The Far Shore

Encountering a living chicken is not unusual. A chicken carcass, probably even less unusual, as a visit to any grocery store or kitchen will inform. Living chickens, spastically grazing freely directly beside butchers breaking down, butterflying, spatchcocking, or otherwise dismembering their previously living chicken comrades does, however, give one pause. Caged hens are obviously housed against their wills. But I was looking at uncaged hens. And for a fleeting moment I wanted to believe the first naive idea that struck me; that we would never allow ourselves to endure such an incongruity; if, in close proximity and perfect view, another human was in live time being spatchcocked by some non-human creature, what extent of starvation, or instinct to eat, or otherwise overriding striving, would it take for me to ignore the morbid conditions of the overall scene and the terror occurring? To renounce my impulses until ceased were the violations of dignity committed against a member of my own, to impose intervention and stop the madness. 

Naive indeed. However, not for the reasons I expected. For this is भारत (Bharat); a man might take a ₹6 (~.6¢) ferry ride to a public garden, buying the ticket at an office next to a pavement barber who has set up shop between a statue of Ambedkar and a shrine for Shiva, currently shaving another man’s head for ₹30, as a ₹5,000,000 BMW drives past a small girl leading a goat on a string beside a man balancing a basket on his head who is dodging the toto (rickshaw) dodging a bus dodging a stationary cow locked in a ballistic trance by an exploitatively red Zomato delivery basket whose driver is arguing with the doorman of a ₹30,000 per night premium (not luxury) hotel, moated by cracked concrete alleys where dishwashers splay pots and pans to dry, freshly washed from an exterior spout, the residual pools of which boys push each other into, giggling and avoiding the man urinating against the wall and perpendicular to the crows pecking the cadaver of a rotund rat which an hour or more previously had been vying for space on a counter against freely grazing chickens.

Children playing in dirty pot water remained in my attention for a while, as a problem to be solved, not a mystery to be pondered. If I possess the belief in संसार, “samsara” (reincarnation), the scenery described in either of the above paragraphs may lose some of its shock value. Indeed, it is not at all shocking either to the present state of much of the world (perhaps a bit exaggerated both because India is a naturally exaggerated place, but also to give succinct illustration), nor to previous states (or at least, presently, carefully managed out of view) of the Occident. Seated in English, for whom the first-person view is permanent, wielding the technology of the pronoun “I”, it all seems obviously “a problem to be solved”. “I” literally experienced the thought “could children playing in dirty wash water be prevented?” For it is unthinkable to the “utilitarian” English mind to interrogate otherwise; “what game are the children playing?” or perhaps “have the children eaten?”. Couched in English, the Occidental soul is merely a receiver of God’s will, interpolating transmissions; in this view, the dirty wash water play must be solved. 

Likewise, the grand impression the Indian Museum of Kolkata had made on me was also the result of a needless heuristic produced by the matrix of Occidental thought, appropriately triggered by the even more needless technology of the museum. “The world is the collection; you can go and see. There is no need for this place to project knowledge across time,” a participant mused to me. Intuitively, this is not a radical idea. Information is stored within the environment itself, rather than extracted and separated. When the information requires recall, if it cannot be done in memory, you can simply travel to where the information occurs, where it is situated in context and fully available to apprehension. The idea that you should extract samples of everything knowable, and assemble them together into one gallery, totally out of context, for the first time in my life, seemed fairly silly. And this came only hours after I had been awestruck by the museum. 

And it wasn’t as though I hadn’t been exposed to this manner of thinking before; indeed, in language teaching, “teaching in context” is an accepted axiom in 2026. In November 2024, I attended a National Geographic Learning conference in Muscat, at which the theme was “authenticity” of learning materials. At some point in time, someone had the bright idea, probably while trying to negotiate stacks upon stacks of decades of National Geographic magazines, to leverage the brand equity of this enormous store of “authentic” text into education markets. And at this conference, in fact, they were advertising new course books leveraged from this authenticity. It had not occurred to me then that the language course book itself is, like the hospital, McLuhanesque; if the course book is in one’s hand, then one’s back is against the world. 

The colonial overtones to the idea that a hospital or a museum were pointless technologies were palpable; such consolidations or taxonomies were historically effective plays to expand and preserve capital, or power (or both). My love of the Kolkata botanical gardens (officially named Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden, which is, in my opinion, too unwieldy a name) in south Howrah, to which I took one of those ₹6 ferries, would also quickly prove problematic in this vein. Botanical gardens in India were explicit imperial hubs, surveying not “nature for science”, but rather “resources for extraction”. Revenues were boosted as a direct result of the establishment and workings of a garden like the one in Howrah. Medicines were also appropriated from the communities into the gardens. Reluctance to recognize hospitals or gardens as desirable places was a view that made sense in the lingering trauma of a previously colonized people. “The world is the garden. You don’t pay money to go into the world,” the adda continued, “you grow in the world, and you heal in the world, not a hospital.” Indeed, I paid a steep ₹200 or so “foreigner fare” to amble the garden, which housed the world’s largest strangler fig, called the Great Banyan, a Ficus benghalensis with sprawling prop-trunks believed to be several centuries old. 

