Romila Gogoi’s Field Diary

“The winds assail the palash. A handful of leaves - shaped like a Sambar deer’s ear- their delicate petioles straining, desperately hold on to her. Bhura would say that on foggy February mornings when her leaves are dry and crinkled, from his window, the palash looks like a herd of airborne deer coveting his rice crop. This August morning, from the undead half of Bhura’s home, the grand old palash looks exhausted, not ethereal. Her gnarled branches reach out to a sky so brown I feel she may start to sprout roots in place of leaves, upending this pretense of heaven and hell once and for all.  What sort of heaven produces a wind this monstrous anyways? As if to issue a remonstration, the wind howls and arrives by me through the collapsed roof. I curl my toes and grip the dirt, trying to hold on to the last vestiges of Bhura’s home. A tendril of air burrows between my toes prying out the earth from between and under my feet reminding me of the steadfast diligence with which our world was being consumed. 

The winds come for all those spared by the floods. Then, for those like me and the palash who will not be bent or swept away, purgatory unleashes the rhinos. The palash wears her scars all around the base of her trunk, where the rhinos have stripped her bark away. I wear mine on the side of my stomach where 100 stitches circumscribe the story of the night a rhino and I sparred in my millet field. Yesterday evening at the tea-stall I heard a rumor that the Park was secretly releasing its prized one-horned rhinoceros at the edge of Palashpari. The Park people would rather see them destroy our fields than risk them dying within the park.  Rumor has it that the rhinos come installed with cameras and they spy on us for the Park people.  Then again, in Palashpari a rumor rides on every grain of dust in the air. Last week it was whispers of the PRC being censured by the Southern Alliance for seeding rainclouds in Tawang. The month before it was the rumored sighting of Bhura in a Tezpur construction camp. For those of us who linger on in Palashpari, certainty is an albatross we chose not to wear around our necks. So we let the rumors swirl and fill the gnawing corners of our stomachs and hearts….

 Ravik Gogoi, Aug 14th 2073

”

Once in an archaeolinguistics immersive, I learned that history has a penchant for preserving the prosaic. A Cuneiform tablet where a man complains about the poor-quality copper rings he was sold, or a Babylonian recipe for a pigeon stew seem to endure the vagaries of time with the same vitality as the great pyramids of Giza. If fate decrees, some fragment of my workaday life may survive for millennia and one day become a window to understand my world. Wouldn’t that be nice! I have been thinking about this a lot lately after Ma gifted me the one surviving snippet from their grandfather’s journal. 

It’s been so strange reading Ravik koka’s words while camping out in the Jungalbahari bio-zone and learning of my deeper connections to this place. Not to mention how odd it is that for all these years Ma neglected to mention to me that we are from Palashpari. Considering that I have been conducting experiments in the Kazi swamps for the last three years, I would imagine that it’s more than a trivial detail that my field sites are located on my ancestral lands! Also, the irony that I am endeavoring to save the very beasts that took generous bites off my ancestor’s life - literally and figuratively! I am sure Lima will find all this to be very fantabulous. 

I was so eager to piece together Ravik koka’s life story that a few days ago I signed up to memorize the archives for the area that is now known as Jungalbahaari. Not much survived the great floods of 2074, and the neural uplink of the available content took just a few seconds. I was grateful to have even this data to fill in the great gaps in my ancestor’s life story! The following day setting the archive on auto-retrieve I set out to collect some data for the helminth lab. As I cruised over the Brahmaputra arterial channel the archive link came alive and I began to remember.

“A long time ago, at this point, the river used to be almost 10 kms wide. Fed by a glacial lake in eastern PRC, it would flood every summer in the process creating rich habitats for tigers, rhinos, elephants and floricans; species found in no other country. When the eastern PRC government (now the Trans-Himalayan government) began their weather modification operations in response to the droughts on the Tibetan plateau, the Brahmaputra floods began to worsen. There were 18 catastrophic floods between 2052 and 2075. These floods compounded the devastation wrought by the failing southwest monsoon winds. The great flood of Palashpari in 2074 and the iconic image of a family being swept away on the back of a rhino captured the imagination of the world. The family of Ravik Gogoi and the rhino survived and were rescued out of the water in Tezpur.”

Destiny’s sleights of hand! 

