls getting lost in forests — perhaps this was how the gendered nature of reading first became conscious to me.

Satya, the protagonist of Aranyak , notices women moving through the forest but doesn’t know what to make of them – “Now, I suddenly remembered the old woman – she was a symbol of the civilisation of the forest: for generations, her ancestors have been living in the forest ... I was ready to sacrifice up to a year of my salary to find out what the old woman might have been thinking of.” I’ve since wondered whether the tale of the girl in the forest might have brought its reposefulness as a character in them just as suspense had trodden along with a young boy’s seeking of mischief. The woman in the forest is quite easily turned into the woman of the forest, and as hunters tame the forest’s wildness by maiming and killing its animals, so must men domesticate the forest woman with their irrational desire. The woman of the forest is a figure so enchanting and so imbued with mystery and eroticism that when it invades the urban imagination, it becomes the equivalent of a tiger to the hunter’s imagination — the woman must be tamed.

Sumana Roy is an author based in Siliguri

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