Savi and The Memory Keeper is the latest work of fiction by the award-winning childrens' author Bijal Vachharajani. The novel tells a funny, thoughtful and moving story about loss, the most pressing issue of our times—climate change, with a dollop of magic.
Bijal Vachharajani's books include, among others, A Cloud Called Bhura, which won the Auther Children’s Book Award 2020, So You Want to Know About the Environment, and Kitten Trouble. She has co-authored 10 Indian Champions Who Are Fighting to Save the Planet and The Great Indian Nature Trail with Uncle Bikky.
Published by Hachette India Children's Books, Savi and The Memory Keeper is available for purchase in various bookstores and online. A Kindle version is available too.
This is an excerpt from the chapter, 'Fun Time With Fungi'.
***
If anyone knows how to give a hug, it’s a tree. We’re solid and always ready to be held. Hence, the term tree hugger.
It’s really like spring has come early.
There you are, visiting my world.
I hold the three worlds together – the air, the earth and the understory.
There you are, stepping straight into my sturdy heartwood. Each ring is the keeper of the stories I have witnessed and recorded on them. Can you see them, hear them, smell them? Stories of heat and rain, droughts and forest fire, of death and life.
The underland of the soil is a kingdom of its own, an intricate tapestry of living networks. Complex and infinite, stretching for miles, reaching everywhere, holding everything together with its roots, like the many hands that came together to form a human chain after the last riots.
Step in, leave your fears behind. Let the lights guide you.
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The rootlets, too numerous to even comprehend, each stretched out like fingers, covered by the luminosity that had taken over my imagination for so many weeks now. It was like a garden full of the tiniest fairy lights, moonlit pinpricks woven into nets. I almost expected an elf to pop out. But as I looked closer, I realized it was fungi, rows and rows of them, little light bulbs on top of the rootlets.
Tree was at the heart of a forest, where they were the most ancient, the wisest, the one that bound all the other trees together. The neem, the pongam, amaltas, doodhi, tendhu, silk cotton, jackfruit, jamun, mango, and even the newcomers – the gulmohar, the rain tree, jacaranda – they were all a family.
I listened deeply as the mycorrhizal fungal network was communicating, transporting nutrients and chemical compounds among the forests. I heard whispers.
Quit hogging my sunshine.
Ever heard of canopy shyness? You should try it some time.
The banyan on MG Road is gone. Made way for a metro. They passed on her nutrients to everyone on SV Road.
Let’s have a moment of branch waving for them. Got extra nutrients today? I am running short. Here you go, take some from me. I have plenty.
Oye, that kiddo needs some air and sunshine. Kindly adjust that canopy – let them grow.
After a moment I realized what I was hearing. It was trees fighting, negotiating, sharing, responding – just like any other family. Just like our family. Just like how Mom, Dad, Meher and I fought. It wasn’t a din like in the canteen at school – it was a comforting whisper, like standing under a bamboo grove and listening to its many songs. But with its own grammar.
The ever-shifting soil is where our dead come to rest in earth and stardust. My earthworms, they extend their elastic bodies, making rubber band loops, burrowing deeper and deeper into the soil, raking memories that are buried and preserved by my underland.
Memories of Shajarpur. Its once-upon-a-time love for trees. Its bitter amnesia.
Its people. Its animals. Leaves, flowers and insects. The living and the dead.
And your father.
***