The channel I cruised over doesn’t flood, it’s not meant to. The moisture matrix controls where the water goes, periodically inundating the Kazi swamps, irrigating the aquaponic fields and supplying freshwater to settlements within the neighboring biozones. The journey over the Brahmaputra channel was pleasant. I have always enjoyed that stretch and the opportunity to watch Gangetic dolphins emerge for air from the river’s murky depths. Along the way I took a quick detour to look for hornbills in the northeastern forest corridor. A ruby-cheeked sunbird tried to keep pace with my scooter, perhaps scouting for an opportunity to feed on the magenta flowers painted on my helmet.  Overhead, a hoolock gibbon crossed the narrow corridor, his long, elegant arms swinging from one overhanging branch to the next. On either side of the corridor a dark and dense forest extended out to the horizon. As I cruised along waiting to hear the familiar sounds of a hornbill’s feathers lashing the air, in the distance along the causeway I saw something resplendent - a palash tree in bloom.  The sight of its flaming red flowers ignited a memory.

“The flame of the forest or the palash tree (Butea monsoperma) is a deciduous tree found commonly in the dry forests of the Indian subcontinent. The tree is best known for its flaming red flowers that are produced in the spring season. The bark of the tree is well known for its anti-parasitic properties.  In the second half of the 21st century the trees were in decline in the northeastern part of the subcontinent due to intense recurring droughts. Following Ravik Gogoi and the other petitioners’ historic testimony at the international justice court of Accra in 2082, the “Rights to Rain” treaty was established. Weather modification, particularly cloud-seeding came to be viewed as an assault on a basic human right. While the collapse of the AMOC ensured that the southwest monsoon winds never quite returned to their normal state, eastern monsoon winds, now freed from the cloud seeding efforts of several eastern nations, became the dominant harbinger of rain in drought-stricken areas such as Palashpaari. But too much had been lost for too long, vital connections had been broken and the dry forests of the northeast never quite made a comeback. A flickering flame had finally died.”

I landed my scooter right at the base of the gnarly palash tree. After searching briefly along its very base, I found the information panel. A quick retinal scan revealed the measurements recorded on the panel.

…

Seed production: Imminent

Mycorrhizal activity: Vigorous

Moisture level: Set to dry deciduous

Flowering month: July

…

All around me dried crinkled palash leaves rustled in the warm breeze. As I looked up through the branches towards the sky, the tree looked aflame. A sunbird dove into a flaming inflorescence and emerged with a dusting of pollen. It was a perfect little moment, suffused with a sort of splendor whose description defied my limited vocabulary. I wondered what Ravik koka may have had to say about a day that felt so aglow with possibilities. It was in that moment that I found the missing piece of a research puzzle I was trying to put together. Perhaps it arrived on a beam of sunshine filtering through the palash’s branches, or maybe it rode on a speck of stardust dislodged off a shooting star somewhere in the blue yonder – there was no way to know. 

All I was certain of was that I had to get to the Kazi swamps. I jumped on my scooter and made a beeline for the rhino habitat. At the Kazi field station, as I did a quick scan of the tree inventory, my suspicion was confirmed. The chronic parasitic infestations in the Kazi rhino population and the debarked palash tree from Ravik koka’s journal entry; after years in limbo, I had arrived at a hypothesis! Perhaps noticing my delight, a rhino approached and stared blankly at me from some distance and a memory revealed itself.

“The greater one-horned rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis) is the last surviving rhino species in Asia. The species has a single horn which was once coveted for traditional medicines. Their population experienced a sharp decline in the 20th century due to rampant poaching. Towards the end of the 21st century only scattered populations could be found within swampy grasslands and savanna habitats along the Brahmaputra River, with the most significant population occurring within habitats near Palashpari. The species is herbivorous and feeds on grasses, herbs, bark, and twigs. Very few individuals survived the great flood of 2074. The most famous survivor was the one the Gogoi family used as a raft to survive the flood. The individual later named Hemrani became the founding female in a rhinoceros captive breeding program. It is believed that all individuals that were born at the captive facility inherited her gentle nature.”

The rhino languidly tugged at a tuft of grass, ignorant of the details of her species’ colossal tryst with near-extinction and unimpressed by my new hypothesis about her current troubles. The AI Janzen algorithm planned the forests of the bio-zones. To me it seemed like the algorithm had never been trained to include palash trees in the swampy savanna habitats. I made a note to discuss this with my advisor and hopped on my scooter to head back to basecamp. 

As I cruised, all around me the swamps steamed and thrummed with the sounds of life finding ever newer ways to carry on. I was intermittently scanning the swamps for signs of other wildlife when I saw something that nearly made me fall off my seat. Behind a dense tussock of grass, I noticed what looked like a very short statured palash tree with drying brown leaves. Was I wrong?  Was the inventory wrong?  I decided to take a closer look just to allay my worst fears. As I approached the patch on my scooter, an alarm call rippled through the air and what I thought were palash leaves scattered in a frenzy of hooves and antlers into the Kazi miasma. The animals disappeared without a trace, but from somewhere in the ether, a voice…

“See.. see.. didn’t I tell you, the palash, it looks just like a herd of sambar deer”

Romila Gogi, Journal log: March 22, 2153