Worried that his two-and-a-half-year-old son’s imagination was being curtailed by the walls and ceilings of urban life, and bribed by photographs of the place on the internet, my brother took us to a forest resort a few years ago. The forest was to be a pill. The little boy was attracted and repelled by the forest in equal measure — his excitement was annotated by the fear of darkness inside the forest reserve.

At day-end, after his tiny heels could no longer keep up with his unregimented curiosity, I took him to The Honey Hunter , a children’s book on the Sunderbans by Karthika Nair with illustrations by Joelle Jolivet. Set in the Sunderbans, literally the “beautiful forest”, a mangrove forest shared by Bengal and Bangladesh, it is the story of little Shonu. Son of a shrimp-farmer mother and a honey-collector father, Shonu loved honey. Though it was a life of hardship, Shonu, like the Sunderbans itself, was content and happy. Until the year the seasons turned topsy-turvy. Cyclones “ravaged the forests, uprooting trees and drowning animals”, and “Shonu and his family moved home three times in two months, rowing from one island to another as the waters rose”. There was very little to eat — dry rotis or boiled rice with only salt and chillies. When such food became difficult to swallow, Shonu imagined the taste of honey, honey with everything, “honey with roti. Honey with rice and milk — like kheer. Honey with hilsa fish — yummm. Honey scooped out of a jar with a golpata leaf spoon, the way you eat jam”, but there was no honey to be had.

For honey is a distillation of the natural cycles inside a forest, it is the taste of tree-time. Unlike sugar granules, the ready-made sweetness available to us through industrial production, the taste of honey is a parable about patience and nature’s time. Shonu’s father warned him about the follies and danger of untimeliness in collecting honey, about bees building houses, gathering food, and generally living their lives attuned to the seasons, that disobedience to this rhythm of time angered even “He-Whose-Name-Must-Not-Be-Taken”, Dakkhin Rai. All this my nephew heard patiently, and when I eventually turned to the page where there was a full-page illustration of Bonbibi, literally the “woman of the forest”, the little boy watched agape. In glorious spring-pink and end-of-night-blue, Bonbibi stood with her weapons in hand, her feet on a half-man-half-animal enemy.

Who was this woman, this most powerful spirit of the Sunderbans? “Daughter of Fakir Ibrahim, Sister of Shah Jongali, Bonbibi is the Guardian Deity of the Sundarban”.

But the little boy had found a new love — where was Shonu, he asked. I turned the pages to show him a hungry and greedy Shonu — he’d entered the forest and was now plundering the beehives for honey. And there was Dakkhin Rai, in his favourite disguise as a Royal Bengal Tiger, about to swallow little Shonu. My nephew was worried. The tiger wanted to kill the little boy, but Bonbibi was arguing on his behalf. Bonbibi punishes him with something far more difficult than death — Shonu must try and reverse the harm he has caused the bees and the ecosystem of the forest.

There, in the clearing, amidst all the hives, she asked him to stand with his arms outstretched towards the sky, and promised to take him home when the rains came. Then Bonbibi touched his feet and his forehead with her silver trident and leant down and whispered to the earth.

Shonu saw tiger ferns and mud swirl up all around him, faster and faster, until he was nothing but a kaleidoscope of green and brown. His feet began drilling into the soil, deeper and wider, seeing water, pushing pebbles out of the way, wrapping themselves around stones, and sprouting curly root hair. It was a little ticklish. He became heavier as his legs fused together into a trunk; then his chest shot upward, up, high above his head, which was tucked safely away around his tummy, now a slender, woody tummy lined with bark.

Shonu is turned into a hibiscus plant, a favourite of the bees. Weary of feeding honey to the bees, “he couldn’t even put his feet up and rest, only tuck in the leaves, fold up the flowers and doze as best as he could, standing up”.

A few months ago, when I tried to introduce him to the taste of the sleeping hibiscus, teaching him to suck its sweetness, my nephew refused. “This is for the bees,” he said, reminding me of Shonu’s mistake. Before I could make out whether the morality of Nair’s story had had its effect on him, he gave me another reason: “I don’t want to be a tree.”

It hadn’t ever occurred to me that that desire too might save the world.

Sumana Roy , author of How I Became a Tree, writes from Siliguri; @SumanaSiliguri

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