The net touches water, and the world rearranges itself. One cast, clean, confident, and the backwaters split into neat squares, each holding its own slight glint of sky. I often watch the fishermen; the gesture feels ancestral, almost liturgical. A single sweep of rope and weight splits the surface into geometry. This is where I first learn the soundless authority of division.
Now, in Wayanad, the memory returns each time we ride through the six-kilometre stretch we call Totoro’s road. Here, the splitting is immense. The land lies open like a vast sheet of water, and God (if God has ever been a fisherman) seems to have thrown a net wide enough to reach the horizon. Mud lanes run like grid lines; paddy fields held in perfect squares; a harvest of earth shaped by human will.
On the forest side of this road, the tribe gathers what the season gives: roots, greens, and fallen fruits. No hewing. No measured squares. Only a practised listening to the land’s pulse. On the other side, cultivation repeats its tidy pattern. We traverse these two worlds daily, straddling them with our bike, plaiting the cultivated and the freely reaped in a single passing breath.
twilight
helios and selene
cleave time
*Yugma is a Sanskrit word meaning ‘convergence.’