In February of 2024, we released our fifth Open Call: Using art, letters, stories, and poetry, tell us: how might we create healthy spaces and places for all? The following is a story submission we received from this open call.
“My story Bugs explores a character’s unwavering belief towards enriching the environment. Her actions emerge from a place of innocence and unblemished inspiration, while her persona is human, childlike and full of emotion. The idea of the story is to illustrate a quiet movement towards change, propelled from within one’s soul, regardless of the world’s descent into chaos. It portrays a human being’s relationship with nature using several dimensions of perception and description.”
Abhishek Udaykumar
“Bugs”
Litha cried when the gardener trimmed the mango tree. She sat in the kitchen with her ginger drink and wiped the dishes to distract herself, staring vacantly through the back window. It had been a month since the bushfire and the shrubs had begun to sprout, growing urgently in the fragmented manner that life had assumed since the start of summer. She thought about her secluded world beneath her mango tree where she had spent her mornings trying to read, waiting for the water to come so she could bathe. The tree had stopped fruiting, sucked the nutrition out of the soil, and needed more water than she had for herself. She would step out once the gardener had left and look at it from a distance.
The evening waned into a waxy candle. The house sat on the outskirts of the town—a dry, eggy cottage in the middle of a scrubland. She used to work as a nurse in the local hospital; after years of study, her first job brought her closer to the people in ways that she couldn’t have imagined. She no longer remembered if the choice had always been her dream, or if her circumstances had morphed her desire till it was all she had known. Eventually, it wore her out—she wanted to read and write again. She finished her drink and rocked herself in the living room, glaring into space till her presence horrified her. She changed out of her skirt and shirt and wore an old onesie and a high pony. The gardener was separating the branches from the leaves. He would carry them home and use them in ways that she did not know. The idea of arranging a butchered tree into neat piles aroused a strange sensation within her and she paced about the house despite the heat and dwindling daylight.
She locked up and left the house through the backyard. The back gate opened out to a slope of thorny bushes that surrounded a sandy ravine. A path running along the slope led further away from the outskirts to an endless patchwork of fields. The world around her was brown, and a sheet of purply, cottony sky stretched beyond the thistles and forest of branches. Puddles of water hugging the foot of the ravine broke into brief streams and ended before they could become a river. She smiled at the triangles of birds flying back home, gripping a bucket and a large mug fashioned out of a plastic can. The highway would appear at the mouth of the ravine, where an old dam held the water on the other side when the rains finally came. But she wouldn’t go that far. There was a clearing where the ravine caved into a shallow sandbank, letting her slide along its gentle slope, until she found herself beside a pond and an archipelago of puddles.
The silence made her feel like the only human on earth. Its apparent ubiquity enlivened her presence, like a rare wildcat enamoured by its own mystique. She felt her skin, her muscles, her nails and her wispy hair pulsing in the sultry earthen heat of the mudbank. It awakened her senses and urged her body into action; she felt like she was watching herself, enchanted by her movement and gaze. She slipped her feet beneath the frilly water, and it consumed her with eager indifference. As though she was but a stone, a twig or a seed. She skirted along its shallow edges, making ribs in the sand with her bare toes. Then she looked up at the sky again, smiling and turning back to the pond. She picked up her pail and ran it across the water, stretching into the deeper regions to avoid the fish and tadpoles that tickled her feet. When she had filled three-quarters of the bucket, she hurried up the slope and began to pour it along a stretch of saplings. She had planted them after the bushfires and she hoped to turn them into trees with the water that she had found in the ravine.
There were forty saplings in all. She had bought them at a horticulture sale in the bazaar and had hired a pickup truck to deliver them home. It had taken her two weeks to plant the saplings. They seemed to have taken kindly to the soil, except a few that had wilted partially. She had dug a well around each sapling to ensure that the water didn’t wander back to the pond. When she was done inspecting them, she returned to the pond, filled her bucket and hurried back up the slope.
