Wonderful world

Fruit flies can feel lonely. Like teen girls, if separated from their friends, they can lose sleep. A magpie robin never repeats the same set song. Like jazz legend Miles Davis, it improvises. Frogs learn the odour of the pond they swam around as tadpoles. It is their idea of home. When it is time to breed, they are known to seek out this ‘native odour’ to come home — not unlike us. ‘Intertidal: A Coast and Marsh Diary’ by Yuvan Aves is a deep dive into an ocean of such details — a passionate love letter of interconnectivity with nature, a book that makes you rethink the way you view the world.

The book is a bestseller. But last week, Yuvan made history by being shortlisted for the prestigious Wainwright Prize for nature writing. It is the first time that an Indian has made it to that list. In a country where nature has been part of ritual, religion, retreat, resilience, and even rebellion, his inclusion feels like Banu Mushtaq’s speech after winning the International Booker: a “firefly’’ moment.

In India, it has been published by Bloomsbury. “I had more than 20 rejections,” says Yuvan over the phone from Chennai. “International publishers said it was great writing but was hyperlocal.” It found a videshi home earlier this year. The shortlist is proof that no story is only local.

Yuvan has turned this in-the-backyard-of-his-city jotting of life and the living things in the wetlands of Chennai and Tamil Nadu into a universal urban experience. It is also very much a meditation on life, through the daily diary of a naturalist. Personal, political and beautifully observed, he writes about the ocean teeming with life, the marsh with an eco-system, or frogs that make home in construction sites, of the campaign to save wetlands, working with children and his deep devotion to all things wild. It is also a comment on the invisible in the city — those who make place for development, whether it is fishermen, fish, crabs or birds. He chronicles marshes slowly turned into concrete, of flood plains being gobbled up and of habitats being lost. Climate change may be measured in carbon, but its mother tongue is water, writes Yuvan. This is a powerful lesson not only for Chennai that faces a water problem.

No creature is too small to be written about. His enthusiasm is infectious. There is the “fashion sensibility” of worms. One who has used “green plastic from a single-use bag; blue plastic from a tarpaulin… clear packaging from an Amazon parcel; black plastic from a meat bag; a piece of a betel-nut sachet and a Sunsilk shampoo sachet; then some shell fragments”. Oysters, crabs, crickets, fishermen and traditional wisdom, dolphins, water skaters and their mating rituals, trees, bees, birds, squirrels — the book is filled with the landscape of the world he sees each day.

He even makes compost engaging.

At a time when environment is loss-tinged and activism is an uphill battle, the issues he raises are urgent. Is there hope? “Hope is a discipline,” he says. “If you are involved with forms of resistance, there is hope. It is the young that are taking on climate change and speaking up for Gaza.”

Wise, evocative, ‘Intertidal’ is also deeply personal. Yuvan’s father was absent, unfaithful and hit his mother for “questioning his ways”. When he was 11, his mother moved in with his stepfather, who “hated him”. He’d beat him up almost every day on small pretexts. “I’d have torn lips and wounds on other parts of my body,” he writes about the darkest days of his life. “My activism is recast rage,” he says. “It could have made me turn to alcohol or drugs.”

They lived in Madipakkam, built on marshland and “seething with life”. The violence of the house mirrored the destruction of the marsh as it turned to concrete. What survived was a refuge. Purple swam hens, Eurasian moorhen, painted stork, clamorous reed warbler, chestnut munia, yellow bittern, scarlet skimmer dragonflies, emerald spreadwing damselflies and pond-skakers — brought with them hope. “Occasionally, a peregrine falcon would appear in the sky and lift me up,” he writes. More than just jottings, this list gave his life meaning. It was nature that provided the anchor. He lost his sister Yazhini. He writes movingly of sitting by her bed in the hospital listing the scientific names of the moths on the walls.

“During her funeral, moths thronged the walls of my home and the ice box and garlands. It was unexplainable. This continued for several days later, in numbers and species I have never seen,” he writes. And in many ways, it is this connection that is palpable, real and powerful to Yuvan. It leaps up in each page, making it impossible to walk away. His personal story runs as the background score for the book, a steady hum behind the bird song, the croaking frogs and the dashing waves.

But he goes deeper to look at what the natural world may offer — friendship, community, compassion, cooperation. “Coral reefs, sea anemones, sea fans and other marine creatures are living architectures of friendship,” he writes. “They form friendships with polyps, anemones, sea slugs, clams, sponges and flatworms. They build coral reefs — complex structures of deep symbiosis — which have the highest biodiversity of any ecosystem on earth. They challenge theories that propose competition and one-upmanship as the key to survival.” Could this offer a lesson in our lives? Could we view the world differently?

‘Intertidal’ also forces you to confront living — and life, and how we are living it. To find newer ways of seeing, engaging and even listening. “What might a warbler feel when a highway appears by its wintering grove of trees? To listen is to wet one’s feet on a different shore of perception.”

Lyrical — the hear soars, literally — deep, philosophical and fiercely passionate, ‘Intertidal’ is a powerful argument to rethink our lives and make room for more. Studies show bird songs have become louder to be heard, he writes. So, perk up your ears.