Reading with Frontline | Anusua Mukherjee
The HinduPublished : Dec 21, 2024 14:20 IST - 4 MINS READ Dear Reader, In my search for alternative realms to inhabit, I think I have found a home in the world of plants and trees. German forester Peter Wohlleben’s book, The Hidden Life of Trees, published in 2015, quickly attained cult status by putting forward the hypothesis of a “wood-wide web”, an underground network of microbes running through forests that enables trees to communicate with one another. The book’s science fiction/ speculative fiction potentials are also high, for instance, when the text says, “There are more organisms living in one handful of this soil than there are humans living on earth.” Most of these beings are invisible to the naked eye and some of them do not even have names yet, but “the forest life cycle—and the society we live in—depends on them.” Here I can imagine a story of a yet-unnamed microbe working industriously in a yet-unseen laboratory to keep the world going, unbeknownst to us. I recently came across one of his short stories titled “Palatak Tufan“, first published in 1896 as “Niruddesher Kahini”.
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