She thought about her routine over those two weeks—she would go to the pond with her spade after breakfast and water the soil for a few hours, loosening it till she could dig a row of pits. She would then bring the saplings three at a time on her wheelbarrow, before breaking for lunch beneath a clump of acacia – the only trees that offered any shade in the scrubland. It had felt long enough to be a summer holiday; she had grown fond of it and begun to believe that it wouldn’t end. By night, she would be too tired to cook, and she would eat a basket of fruit and drink a tall glass of cold milk before falling asleep on the sofa. She would sleep a dreamless sleep and wake up feeling a pleasant ache in her muscles, the joy of making something grow pulsing inside her chest. She would eat as abundantly as she could and scurry across the ravine to her plants. A bottle of water and a lunchbox in her bag.
She sat beside a tamarind sapling and inspected its leaves. The plant had begun to seek its independence from her and she started to sing A Whole New World as she patted the mud. The evening rotted like a wounded peach, but Litha was brimming with life. She did a little dance and returned to the pond to tell her stories to the fish and the frogs that missed her laughter in the frightful night.
On the way back, she found a cluster of ladybugs making their way up the trunk of an old, barren tree. She stood there with her hands on her back, watching them flutter with purpose as they ascended the woody veins. Their red bodies seemed out of place in the featureless land, and the little black spots on their backs were comical as though they belonged to a silly board game. She used to collect them when she was a child and put them into jars with holes punched into their lids. She would place a large twig, a few leaves, and a little grass inside for the beetles to climb; but despite reading about them for hours in encyclopedias, she didn’t know where to find the right food. She would eventually let them out where she had found them and spend the evenings following them, imagining her garden to be a planet of its own and the beetles its inhabitants.
The light had withdrawn from the world, turning her into an apparition smudged against a charcoal landscape. She was helpless against the tide of time and insignificant amongst nature’s many creatures. A wave of sadness shrouded her as she made her way back home, sticky and lost in her lonesome world. The water that had once filled the ravine and gurgled through her dreams had turned into a mere secretion of the earth. Another arid month and the soil would begin to crack, chasing the farmers and their cattle up the hills to seek the cool promise of clouds. The fields would roll into themselves like ragged cloth and reveal the parched skeleton of land beneath. Summer had just begun and her trips to the pond were becoming arduous with each day.
She drifted past the back gate and washed herself with the bucket she had filled that morning; the water level had dropped, and the surroundings showed signs of four-legged visitors in her absence. She slumped against the backdoor, drawing her legs along the warm concrete steps and stone ground. She undid her hair and tied her ponytail as high as she could, turning to the bats and cranes that ruled the sky as night lounged behind the whale skin sky. She was camouflaged in the musky evening and stared hard at the objects around her house, trying to recognize them in the chocolatey dark. A pack of wild dogs howled beyond the clearing, and boars nodded along the ravine like legendary monsters. There was no sign of people, though the town had grown and felt closer than it had when she was a child. The current was out, and she didn’t dare enter the house till the fans could be switched on. She leaned against the doorway and thought about the ice cream she had bought a few days ago, and how it must have turned to milk in her poor refrigerator. Life was real only as long as she lived, but the ladybugs didn’t know that, and they sprinted across anything that nature laid them upon; the idea almost made her laugh.
She stood up and slowly made her way around the house, past the old garage and the living room window, till she found herself in the front yard. It was too dark now to see the houses beyond the compound sloping down the formless land. A car snaked along in the distance and zipped the baglike valley, and nothing was visible after it passed. But Litha could see the dilapidated branches of her mango tree despite its lack of leaves. She felt a rush of sympathy in her crusting throat for memories lost in vivid lanes of summers and mango days. “It would grow back,” the gardener had said, but Litha was beyond comfort. She swallowed and held herself together till she was beneath its sprawling body, the lower branches feathering her hair with its thinning bouquet of leaves. She looked up in anticipation and imagined the familiar thicket of her tangy green tree, but all she could see was the moonless sky through its leafless arms. She hugged its trunk, closed her eyes, and let the tears break through her again till she began to shiver.
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