Buried

BURIED This is strange. I study the points I had marked on the map of Karnataka. My careful pencil traces inform me of the path the plants I had tagged,had taken in the last few days. And it was disconcerting. I look back at the neat lines of text on my laptop screen and the dates and distances they display. But again, I find no errors. Ofcourse, I never made mistakes.

I rub my beard and sigh, stretching my neck. The pencil I had been looking for slipped from its unsteady perch between my glasses and ears and clattered down to the floor. I let it roll under my desk. The steaming cup of coffee near my laptop grows cold as I stare at a map. The evening creeps in, bringing with it the sounds of a curious five year old boy standing on his toes to peer into the keyhole of his grandfather’s home-office. Hearing my wife yell that they had returned, I finally move. I shut down my laptop with a decisive snap and carry it out of my office. My grandson, Vinnie is face-down on the carpet, evidently having tried to look under the door. I hold out my arm to pull him up. After depositing my laptop in the bedroom, I help my wife set-up the table for dinner.

The plants keep flitting through my thoughts. During dinner, I catch myself tracing the pattern I had seen on the map, through the gravy – a swirl of arrows that spin around in a half circle, finally pointing back towards where they had started.

But why? It went against everything that was believed of the plants’ movements. Perhaps, my data was incorrect. Maybe I had finally begun making mistakes. If word got out, my reputation would be ruined.

Unless.

Everyone else was wrong.

Something nudges my foot under the table. My wife raises her eyebrows at me, and then looks at my plate of food which has been barely touched. “You’re doing it again, grandpa”, Vinnie giggles. “Oh. Sorry”, I smile at him over the table and bring my focus back to dinner.

“We are getting some very interesting results for the slogan competition at work”, my wife says over her bowl of dessert. Like other businesses around town, the law firm she was running had begun to consider changing their names and logos. Phrases like ‘firmly rooted’ and ‘plant your trust in us’ lose their meaning when plants can move. Initially these businesses had considered rebranding when their marketing teams warned them of the floundering faith of consumers in their services. As plants moved all over the world, tending to crowd around beaches and skyscrapers, the public had descended deeper into confusion.

Possibilities erupted and as the dust settled; the plants emerged, cloaked neatly under a label of ‘the saviours of humankind’. Some people began to talk about the plants eventually forming a wall along the coast to hold against the raging waves of the sea. Some talked about roots burrowing down into the sands and holding the seabed firmly. Others spoke about the new canopies that formed as forests had begun to rearrange themselves and of how they would hide humans from the radar of aliens.

All of them talked about how fascinating and frightening the phenomenon was.

While people talked, experts argued. Contradicting theories and conspiracies and hypotheses had been spreading across the world. Discussions rose into heated debate. I am pretty sure

there was even a group who had tried to debunk Darwin, sometime in March.

As tempers cooled down and the plants kept moving, among the flurry of experimenting, a trend grew into existence. The scientific world, strongly backed by the Governments, began to reach a consensus. The people’s story, with the media gleefully marching in front of it, took hold.

The outliers were ignored and gradually, the focus shifted from finding an explanation towards identifying the next steps to take.

The media’s explanations of the plants caring for their human counterparts did stretch too thin at places. The carefully constructed regimen of funding protocols kept the light from shining too long on them. I had heard of independent researchers fighting their way through itbut their voices were mere echoes past the clamouring praises sung about the plants.

With time, faith in the plant kingdom rose. In just a few months from when the phenomenon had started, the ideology of plant-saviours had gained enough traction for the plants to be kept carefully guarded from human violation. Riots would streak the streets at hints of corporate sniffing around plants that had grown into their lands. Hundreds of beach resorts, skyscraper builders and land owners were promptly sued for attempting to clear the plants. Many of those lawsuits, I must add, were handled by my wife’s own law firm.Like them, businesses switched to weaving subtle plant-based puns into their branding.

For months, I had let the world argue. I had put the plants and all that which surrounded them to the back of my mind. But every morning, I found myself staring at the green expanse that freshly coated the steel of the gates of the apartment we lived in. A few weeks ago, when I was looking out of the balcony, to the dozen floors below us, some tendrils of leaves drifted into my line of sight. I was pretty sure I had not seen them the previous day. They had been stealthily working their way up the apartment. But what purpose would this serve?

“Fine”, I muttered to the leaf. “You have my attention”.

I headed to my home-office and switched on my laptop. It appeared that my retirement had sent itself to an early grave.

I worked for weeks, until all of my clothes were speckled with soil and shirt cuffs dotted with chlorophyll, until fine lines etched themselves around my eyes and my pollen allergies forgot their existence, until I had collected enough data. After congratulating myself and musing over a carnivorous diet, I ran my data past a few basic screens in an attempt to find some semblance of structure within the numbers. When this yielded no results, I continued trying, with models of increasing complexity (and increasing propensity to incite frustration).

