How to build a home with walking: Book Review of Tales of Hazaribagh

Evening at Dhauligiri, Odisha.

These days I have been trying to understand places. I am not even a regular walker but I think about outside a lot when I am inside. I walk and walk because that is what slows me down. To walk is to move at a regular pace by lifting and setting down each foot in turn, never having both feet off the ground at once. There is so much rhythm in walking, that all my poems land on the ground first, as words find a crack between black tar and stare at this gap with curiosity, like crows at the passing bulldozers.

Tales of Hazaribagh is that ‘lifting and setting down each foot in turn’. A Zeitroman, the book is an intimate exploratory account of something which neither ends nor begins. Hazaribagh is pursued actively in conversations, anecdotes, histories, spectacular ordinariness amidst aids like, Google Earth, a prophetic grandfather who knows everything about everything, and confident young guides like Md. Danish Ansari. 

Morning sun in Lansdowne

Divided into seven sections, each highlighting some topographical, much personal connections with the ecology of the place. This memoir captures the urgency to treat nonhuman life with dignity. The prose meditates on waterfalls, solitude, adventures that aren't solitary, and the many vagaries of this land. Apart from revealing geographical exploration, Vatsa is also interested in being mindful of words like beautification and conservation. Neither does it leave your mind.

I was beginning to notice the geography, making assumptions and conjectures about streams and rivers. As I was trained in literature, I knew the words context, critique, and problematic. I did not know the words topography, terrain and undulation. The land for me was still up and down.

There is an honesty about the absences, as the writing is aware of how these treks and loitering, are adjusting to the contours of a particular gender. In some places, the attire was altered; in some places, the dialect made it helpful for connections to develop. I wondered what the same place, loitering, treks would look like for women. And that is when we meet the author’s mother. 

Maate stuck to roads, they were her threshold. Beyond the roads, we wouldn't go. The hills with no roads were for me secret places, demanding exploration. The Hills with no roads were for her dangerous places, demanding seclusion.

It was with his mother and his relatives that Mihir Vatsa first discovered his waterfall at Salparni. When the family trip helps one discover an emu bird, a waterfall, I loved reading those parts. Conversations with guides, description of clouds, trees, the Canary Hill, are all going to stay with me.

In many places, the narrative haunts you, prods you, moving beyond the excitement of the adventure. It is like seeing someone solve a mystery. 

 
At a time when sensory curiosities are least of our concerns, this book prods many important questions on landscape, ecology, administration’s arbitrariness, while simultaneously giving a chance to dig deeper into the craft of place writing. This is evident throughout, but there is one which is my favourite: Towards the end of the book, in "Territorial Trespassing", Vatsa makes the reader craft a visual of Hazaribagh— 

Imagine blankness. Imagine two slanting lines, originating from the two top corners. They come down to join each other, but they do not meet. A while space keeps them apart. 

Keep much of this whiteness intact but paint a thin streak of blue through it. The witness that remains, imagine it as sand.  The blue is the water. The two lines that do not meet, imagine them as mountains. They are blue too but there is a different shade approaching green-not aqueous.

On both sides of the sand, put trees. put so many trees that they proliferate across the lines, muddying the precision. In the whiteness above the sand, imagine clouds. Draw them softly and draw them voluminous. The sun hides behind them. Now and then, you find the light struggling to push through for stop the clouds release it in diffused beams. 

I read this book traveling to Uttarakhand, Delhi, and Odisha. When gulabi thand is mentioned, I am taking quilts out in a large, dingy restroom in Lansdowne. When Gibraltar’s haunted manor is received with the reality of people actually living there, I am listening to black drongos on cheed trees, while trying to find out the whereabouts of a museum. Traveling on NH316 and crossing Barakhanda Wildlife Sanctuary, I see canals, mining locations interspersed with other towns, deforested blank spaces dotted with boards for the upcoming Shri Swami Narayan Mandir; 'forgetting' the fodder patches behind tall trees of Neem(?) along the highway. 

That we walk is not enough; how do we build a home with that walk, when it is so precarious, so sturdy in actively requiring effort, is something I learn with this book. The land for me is not up and down anymore.