A collection of three picturesque novellas comprise Nirmal Ghosh’s new book Blue Sky, White Cloud –– an eponymous story about two geese in Mongolia, a male elephant on the banks of the river Brahmaputra in River Storm and a female leopard in Spirit of the Hills. Ghosh who is a wildlife conservationist himself, has written his prose straight from the heart, getting inside the minds of the animals whose personal stories he chose to document and imagine in his tales. So rich and vibrant is his text that one can get transported into the wild with the turn of every page.
In River Storm, Debesh is seen traversing the Indo-Malayan rainforest through eastern India and Burma, following an elusive tusker with whom he forms a bond. The readers are taken on a splendid journey of the elephant’s life from his birth to his many travels across the land. While Debesh has been tasked by the government to kill the elephant for some ill-fated encounters with humankind, Debesh is able to read his mind and feel seen by the mammal. The first novella in this series of three is a testament to the connections of nature with humans and animals in a giant cosmic dance of survival.
In the Spirit of the Hills, Hira Singh is a guard in the Nadia Wildlife Sanctuary where he encounters a female leopard. Climate change and crisis remains at the forefront of this novella as the leopard suffers shrinkage of her land. Ghosh builds a narrative where Hira Singh’s fate is similarly entwined like the leopard’s and love and loss form an intrinsic bond in both the creature’s lives. In the novella Blue Sky, White Cloud Nadia, a wildlife biologist is seen travelling to Mongolia to study geese and subsequently tags two geese who she names Blue Sky and White Cloud. She forms a friendship with the minister of state for the environment, Vivek, and takes him on an adventure that can have life-changing repercussions on the immediate society around them. A socially aware collection of tales, Ghosh’s book is pertinent to the times and a journey towards empathy that is the need of the hour.
