Engaging with the disaster at our doorstep
Syed Saad Ahmed
In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh discusses how contemporary literary fiction has failed to address the crisis: “When I try to think of writers whose imaginative work has communicated a more specific sense of the accelerating changes in our environment, I find myself at a loss; of literary novelists writing in English only a handful of names come to mind… The literary mainstream, even as it has become more engagé on many fronts, remains just as unaware of the crisis on our doorstep as the population at large.”
In light of this analysis, journalist and wildlife conservationist Nirmal Ghosh’s Blue Sky, White Cloud, a collection of three novellas, seems like a promising attempt to engage with humanity’s impact on the environment. His stories foreground animals in the narrative instead of donning the usual anthropocentric lens. These creatures do not live in a pristine Eden. Human footprints have marked their homes and upset the life they or their forbears were accustomed to. Human-animal conflict is omnipresent, with disastrous consequences.
Arati Kumar-rao’s blackand-white illustrations are delightful companions to the stories. Her renderings of landscapes and animals are often more evocative than the words on the page. My only grouse is that most are tiny — some span a third of a page where they deserved a spread.
River Storm, the first novella, features a male elephant born in the grasslands along the Brahmaputra. We are privy to his life experiences: his first unpleasant interaction with humans, friendship with an older bull elephant, perplexity on witnessing roads, logging and tea gardens fragment the forest in which he earlier gallivanted freely. The story seeks to nurture sympathy for animals in a homocentric world, but fails. The descriptions of the landscape and the elephant’s activities are prosaic, more like an environmentalscience textbook than a novella. The conflicts that animate fictional narratives are absent or dreary. Although the elephant is ostensibly at the centre of the story, his characterisation is flat. He seems to have few facets beyond suffering from and reacting to human depredations. The
Blue Sky,
White Cloud Nirmal Ghosh 220pp, ~599, Aleph largely linear narrative has a predictable ending too.
Spirit of the Hills, the second story, is a near-replica of the first. A female leopard replaces the elephant; Hira Singh, a forest guard, is the conflicted human; and the setting shifts to Uttarakhand. The plot remains the same, ending in an identical denouement.
The third novella, Blue Sky, White Cloud, is a refreshing departure from the other two. It eschews their simplistic plotting to present a rich tapestry of events, characters, and locations.
Wildlife biologist Nadia travels to Mongolia for her research on geese that migrate to India over the winter. She tags a pair, BH6 and BH7. At a conference in Stockholm, she meets Vivek, a former journalist now in a powerful position. Their and the goose pair’s trajectories intertwine at a high-altitude Himalayan wetland. Unexpected events and connections build dramatic tension, making for an engaging read.
Although the story seems to shift focus from animals to humans, it is the most effective at portraying the magnitude of current ecological crises. The narrative traversing various landscapes and countries helps draw links between random entities such as electric wires around Bharatpur, an upcoming dam in the Himalayas and the Qinghai Lake in Tibet. It conveys how decisions made in one part of the globe can wreak havoc thousands of miles away.
Making these connections is challenging not only for fiction but also for scientists seeking to link specific extreme-weather events to the climate crisis (albeit for different reasons).
Blue Sky, White Cloud is an intrepid attempt to convey the
Anthropocene’s impact on the world and its inhabitants. And although it falters, it opens a door to how fiction can address the environmental crisis and climate catastrophe.
Syed Saad Ahmed is a writer and communications professional