Conjuring a Landscape

A novel rarely begins with a plot.

- Vikas Kumar Jha

It begins with a landscape, not the visible one before our eyes but the shimmer of a place half-formed in the mind, waiting for the world to reveal its counterpart. I realised this again after finishing McCluskieganj. That novel demanded emotional excavation and left behind a hollowness I carried without knowing what might fill it.

When a story ends, a writer steps into a season of searching. We begin to look outward, not for a destination, but for resonance, for a geography that answers questions we have not yet learned to phrase. It was in this state of quiet unravelling that I boarded the Mangala Lakshadweep Express with my son, headed for Udupi for his engineering counselling. The journey stretched across nearly half the country.

The train was long and the conversations longer, and somewhere between Delhi and Karnataka, a young man from Malpe began speaking about Agumbe, a rainforest village tucked into the Western Ghats, known as the King Cobra capital and the filming location of Shankar Nag's Malgudi Days. This detail arrived with unexpected force. A fictional village from childhood television, a world crafted by R.K. Narayan's imagination, had taken spatial form in real geography. It felt as if a memory from the past had stepped out of fiction and settled beside me in the rattling train compartment.

Even before I saw Agumbe, something inside me stirred. Landscape always arrives first as emotion. It is recognition rather than knowledge. It is intuition rather than intention. I sensed The possibility that this place, which I had not yet visited, might be the one my next story was already leaning toward.