But, I had yet had no luck. I had never expected such a bizarre phenomenon to be easy to work with but I had had hopes for myself. After all, I never made mistakes.

Nodding absently to Vinnie as he readied himself for bed, I creep back into my office. I let my latest model try to fit the data and wait.

I jolt awake to Vinnie trying to clamber up onto my lap. I reach for my glasses before he can.

Both of us stare at the glaring glow of my laptop screen, loudly proclaiming another failed model.

“That looks pretty”, Vinnie says, his big eyes taking in the multitude of points the scatter plot shows.

“You want to see something nicer?”, I ask him. I reach over the top of his bed-head to type a few lines of code. The computer hums. In a few seconds, a bunch of graphs pop up on my screen, each with clusters of a different colour. Vinnie shakes his head at me. Of course, he likes the messier version better.

He climbs down my lap and asks me to guess what was happening in a few hours. I tell him I don’t know. I hope the answer is coffee. “Papa and mama are coming back today!”, he exclaims.

Ah, that was why he was awake so early. I guide him over to the bathroom and we brush our teeth. The graphs we had seen tug at my brain, seeking my thoughts.

I make breakfast for us while my wife sleeps in. Vinnie keeps talking about his parents and the gifts they had promised him. My daughter and son-in-law had gone to Germany for a Very Important Business Meeting that would take an entire week. Apparently, their meetings also required them to take photos at several tourist locations. Well, what did I know about journalists?

Vinnie wakes his grandmother up and they watch TV while I try to clean up the data some more. Something about it doesn’t sit right with me. The number of plants along the beaches had stopped increasing in the past two weeks. Traces of movement had been detected but the plant densities had largely remained constant. People assumed that this meant the plants had reached their goals.

But then why did my most accurate models break under this assumption that the plants had stopped moving?

A knock on the door breaks through my concentration. Vinnie runs up to hug his parents. I rise and help them with their bags. ‘It’s so good to be back home’, my daughter says. ‘But you simply must go see Germany. It’s beautiful‘, she continues. She tells us of how their photos have persuaded her friends’ families to consider booking tickets too. One was even leaving today. We smile at her brightly, tell her we’ll think about it. It would be nice to go somewhere new.

Vinnie pokes his grandmother’s arm, a silent reminder of a promise they have made. So she speaks up. ‘I hope you brought back a sea-shell’. She had told Vinnie about how you could hear the sea when you placed a conch close to your ear and he had promptly declared it magic.

Vinnie’s father starts to dig through his backpack while he watches eagerly. I narrow my eyes at them.

The map flashes in my mind.

I rush over to the balcony. The leaves trailing along the walls of the apartment lift lazily in the wind. I examine one of them and it is just as I thought. The leaf has three striations but the one I saw the other day had far more, a very closely related species but different enough to harbour drastically different implications. I lock myself in my room. I go over the data manually and begin to group them separately. So far, I had been tracking down groups of plant populations.

This time, I select a few and track their progress over the city. As confirmed by other scientists, the plants moved fairly rapidly overnight, in increments that had been mapped and recorded carefully. But the goal of movement itself had been assumed to have been one for survival by evolutionists and for the protection of humans by the public and later, had been swept neatly under the rug.

My observations do not line up with any of those ideas. I frown and erase the previous pencil marks on my map. I plot the path this tiny group of plants took. I see a clearer semi-circle, an arrow returning to its point of origin. I use my computer to plot the same for several more small groups of plants. The morning presses on. I plot the variations in group movements over time.

I look at the probabilities my computer predicts. It is just close enough to one to be promising.

I make more calculations and the more time I spend at my desk, the more I am convinced. The errors and variances and correlations I obtain, paint an explanation for the high similarities in movement patterns between plants from the same habitat. They whispera story just for me to understand. And when I do, my pencil clatters to the ground.

Often, the simplest explanation is the closest to the truth. A chuckle leaves my mouth, erupting into full-blown laughter and that is how my family finds me – a man bowled over by the simplest explanation of them all. The plants were moving across the world, to see the world. Humans, who tended to personalize everything, had refused to acknowledge the humanity of the spectacular phenomenon that had occurred.

I falter. I look up at my concerned wife and think about the lawsuits she oversees – the hundreds of cases her firm has won and the companies they had sued for disturbing the plants. I look at Vinnie, who is still holding his father’s passport in his hand and think about his dreams of going to the sea. I think about the sheer amount of experience and skills of researchers around the world, and imagine furtive glances and imperceptible shakes of the head, the controlled erasure of incriminating graphs and correlation coefficients, notes hurriedly stuffed into shredders. I imagine truth buried deep, invisible and immovable. I make a decision. I tell my family, I have failed. ***End***