What we chase out there might be closer to us than we think

As a narrative of the wild, The Light of Wilder Things: A Teenager’s Search for Nature and Wildlife presents us with a bit of what we expect: detailed descriptions of various insects and animals, stunning photographs and curious sketches, but even more so it provides us with what we don’t expect: a depiction of the intimacies between people, geographies and creatures that we have somehow chosen to unsee in our times.

Ishan Shanavas’s account of his teenagehood offers an opening into how we think about memoir writing. It is a book that considers the natural world of plants, animals (big and small), insects, and birds as the landscape through which the author explores his interiority. His earnest curiosity, fueled from his childhood by his parents, frames every tale he recounts of his brush with the natural world. Indeed, in the foreword to the book, environmental historian and professor Mahesh Rangarajan says that a “sense of wonder about living things has been a hallmark of some of the finest minds of our age” and it is that very sense of wonder which allows Ishan to take us, not just into different parts of his life, but into the wild itself. The book offers a curious nook in the form of the “memoir” as we know it, and it is most welcome.

Who’s out there?

The memoir opens with a beckoning, “Come, let’s listen to the stories of the boy”, as though we are seated around a campfire, and plunges right into Ishan’s first misdemeanour: jumping out the window of his classroom and darting to see an innocuous snake lounging on a tree. The abrupt fascination of this moment is precisely how the book is staggered, sharing one wondrous incident after the other that inevitably results in a gasp of delight.

In the beginning, we meet Ishan in his childhood observing a barbet’s nest right next to his apartment which housed two baby chicks and their mother. Made restless by the proximity of the birds, he observed them day after day, and eventually, when they grew older and flew off, Ishan wasn’t far behind. He describes, “I imagined my hands unfurling into wings. Fingers became feathers, and with one thrust, I pictured myself soaring with them.” This early dream of metamorphosis signals in many ways a vital connection between him and the natural world that the author highlights for us repeatedly in the memoir. It is a connection that sounds almost transcendental but allows him to write of nature in the sharp yet tender way that he does.

The pivotal instance that shaped him most starkly was his first encounter with the tiger. Ishan returned home one day frustrated by the cookie-cutter education system of his school, having realised that those he trusted to be experts could no longer be held to that standard. Despondent, he lay on his bed until his father came to ask, “Ishan, want to go to Bandipur for the weekend?” Golden words for a boy in his mood, Ishan pounced on the idea. Soon enough, he was seated in a safari jeep, coursing through the forests of Bandipur National Park. Right as the sun was about to set, there emerged from the bushes the infamous tiger. Ishan’s words here craftily unspool the tension of the moment even as his extremities go numb. He recounts the encounter, saying, “Whether it was a second or an eternity, I do not know. But I felt something, unlike anything I had experienced. A connection. Something that snuffed the lethargy of my present.”

The living thrum of this moment beats throughout the winding narrative of his memoir. It allows him to do with nature writing something thrilling but also crucial: a reminder that nature has always been awe-inspiring because it unsettles us. In its ferocity, it kindles a connection that is necessary for thinking of conservation as integral to our lives. His language while describing any number of encounters in the book is smartly level-headed and refuses to engage with the shuffling powers of “man vs nature” that routinely appear in wildlife writing. Instead, his stories are rife with wonder in such a way that does indeed “snuff the lethargy” of the reader’s present. Being written in memoir style, the space of his personal experience lets Ishan present the tacit facticity of nature while still making room for the moving and undeniable beauty of all the wildlife that he sees.

Folks in the wild

As much as this book describes the wildest of creatures, it also talks about the people who live beside and with those creatures. How Ishan writes of his interactions with people he meets and especially of their involvement with nature is deeply heartening. It tugs at an idea of a community that is not “occupying nature” but cohabiting alongside it.

At 12 years old, Ishan was treading the ocean at Maafushi, an island in the Maldives, trying to collect plastic bottles that were littered in the waters. As he was stepping out, two women noticed him and inquired what he was up to. Following a pleasant exchange where he explained that he was a tourist like them and was trying to clean up the beach, they called over their friends and soon enough, a group of 20 assisted him in his activity. He calls this his “mini Greta Thunberg moment” as the group managed to fill 30 sacks with plastic waste in a matter of hours. This incident was his “first lesson in the power of unity: if people come together, they can make a difference.” Ishan’s honest and easy way with nature was making connections everywhere, not just within nature but with people too. His unassuming participation in conservation from a young age seems to have sparked a recognition within those around him of their own ties to nature, calling hands to action.

As we see him grow older, he too develops an eye for this connection between people and the environment where they live. A summer project would have Ishan return to the Bandipur National Park as a volunteer, where he worked with people of the Jenu Kuruba tribe. For an NGO named Junglescapes, he was compiling a report depicting the work of the tribe to curb the spread of the invasive plant species Lantana. He spent most of his mornings that summer talking and learning from them. They showed him ways to read the forest, how the bend of grass signifies the trace of an animal, or how to discern a chital’s call of alarm. He says, “These nuggets of wild knowledge, honed over generations, hold a value that can’t be captured in words. Their mentorship meant more to me than I could ever tell them.”

Ishan finds a way to think of inhabiting nature outside constricting modes of the “insider/outsider” binary. Even as a tourist, a volunteer, an outsider by all means, Ishan forges connections with people that are based on the ways in which they engage with nature. And it is these bonds precisely that allow him to develop unique relations with the natural world too. His position then, does not become irrelevant, but garners importance only to the extent of what he does with the knowledge he gains. The humility and gratitude that necessarily accompany his curiosity suggest that how we live with nature is inevitably an education in how we live with others too.

On various fronts, the book offers us fresh ways of thinking about where people, nature and wildlife can meet. Ishan’s stories are passionate in suggesting that what seems so far out of reach is not nearly that far, and that which we take for granted right beside us could use a more curious eye. While these stories are given to us as the vibrant memories of a teenager, they seem to transport us too, taking us on a journey to see wondrous sights and meet those on the wilder side of things. As a memoir of a teenagehood, The Light of Wilder Things casts its gentle but keen glow on the nature of tourism, conservation and education in India, deftly folding the natural world into the language of everyday life till we can’t tell where Ishan ends and wildlife begins.

The Light of Wilder Things: A Teenager’s Search for Nature and Wildlife, Ishan Shanavas, Stark World Publishing.

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