The strangler is an object of intense fascination and attraction to me. Laughing, the participant bemused “think of it! You call it a strangler!” and went on to emphasize the intrinsic violence latent in all English thought. I found myself questioning my very understanding of the tree itself. For hitherto, I understood that it was a parasitic plant; a seed is dropped into the canopy of another already mature tree (a “host” in parasitic terms) and propels aerial roots downward, forming a mesh vest around the trunk, and over time, ultimately suffocating and “strangling” the host into death. It’s easy to mistake the draping adventitious roots as tendril-like trunks of a gang of lanky winding trees. The British bastardized the tree with the name “Banyan”, from Baniyas, a word for merchant, or shopkeeper, as they noticed frequent business meetings beneath the trees. Apparently, these intrepid conquerors did not notice the astounding wealth of cultural and religious activities that also occur beneath and in proximity to stranglers, including a Hindi word already associated for nearly three thousand years: “आश्रय”, “ashraya”, meaning “shelter”, for which the strangler was a principal symbol. 

In Bengali, the tree is called “বট গাছ”, or “bot gach”. Literally translated, it means “the encompassing mover”, or “the surrounding which goes”. It evokes a ubiquitous sense of embracing movement. I imagine an eternal breeze, which effortlessly and infinitely carries us upward. Bot is now shorthand for the Banyan. Recall that this is the same object to which English places “strangler”. The first of the European languages to employ the conceptual lineage of violence in association with the tree was Spanish, where the word “matapalo”, or “killer” was applied by Conquistadors. German later affixed it with the word “Würge” to “Würgefeige”, to choke, and along the way (perhaps carried down by an eternal breeze) “strangle” made it into English. This is all in comparison to the Bengali (or Hindi) “surrounding tree”, with related concepts of shelter and eternity.  

just outside the gardens

Thus shattered for me was the parasitic conception of the strangler and its victim as distinct objects. Indeed, the separateness constituted into the English-speaking mind pervades all that the English-speaker does, I was further instructed in the adda. It is in our pronouns, such as “I”. It is in our technologies, such as the hospital, museum, or garden. It is in our conception of our own souls; that I am some such distinct thing that will carry on for eternity (with Jesus perhaps) after I die. Even the American constitution itself, it was pointed out to me, delineates humans from nature: for the people, by the people; enshrining in law protections for individual life, liberty, and property. No such mandatory provisions have been made for other creatures, or the planet, or the broader natural world. That is, at least, not in the federal constitution of the United States. A borough and a city in Pennsylvania have taken steps to recognize the “Rights of Nature”. A court in Tamil Nadu made the same maneuver. However, at the national level, only Ecuador, Bolivia, Panama, and Uganda have endowed nature with the right to exist within their constitutions, a wisdom transmitted at least from the former of the three via the indigenous practices of Buen Vivir (“Living Well”), or Pachamama, meaning “Mother Earth”, a goddess worshipped in the Andes.

Even rendering Sanskrit-origin words into a “utilitarian separateness” proved contentious; two among the adda began to discuss the translation of “competition” into Hindi, “प्रतियोगिता”, “pratiyogita” (surrounded by Marxist literature, it wasn’t unusual that this specific word would arise as subject matter). “No such word works without contradiction. To force meaning, it combines two opposite ideas and tries to make them work.” Too far out of my expertise to discuss, the closest I can come to understanding his meaning is that the essence of this word means “against community”, meaning to be against the ones to which you are connected. I naively asked him if he’d heard of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or if he’d read Heidegger on “gestell”. “Bro…I mean…no. I haven’t even gotten through half of our stuff.” I know I take my Occidentalism for granted. I realize I’m entrenched in the traditions of my forebears. But never had I felt it so acutely, so lost in the ocean of world thought. I did realize, as I had anticipated in my research for the trip, that there was indeed no poverty of literate interlocutors in West Bengal. 

বটতলা (bot tola) is a Bengali phrase meaning “under the bot gach”. The meaning referred in the past to the pop-up book printers parked underneath banyans, swarms of which have since planted roots in various neighborhoods in north Kolkata. The meaning has since evolved to refer to the genres sold at the book stalls, pulp or street fiction, tabloids, and various risqué or taboo reading material. Many such stalls have also evolved, with vast portions of these reading streets offering mainly aspirational texts and school textbooks. Indeed, for anyone who is dubious about the future of reading on the planet earth, make the pilgrimage to College Street and Boi Para; reading abounds, in frantic masses. 

