During the course of the pandemic, some writer friends stopped writing. Impossible, they told me. How could they? When the world was unrecognisable. When the shift between what was and what is was so sharp that it rendered their stories no longer tellable. This was at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis last year, with lockdown imposed across the globe. For a long while, they were paralysed.

Strangely, it wasn’t so for me. If only because I found that the conversations we were having, particularly around the ecological reasons why pandemics may occur – rampant deforestation, mindless mining of resources – resonated deeply with the novel I was working on. At its heart, the book asks the question: what is our relationship with our planet? And, of course, if we are to have any hope of containing or avoiding future outbreaks, this is a question we need to ask ourselves too.

If I tend to normally have quite a hectic writing schedule – one that resembles, rather unglamourously, a “nine to five job” – it was even more intense in those pandemic months in 2020. I was driven to my desk by rare energy, feeling as though even if I could do little else, I could write, and write a book that was strangely resonant of our times. It hadn’t been planned that way, considering the idea for the novel grew in my head as far back as 2014. I spent many summers at the British Library, the Kew Reading Room, and the Linnean Society library. You see, though never quite having ever been a “science” student, I was using botany as a way to explore the central theme of the novel – fixity versus fluidity, categorisation versus openness. You would find me reading middle school botany textbooks to brush up on the subject, watching endless “botany for beginners” videos.

But what truly helped was being forced to spend time in the small garden at our Delhi home. Months of lockdown meant Suresh ji, our trusted gardener, couldn’t visit, and so I was forced to step in to prune and pluck, to water the plants, and

try to keep the aphids at bay. Over those days, my study and my garden became inextricably linked, forging an umbilical connection – I would write and then step outside for a break, cup of tea in hand, watching to see how the plants were doing. Which ones needed watering, more light, or more shade. Every time a new leaf unfurled, it felt like a tiny miracle. Writing about the natural world meant seeing the natural world anew, and seeing it anew meant I was writing about it with a kind of particular attention I couldn’t bestow upon it before. In our small garden, despite the confinement and diminishment of lockdown, I realised there existed a connection to something larger – the seasons, light, sun, warmth, that the plants, and subsequently I, responded to. It became a space of growth and movement and expansion, and I took that learning back with me to my desk.

By the end of 2020, I had finished a draft of the book. Some things, however, were still not quite aligned, and I had little idea how to fix them – until I travelled home to Shillong in December to be with my parents (who I hadn’t been able to see for a year). We are lucky enough to live a little out of town, with a pine forest that spreads for miles behind our house. Here I found what I like to call a temporality for my characters – a slowness of time that allowed for the narrative to fall better into place. The voice of my character, who also travels back to the Northeast from Delhi, became sharper, somehow more authentic. On my walks through the forest, every afternoon, with the sun dappled through the trees, I grew to know her better. I learned to see clearer. Here, a sloping patch of green I would usually walk past with little more than a quick appreciative glance, became a galaxy – a rick variety of ferns, ten or more, and behind them, moss shaped like stars. It made me realise that truly, attention can come only with stillness, and perhaps this is why my pandemic novel couldn’t have been written at any time else.

Everything the Light Touches is forthcoming in India, US, and the UK in October 2022.

Janice Pariat is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Visual Arts. She is the author of three books, The Nine-Chambered Heart (2017), Seahorse (2014), and Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories (2012).