A woman sits on the ground, leaning against a pine. Its bark presses hard against her back, as hard as life. Its needles scent the air and a force hums in the heart of the wood. Her ears tune down to the lowest frequencies. The tree is saying things, in words before words.

It says: Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering.

It says: A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch.

It says: Every piece of earth needs a new way to grip it. There are more ways to branch than any cedar pencil will ever find. A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.

— Richard Powers, The Overstory

I read parts of Overstory perched high(…ish) above the ground, atop a concrete Maple in Vijayawada. The balcony at the eleventh floor fortress is surprisingly calm and reading-inducing, despite (or maybe, because of) the drizzle and the breeze and the bird’s eye view it shoves on you unasked. It is only after I leave the raintrees alone and come home, that the strange and lamentable significance of the building-naming-scheme[1] sinks in. Whether the builders or the people-generally-upset-at-the-absurdity-of-naming-things-after-what-was-destroyed-on-the-way-to-the-things-themselves like it or not, being in a building named after a tree (I was in Pine for most of my stay; the choice of name made severely appropriate by how gloriously alone I was for the last three weeks.) makes you see and do things differently, say, from being in a building named after itself. (Hostel 13 said HOUSE OF TITANS in university-gothic letters—awkward-cornered inlines, protruding outlines, stab-serifs[2]—and one always felt someone shrouded in security-uniform-colours was about to ID you getting out of the john.)

I read significant parts of the book (the ‘Roots’ is poetic and a guaranteed tearjerker) with the day’s newspapers laid open to the Aarey disater with an effing parking lot over dead stumps. This was reminiscent of the Hitchhiker’s Guide in ways more than one and none of those ways was fun.

With all the teaching, I’ve been more than drowning the bicycle-trips to the studio in truckloads of carbon-footprinting. On a peculiar night at AmalodTheGreat[3] over cups of thick tea, I quasi-decided to ride to the next course (in Hyderabad) and failed to realise there was not under- but over-one-thousand kilometers separating home from the college. It would have easily taken 10 days with hundred-plus kilometer days to get there in time for the first day of class. This, I am not prepared for, with the many projects deadlining in November. Yet, it looks like a good opportunity to turn courses into aftermaths of long-distance bicycle-trips; it seems like the only strict brief one could give oneself to stick to the road and hope for tailwinds. Wishful thinking: the money made from the courses can then go into funding the trips and not into unnecessary bits of gear that tie one down to a place. (I’ve come to terms with there being nothing wrong with tying oneself down to a place, mentally. Besides, the place I am tied down to is beautiful; yet it is a place in place.)

1: The other structures are named after Walnuts and Teaks. There is a tea-shop under Teak that is good material for low-hanging-fruit-puns. I’m in two minds about Walnut and Maple; they don’t do poetic justice to the the whole shebang, IMNSHO.

2: Joke! Just in case.

3: AmalodTheGreat is Vijayawada’s chai-gate in limbo. (From Wordweb: Limbo: ‘The place of unbaptized but innocent or righteous souls [such as infants and virtuous individuals].’)