BY TESS JAMES
6 minute read
Yesterday, I saw a lizard expanding itself in death, assisted by ants. Slowly, it ceased to resemble a lizard. With their help, it was evolving into something larger than itself. I could not look away.
Someone else might have seen murder. Another, the quickness of ants. But to me, the scene felt sacred. It lingered for hours beneath a palm shrub, where dust and shadows thickened into a shifting, dancing form on the tiled floor. It was cooler there.
I was sweeping the courtyard. Each time I passed, my body seemed to change—cool air brushing my skin, an eerie silence trailing my limbs. I could almost hear a cello playing in the distance. I felt invited to a ceremony. A lizard, becoming more than its life.
Watching the lizard dissolve into something beyond itself, I thought of another kind of becoming—one I had witnessed over the course of a year. The seed of the memory is held within my friend, a collector of seeds, who roams the world with an easy gait, a lean back, and plenty of stories in her bag.
I was once an aghast gardener, watching my precious tomato plants wither despite my best efforts. She, ever the wanderer, gathers seeds from distant lands—tiny capsules of folly and wisdom alike. She once told me:
"Seed collecting teaches you how life truly works."
My tomato plants, sick from their long journey in a seed packet, struggled to belong. The soil was still foreign to them. The land, still unknown. Many didn’t survive their first or second generation. But in those moments, their purple and yellow veins sent out an invitation—a distress call.
And then they arrived. Aphids. Cutworms. Spider mites. Flea beetles. Thrips. Gastropods. Here, even African snails respond to every distress call—and there are many.
On the days the first and second-generation tomato plants surrendered, I saw them transform—slowly but surely—into moths and butterflies. I saw them spread their wings and flow—into the beak of a dancing flycatcher that waits near our home every year from September to October.
This is how it has always been for me.
People exist in the background; my foreground is the present moment. Never empty. Always a canvas—Butterflies. Dried leaves. Twigs I like to hold. Worm castings brushing my heels.A bird call.The quiet shock of meeting a Shikra.A Racket-tailed Drongo lingering as my mother eats her birthday lunch.
This is how the world arrives for me. I step into the human world through the mirror of the more-than-human world, finding ease in its familiar safety.
I can recount the hours spent climbing trees, tracing bark with my fingers. But how do I measure the moments when the earth beneath me gives way to beauty, to wonder, to tea?
How do I quantify the time I have stood as a silent sentinel, waiting for rain alongside a thousand beings who can only drink when it falls?
I wait with them simply because I enjoy their company. It is the most natural companionship I know.
Before I loved flowers, I loved stones.
I have my preferences here too. Fire speaks to me in a hungry growl, sometimes singeing from beyond a flame. But I have always belonged to Earth. To Sky. To Water. Fire has taken its time to become a friend.
In the more-than-human world, I breathe better. Wind curling through the ribs, lung tissue encircling the pain where my bones held tightness. A tremor in my chest. A quiet sigh before I knew I needed one. Attention softens on the edges of my awareness, and I am breathed.
Yesterday, a dying lizard, a mango twig, and the first summer rain steadied me from a lingering question: Are we a violent species?
I found my answer in summer.
Summer—a single word, yet never the same from one moment to the next. The terrible heat is not constant. Not across days, not across hours, not even across villages and cities. Here, our summers have moods.
The sun singes at noon. But not all noons burn the same.
Some days, like yesterday, summer carried dew. My mother and I tried to tease rain from the dew. It worked—by evening, long after we had resigned ourselves to its absence.
And so, when I look deeply, everything shifts.
My breath shifts first.
But arriving here, to this breath, took a lizard, a twig, and the memory of a mango tree that once overlooked a pond. A pond where herons pecked at water holes. Where Jaladhara skittering frogs called out for rain.
Through the more-than-human world, I find the safety to look again—at the people who matter to me.
My father steps into the courtyard. A patriarch, yet in my eyes, he is slowly dissolving into something beyond a parent—especially with the pearly white beard he has been growing for months now. No longer just the bearer of authority, but a dignified presence unfurling in quieter, more human ways.
My understanding of the human world has always been fragmented, wired through disparate notions. I recall easier times, but it is the animate world that has stood as guardian to my sanity.
In the human world, I have needed concepts.
When I couldn’t grasp their fluidity, I became starkly reductionist, shrinking my life into the smallest space possible—trying, at least, to be harmless. But even in that space, I was reminded of the potency of a mustard seed. Except I am no mustard seed. I splutter differently. I bloom differently. I race with the world—chasing centers, apexes, circles, pyramids, and such. Occasionally, my soft body arrives at its own softness, the wily muscles hanging around breath on a dancing tangle of sticks and such.
I see with clarity now.
I cannot live without notions. I cannot live without friends.
I have spent time with metaphors. Some call it mysticism. Yet nothing has been as affirming as allowing notions to dissolve and flow. For that idea to germinate, it has needed space within me.
In the foreground, the towering presence of canopies offers myriad company.
A simple offering—root vegetables cooked on coals, eaten with crushed chilies. The sharp heat of capsaicin burns my tongue—earthy, fruity, alive. I think of the parrot, unsinged by the chili’s fire, and I smile.
The women in the neighbourhood watch over those passing by, always looking out for friendlies. The three sisters, empty nesters, wave at me.
They always recall better times on this street.
"This place didn’t have all these shops. These were homes."
"See those buildings? Once, there were trees there. Monkeys lived on them. The ledges were seamless, unlike now!"
They sigh at the past and ponder the stillness that surrounds them now.
I know this about them.
They love to eat root vegetables with crushed chilies, like I do.
I see a shared glint of laughter as I wave back. Perhaps today, I will need an extended hour on the ledge that separates our properties into "ours" and "theirs."
And we shall gossip like warblers—town gossip, about root vegetables and such.
This is the secret I know of invitations.
I have always seen my belonging to the more-than-human world as a response to an invite.
A twig. A dying lizard. The first summer rain.
Everything calls, if I listen.
Yet in the human world, I have moved differently. As a disruptor. Perhaps because I never saw it as a world of invitations. With the same score in mind, I tend to even out scores, with or without knowing it.
The suffering of the rivers. The time the river coughed back plastic to the shores and flowed on, indifferent, as if nothing had happened.
But everything swells up, with room for invitations.
This is the secret I have come to dwell in.
One must understand the nature of invitations in the human world too.
And so, I post them—my invites—out into the world.
And there is laughter.
Like breath, between me and the Other, inseparable.
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