This captivating black-and-white book of 33 pages is partly sketched and partly handwritten in stylish calligraphy by the late, world-renowned artist and writer Paritosh Sen. It has been typeset for clarity and serves as an intensely personal reflection of his childhood memories in a neighbourhood in Dhaka, Bangladesh, rich in details about its biosphere. This work encapsulates Sen’s early and later reminiscences, skilfully interweaving a child’s sense of wonder with a more pragmatic adult perspective, both of which are equally fetching.
The book’s backstory is this. It is a condensed English rendition of Sen’s Jindabahar, published in Bengali in 1959, used as a learning portfolio at the National School of Design, Ahmedabad. Acclaimed poet Kiriti Sengupta, who editorially spearheads Hawakal publications and is Sen’s great-nephew, gives a compelling overview of the volume and categorizes it as an eco-literature and nature-studies book, over and above its literary and visual merits.
At the heart of the book is a hundred-foot-tall Arjuna tree (Terminalia Arjuna) that dominated the author’s childhood neighbourhood. This tree is a sheltering macrocosm that could pass for a forest, and it hosts a teeming microcosm of flora, fauna, avian, insect and reptilian life, as well as otherworldly beings, with a firmly established hierarchy of inhabitants.
To his eyes as a child the tree appeared mesmerizing, with its sprawling branches, lush leaves, and enchanting fragrance. It stood tall and steady, like a stalwart guardian, sparking various adventures and magical experiences. Even as an adult, with a blend of tenderness and fascination, Sen continues to marvel at the tree, appreciating the journey of exploration and surprise it has provided—an experience that lingers like sunshine long after it’s gone.
Sen vividly describes the intense territoriality of the tree’s inhabitants, leading to fierce, bloody battles in which fatally injured mynahs and bulbuls fall from the trees. At the same time, various birds clash with marauding langurs. He uses the language of visual art to highlight the qualities that make these skirmishes and adversaries noteworthy. The sounds of their frenzied calls—the ‘chiri-chr-t-r-rh’, ‘mir-r-r-r-rah’, and ‘biter-bit-bit-bir-r-r-zr’ chirruping—add to the auditory experience.
The lives of snakes, earthworms, caterpillars, grasshoppers, butterflies, centipedes and fish are equally important to him; small, invisible and sometimes repellent they may be to others, but not to him. His keen eye for the minutiae, his inordinate talent for seeing and understanding the small, often overlooked yet significant details of a living being, or a situation, is evident in his detailed narrative of a tug-of-war between red and black ants over a dead beetle.
Sen’s raison d’être is simple. He says, ‘It was under the Arjuna tree I first became aware of the mysteries and wonders of creation. It was there also that I learnt another fundamental truth—the inalienable right of all life to co-exist.’ This philosophy is central to the book and fundamental to Sen’s worldview. He believes there exists a deep-rooted, vital, and symbiotic connection between humans and their environment. If humankind ignores this principle, it will lead to peril, resulting in both ecological and moral destruction. There is hope for humanity if we truly align with the living beings around us.
Sen does not shy away from describing encounters with otherworldly beings inhabiting the Arjuna tree ecosystem, viewing them as integral to our universe. He seamlessly weaves these narratives into his main story. One such encounter involves his cousin Tapan, who meets a woman from another dimension at night. She has long hair and wears a white sari while fishing. The tale of what she does with the fish, and how she does it, is chilling in its gruesomeness. However, Sen narrates it in the same tone as he uses for other stories, treating it neither as implausible nor foolish.
Sen’s inimitable writing is bound to spur readers of all ages to vault over worn-out assumptions and stasis to clear thinking, and it will prod them in equal measure to visualize concepts along the lines of the writer. All this, with the same fluidity he possesses, with his ability to accommodate new, unlikely and even conflicting patterns and parallels, with his agility to peel away coatings to get to the core of the matter, and with his skill to adapt flexibly to new situations, and even to delve into abstract reasoning for he takes the reader with him at every step, with him through every page.
Sen’s visuals are detailed and imaginative, with the stamp of his distinctive signature style (clear evidence of his drawing and design skills, given that he established the Calcutta Group and drew influence from French painters). Visuals of ruffled, agitated birds, chittering squirrels, and snakes slithering through the book’s text accompany his anecdotes, memories, facts, oddities, scientific observations, and historical, cultural, and mythical notes, and freewheel from one page to the next with elan and flair. The effect is spectacular: they create a seamless flow of understanding that deepens our engagement with the text. And they display the same ceaseless curiosity of his words, turning into a memorable guide to visual awareness in the finest sense of the word.
The play of colour, shapes, forms, and contrasts of light and dark is Sen’s métier, making cognition of the precepts in this volume predominantly visual. Even though this volume is black-and-white, he captures the Arjuna tree’s transformation across the day in captivating prose. When it catches the first rays of the sun, it looks like Gautama Buddha in deep meditation. At high noon, in the harsh mercury-white light and lamp-black shadows, it looks fierce, like the demons Sumbha and Nisumbha who rocked the heavens. And at dusk, it turns steel-blue, and its quivering reflection in the nearby water body resembles the delicate brushstroke of a Japanese calligrapher.
This book is a treasure for those who enjoy the interplay of word and image, a format intrinsic to journalling, an increasingly lost art, and for those who relish the quirks of the unexpected and dips into the unknown. And it is meant particularly for those who like spaces, a little left unsaid, between sentences and in endings, and delight in open-ended cerebral wanderings, where the mind revels in many possible meanings and ends.
Chitra Gopalakrishnan, a writer based in New Delhi, uses her writing to break firewalls between nonfiction and fiction, narratology and psychoanalysis, marginalia and manuscript, and tree-ism and capitalism.