Perpendicular to College Street and Boi Para is Indian Coffee House (also called College Street Coffee House), an institution for coffee and adda, conveniently located adjacent to the University of Kolkata, in the former “Albert Hall”. There I met a musician from the UK who was camped in the south of the city to master sitar for several weeks. “You don’t have to talk to me, I just need a place to sit.” At Indian Coffee House, space is communal. The interior is furnished with around at least a hundred perfectly square wooden tables with exactly four chairs around each. I was seated at was at the time one of several available tables; by the time the musician found me, my table was the only left with available space, and the waiters sat him down. He and I began chatting, and the tables around us had already also morphed. 

“Where are you from?” interjected a tall, fat local at the closest nearby seat, with his shirt tucked in and a friendly look on his face. “I lived in New Jersey.” I couldn’t hold back my acerbity when I said, “Then surely you must have learned how to say hello first to a stranger.” In an establishment where tables are not formally defined, and conversations are formed and fused (much like an encompassing mover), the eccentric thrives on the lack of boundary. One wondered how many unsuspecting victims he casually reeled in, and at what accelerated rates. “I’m a writer. I have a book on Amazon.” After much deflection, the music conversation got back on track. 

“Right now we’re playing Raag Des (राग देश ). Which can only be played in late evening.”  Not unlike many other beliefs in the Hindu astrological belief universe, classical music in the subcontinent was categorized and played (or in this case, rehearsed, or practiced) according to auspices of time. If you’ve ever slapped on a sitar album, you’ll have noticed the seemingly tragic generic names: morning raga. Afternoon raga. Time is split into further modes, of early morning versus late, late evening versus midnight. “It’s a lot about vibrations, the chakras, and your posture. You have to brace the bottom of the instrument with your foot, so that your whole body is in the music, and the vibration travels through the spine.” 

Ficus religiosa ("sacred fig") is a sibling species of the bot gach. "Peepal" in English comes directly from Sanskrit, "पिप्पल", "pippala", referring to berries born of the tree. The tree under which Buddha achieved nirvana (enlightenment), two further names for the tree are “बोधि”, “bodhi”, meaning “enlightenment”, and in Bengali “অশ্বত্থ”, “Ashwath”, literally meaning “not staying tomorrow”, evoking impermanence, and the fleeting. The tree differs from the bot gach in an important way; when the seed begins to devour the host, instead of propelling roots downward externally and suffocating it, the Ashwath roots wedge into the trunk and branches through imperceptible crevices, splitting, splintering, weaving, welding, mounting its buttressed meld in place for, if lucky, millennia. The leaves of the peepal are shaped like a heart and in the wind, create the perception of a clapping sound. The leaves are the symbol of the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian honor, awarded to Ravi Shankar, who also was from West Bengal. A sitar is made from teak, but its frame is coated in shellac, which is a resin secreted by a (parasitic) beetle called a lac, or Kerriidae. Synthetic finishes such as polyurethane harden the frame and dampen vibrations; shellac’s brittle consistency amplifies them, especially for the underframe resonance strings within the sitar. The Kerriidae’s preferred home? The Fig religiousa. 

Improvisation in raags is essential, and a sitar raag grows like a peepal. There is an initial seed, in which a foundational melody is established, where every ascending note comes back down. Then, the raag branches, roots, and eventually “lands” in what’s called a “nyasa”, a final resting note which punctuates the end of the song. Each iteration of the raag honors the original; there is no “strangling”, or “parasitizing”; there is only the “Gharana”, the “lineage”, or “house”, with a central growth defined and made whole by the movers that encompass it, iterating it endlessly, both from without and from within. A raag is played for the first time; each further instance of it is not “parasitized” but immortalized. A peepal grows forth outward through, not a host, but an originator, or initializer, creator, prime mover, upon which another encompasses, as a raag; and vice versa. And so it is with all life, as viewed in Bharat at least; an allegory of each instance of being, an improvisation.

I share this view, even if I don’t share in its fantasies about what improvisations came before or shall come after. Or rather, perhaps, this view is shared in me, and I am because of everyone else. The Bhagavad Gita (a foundational Hindu text, subtitled “The Song of God”) illustrates one of our parasitic fig trees inverted, as the divine originator of all. Chapter 15, Verse 1 instructs: 

“The Supreme Divine Personality said: They speak of an eternal aśhvatth tree with its roots above and branches below. Its leaves are the Vedic hymns, and one who knows the secret of this tree is the knower of the Vedas.” 

Roots are unconcerned about their trajectory or the trajectory of others; for though they all take difference paths, they share the same departure point, and ultimately share the same destination. I am that Bengal chicken, not mindlessly ignoring the reality, but so intrinsically part of it. A fact I would feel acutely at my next stop on my journey to death, Banaras.