Memoirs + BOTM August '23

Booksify is back from hiatus! We begin the month of August with BOTM...

World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil!

Our first post of August '23 takes heavy inspiration from this gorgeous non-fiction debut, we hope you enjoy this book and relate to it as much as Booksify did!

If Summer were to be summarised – a synopsis of the months swaying in the calendar adrift of gales, the wavering airs and wet pool days – the cicada’s wordless yet sentimental tune would serve.

Yes, when the Sun is stripping you of your defenses and melting the ice in your throat, the cicada’s lilt pierces the sweating silence just as ferociously. Under the infraorder classification of Cicadomorpha, which encompasses: spittlebugs, leaf and tree hoppers – the cicadas exist in the superfamily known as Cicadoidea. The insect inhabits all the continents excluding Antarctica (or perchance the findings are simply as such!). The Cicadidae can be divided into, ‘periodical,’ and, ‘annual’ cicadas.

I accord Summer to the cicadas. For, my perpetual state of lacking in clear classification and existing in essence within a triad of continents, earns me peculiar perceptions of the season. The undying swelter of south India mocks Summer into the label of another Monday. Sohjo in south-eastern Suomi glistens into a glare as it reflects the Summer’s long days into shades of buttercups, celosia, and lilies (you shall see none of these, favourably cranberries or lingonberry). North America’s mid-west stubbornly remains indecisive, from fits of rain to calm cloudless horizons. Grand wings over grander oceans set the seasons scrambling into disarray, yet infallibly, the months stay. There are years where Summer is a passing point, negligible as the mailmen of its postcards. There are years where Summer is immersed in its element of heat and bloom, and it gains boiling substance over me. I have always known of the tearful and parting last days of school, the amiable outings quick to follow, the jobs and refreshing schedules, the vacations and the photos – but often Summer was a subordinate to these annuals. Annual cicadas have a lifespan of 2-5 years, merely addressed as such for the species constant presence each year. The distinction exists solely for the North American species to divide periodical away from annual. My umbilical cord separated from my first cells (that fit me as poorly as untailored gloves) in India. The nurses, shocked a Finnish mother could miraculously birth something as myself, shouted, “Indian baby,” at the tan of my skin and the dark of my hair. I do not feel I was born there: in the same means that we do not truly believe we were born if we disregard third person stories. For all one knows, as I molted from my loved sleep, the anchor of home was misplaced (I have only ever been an overseas Indian citizen) and left to rust in my old fish-tank. Swiftly I would visit Suomi and the United States – the veins in my very eyes becoming the oceans bordering the continents; I was rather born everywhere. Cicada eggs are lain on the tips of tree branches. Cicadas perform incomplete metamorphosis, hemimetaboly – they forgo the pupal state and spend their early days underground in the larval stage. As humans we will not experience the childhood of the insect and scarcely see its young remains in shed skins. Underground and unseen is how annual cicadas plough away two years of their life, gaining nutrients for their growth. I doubt any human being shall ever empathise with the cicadas. There is an unidentifiable unbelonging absurdity – in a life enveloped by soil and sap – for those who are laid out to the world under blaring lights and sanitary white. No, it shall never be understood. If tree roots would cooperate and entangle around my inked hands, equipped with a letter for planting in that envelope, I would ask, “How is Summer there?” May seasons exist within a period of two years – is Summer a mundane weather forecast, muffled in announcement? Does the Sun shine as it does under closed eyes, a familiar red – is it unfamiliar now, in this underworld?

Predator sedation. The predators of the Cicadidae include numerous birds and mammals, alongside arachnids and mantises, wasps and more. Periodical cicadas spend a hefty 13-17 years underground. Then, all the periodical cicadas emerge at once in a grand orchestration – often in late spring. There is speculation cicadas track time by using the seasonal changes of trees when feeding. This adaptation evolved to increase chances of survival against cicada predators; the greater concentration of cicadas decreases individual chances of death by predation. Biology has innateness. Of spending nearly two decades underground – to purely survive. May the cicadas be aware or – be? Existence – may it be a burden acclaimed entirely to me? Isolation and ignorance are subterranean predators with no faces, comparable to all and any stingers and venoms. Yet, as flowers die – the broods rise; from one hell to another. Now, hell has cicadas.

For the years the periodical cicada feeds and drowses, drunk on its soil: its lifespan above ground is less than a month. The nymphs emerge, molt, call, mate, lay eggs and die. There is no simplification to life (death, we encompass). We know not of the life of the cicada other than in diagrams. I wish not my own life put into disposable sentences; my life is not one or the other – my right to hate is my freedom to love as it is to live and despise survival. Those, who have pressed their eager eye against a microscope – and witnessed! the tragic firework of single-celled organism cessation – there truly, is no summarisation to our ends. Oh! We find summarisations to the in between.

Summer. The cicada’s song.

The hedgehog, a spiny mammal in the Erinaceinae family, hibernates in the Winter months, hiding itself away from everyone and everything else.

It spirals into itself, curled up into a ball of spikes warning any and every kind of living being to stay away from it. Hedgehogs match the chill of the winter too, plunging themselves into 6 months of cold where they reduce their inner temperature to 5°C. Winter is brutal to the hedgehog: layers of ice, sheets of snow, and relentless bouts of sub-zero. Hedgehogs cannot maintain themselves in such dark, lonely, and cold conditions; this is why they hide.

I am not composed of four tiny, pawed legs nor a back flourished with keratin spikes, but I suppose the hedgehog and I are alike.

