In the 1970s, many of Delhi’s photo studios offered hand-painted backdrops: Castle, fort, forest and the Himalayas, the mountains picked out in dazzling Rin-white tints against a glaring, blue sky. But even in its clichés and exaggerations, there was something about the Himalayan backdrop that hinted at the grandeur and magnificence of the real thing.
One night in Yumesamdong in Sikkim, I looked out the window, muzzy from a long day’s travel, and the range that I hadn’t really registered before except as a backdrop took on a startling, unforgettable presence.
The Himalayas draw forth awe, a reverence at this ancient beauty, and if you’re wise, respect, mingled with some dread at being this close to the old bones of the earth. Plains people and river people should envy mountaineers and pahadis, at least a little.
Two recently published books, one an anthology of writings on the Himalayas and one on the secret life of trees, take readers on quite a journey. Wonder is the initial, often primal, reaction to learning about the natural world, but there is a world of discovery and complexity beyond amazement.
In 2014, mainstream newspapers began to carry reports of papers on inter-plant communication through mycorrhizal networks, calling this the “internet of fungus”. It seemed that trees “talked” to each other, exchanging information through complex underground root networks. And one of the best guides to trees is a forester from the Eifel mountains in Germany.
“I knew about as much about the hidden life of trees as a butcher knows about the emotional life of animals,” Peter Wohlleben writes in the introduction to The Hidden Life of Trees (Penguin Random House). It was only when he began walking through the forests with visitors that he started to pay attention to the trees. It changed the way he managed forests: “When you know that trees experience pain and have memories and that tree parents live together with their children, then you can no longer just chop them down and disrupt their lives with large machines.”
His findings are backed by science, even when he writes of the dangers of loneliness for trees or that humans misunderstand trees because “they are so incredibly slow… their childhood and youth last ten times as long as ours”.
Urban trees have trouble thriving because the mycorrhizal fungi that help collect water and food is present in low numbers, the air off asphalt and concrete is dry and full of exhaust fumes, and other stresses, including isolation, mean that they die prematurely. A healthy forest, by contrast, is an unthreatened one, and Mr Wohlleben suggests that we intuitively feel the difference when we are around trees that are well-nourished, in social contact with others of its species, neither choked nor isolated.
When Mr Wohlleben writes that thick silver-gray beeches remind him of a herd of elephants – “they, too, look after their own, and they help their sick and weak back up onto their feet” – I know that I will see the trees outside differently the next time I go for a walk.
There is a way of understanding nature – trees, mountains, animal life – where you remain open to wonder, but avoid sentimentality, or the tendency to elevate the human perspective. We are not the most important, certainly not the most alluring, perhaps not even the most articulate of species, though we do presently have the monopoly on writing books about the natural world. These two books, The Hidden Life of Trees and Himalaya, do an excellent job of keeping a wider perspective in mind.
Himalaya: Adventures, Meditation, Life (Speaking Tiger), an anthology edited by Ruskin Bond and Namita Gokhale, stirred a different kind of longing. The poet Ko Yun wrote: “One thing alone is beautiful: setting off./ The world’s too vast/ to live in a single place,/ or three or four.”
Himalaya makes you feel like that. The 44 contributors include familiar names – Heinrich Harrer, George Mallory, Peter Matthiessen, Bill Aitken – and some unusual essays, from Jemima Diki-Sherpa’s Three Springs to Pundit Nain Singh’s account of surveying the route from Nepal to Lhasa. The anthology is divided into three sections, Adventures, Meditations and Life.
Mr Bond sets out the kind of writing that the editors didn’t want in the anthology: Accounts by travellers, climbers and pilgrims that “tell us little or nothing about the people who eke out a living on hostile mountain slopes”.
Gradually, from expedition accounts to the poet Arundhathi Subramaniam’s meditation on discomfort, epiphanies and Mount Kailash, from reminiscences of pahadi life with an emphasis on women’s experiences to Aleister Crowley’s assured, slightly tricksy, account of a Kanchenjunga attempt gone wrong, a portrait of the mountains takes shape. Himalaya doesn’t deny the perils of mountain life, including wrenching accounts of recent disasters.
Andrew Harvey writes that there is ugliness in Leh, too, open lavatories, mangy flea-ridden dogs, signs of poverty, which must be set down alongside the “moon-washed poplars and willows”, “the Milky Way lustrous in this high mountain air, each cluster of stars, each swirling nebula, precise and dazzling…”
Both should be recorded; both are equally true. Perhaps it’s because he knows both the beauty and the reality of this life, Mr Bond’s words carry greater weight: “I could not rid them from my system. It was always the same with mountains. Once you have lived with them for any length of time, you belong to them. There is no escape.”
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