Wintertime is always a sharp and frigid reminder of my darkest chapters: months of icy, stinging pain and deadly isolation. I can bitterly remember all my personal hibernation during winter, just like a hedgehog: get through it, again and again. The willing of oneself away to a quiet, frozen husk buried within oneself, all alone. The memories of panic attacks, tears, moments spent collapsed on the floor. A hedgehog isn’t meant to hibernate forever, but what does it think during its first winter? It doesn’t know the summer sun will rise again nor that the winter isn’t made to last forever. Perhaps the very first winter, all a hedgehog can do is freeze and wonder. Some hedgehogs only live two years; they can spend an entire half of their life believing all they were destined for was to waste away in a glacier of time.

But then the sun rises. The days get longer. Hibernation finally ends. The hedgehog and I – we didn’t stay so broken.

Some memories are amazing. The mortality of living creatures is what makes them so stunning. Their purposes are all unique and serve the Earth in their own way. Hedgehogs are a lovely mix of all things sweet and summery: amiable, docile, content yet bursting with life. In the summer months, you can find how they are true spirits of peace and community, yet explorers of self – tiny paws skittering across threads of dirt and soil, wide eyes beaming at every sprout and woodchip, little nose ruffled by exciting scents. They feed on insects and help keep harmful pests from exploiting a garden. As if tiny fountains of life, they distribute seeds from here to hither and there to thither. Hedgehogs are rife with lessons to learn; they are governed by duty and seek not to overrun a garden, simply to complement it. Within their little worlds and ecosystems, all they seek is to balance and nourish it, embodiments of the sun, rain, and air. What a small but miraculous wonder it is – how they can thrive in a special way when in a healthy garden! However, hedgehogs are just like us. Toxic things aren’t healthy for us; an overgrown, rotten garden would only tear us both down.

There is no use in long, brown ferns and bushes marked berryless, dotted with cobwebs. The poor hedgehog would have to feed off insufficient pests and struggle to distribute seeds at the lack of them. Without a functional ecosystem, the hedgehog must beg the question: what even is there to balance and nourish? Surely not something so dead to start with. It is like a torturous maze to stumble through summer in a frenzied, parching haze only to retire into a depression for winter’s hibernation.

Sometimes the hedgehogs are helpless to this. Ecosystems can be elusive and hide their toxicity well. Behind every blooming flower can be a snide weed and behind every innocuous fawn can be a detrimental disease. I once collected flowers and fawns too. They would accompany me through winter and summer alike, innocently stripping me of every life force I had within me. The ugly truth about your environment is it is yours just as much as mine is mine. It’s painfully easy to overlook the flickers of wounding as you carry through with a steadied spine and heavy head. Every whisper of a flower: it's not a big deal, just get over it! alongside every fawn: what the hell is wrong with you? Relentless poking and poking and poking at a hedgehog can only end one way: they put their spikes up, they put themselves down.

Life is so short for a hedgehog. Even the longest they may live (5 years) is nothing but a flicker of a candle when compared to the glaring forest fire of our long, outstretched lives. The hopeless allure of light, attracting moths and flies, attracts their predator – the hedgehog – too. Whether the hedgehog or I, playing with fire is a dangerous but certain siren call. I wonder if the hedgehog and I somedays look up at the sky and wonder at the same time. What if the whole universe rained down on all those candles and all those forest fires? Would each and every last one be put out? Or would they simply burn brighter – forever and a half? Each day is a journey to convince oneself to stop dreaming of snuffing out the light.

When, for the very first time in my life, I encountered a healthy ecosystem – a rushing, vibrant, and beautiful garden – which had openly welcomed me, I never expected to exist within it so shamelessly and simply. Maybe it all started with a couple of Hello’s and the exchanging of a few Instagram accounts and numbers, but we found a way to take a few scraps of wood, seed, and water and build something more fulfilling than the destinations people spend a lifetime trekking towards.

Through the grapevine, I had received her @ and interacted every so often, shy as a hedgehog. However, just as the seasons shifted, I warmed up. Messages of Happy birthday! and Just wondering - what do you want to do with the rest of your life? worked more miracles than Mother Earth herself. Similarly, I had found his @ and shyly received his number. It’s fascinating how much a few green Facetime buttons and hurried texts can change a person’s life. Together, we continue to collect pieces of flora and fauna for this wonderful garden: our crazy text chain of literal chaos filled with meaningful exchanges and 36 Questions; our comical “Hot Room” and lunchtime conversation; our wanderings through Hilldale (our local mini-Hamptons) and Middleton, somehow ending up in a CVS. Like the hedgehog, I found myself spreading seeds through this garden – conversation starters, weekend plans, even things as thoughtless as buying matching plush animals and passing through the gates of a mustard museum – as well as doing my best to relieve it of its parasites – mediating meaningless arguments and keeping spirits high when circumstance felt low. The most magical part of a healthy ecosystem for the hedgehog is not just how seamlessly it may integrate and share itself, but how for every spread seed and every pest confrontation, the surrounding flora and fauna matched the hedgehog in its kind nature, going so far as to teach the hedgehog new ways to care for and cherish this garden.

In the right garden, no matter how short or long the life of the hedgehog and no matter which trials it was made to face (accounting even for hibernation), the hedgehog will live with meaning. We both will continue to sink our small hands into the dirt and give and give and give and take and give and take and give.

A light can be snuffed out at any time, but this will last – forever and a half.

First piece by Nat. Second piece by Anya.