Non-Fiction
Growing a Sky-heart / Nikita Azad
Image by the author.
Five miles from my flat in Oxford stands Wytham Woods, an ancient woodland believed to date back to the last Ice-age. Once, walking deep inside the prehistoric woods, a friend and I halted at the foot of a mysterious tree. Its leaves were beech-like, but its trunk appeared to my friend like an elephant’s foot. It resembled a ginger root too, with nodes and buds sprouting from its trunk in all directions. Opposite the tree stood an ash, afflicted with ash dieback disease. We sighed and continued to stare at the dense canopy, still scanning the enigmatic tree for a name. Dappled sunlight caressed our sun-deprived bodies through a breach between the crowns of the two trees. From this little opening, we saw the clear blue sky on that unusually hot English summer day, a heart-shaped sky, nestled between a dying ash and a beech-like tree—a sky-heart.
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In my science textbook from grade five or six, there was a question: why is the daylight sky blue? This was my introduction to the sky, as something to be scrutinised. It didn’t help that I grew up in an industrial part of Jalandhar, my hometown in Punjab, India, where the sky was more grey, orange, and black than blue. For my child and teen self, the blue sky existed only in textbooks and sometimes, on hill stations that our family visited once a year. About the blue of the horizon, Rebecca Solnit says in her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, “This blue is the light that got lost.” The light that doesn’t reach us, that scatters in the air and the water, gives us the beauty of the world, she writes. But the blue quite literally never reached us. From the rooftop of my two-up two-down house, the horizon was a faint orange at sunset cut horizontally by multi-storey shoe, football, and glove factories that many of my friends’ parents worked at. Scorching heat in the day, plumes of smoke at twilight, and orange streetlights at night were all that remained of the sky at day’s end. A memory of the sky, a ghost.
Yet the sky is always present in my past, as it has been for earth-dwellers since the beginning of our planet. Our ancestors used the sky for navigation for centuries; for them, the sun kept the time and the stars showed the way. The fluctuating weathers of the sky determined their journeys and fates. People looked up to the sky for signs, knowledge, and wisdom. Some even mapped the night sky onto their minds. Knowing the sky was as important as knowing the land. It was a survival skill.
Today, though, we hardly know the sky. We may appreciate its majestic beauty, its many hues, its gifts and threats of breeze, rain, snow, and stars. And we may also have important information about the sky’s texture and composition. But I’m not sure if we know the sky in any meaningful way that stretches beyond the aesthetic and the instrumental. What is our relationship to the sky today and what does that say about us?
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Maggie Nelson wrote a book, an ode to the colour blue, Bluets. When she’d tell people that she was working on Bluets, they’d share the most interesting anecdotes and stories with her. These people who gave her ‘reports from the field’ she called her ‘blue correspondents’. I scoured the different geographical and cultural fields I inhabit in search of sky-correspondents.
In the Rig Veda, the sky is or has a deity, Dyauspitar, literally the ‘sky-father.’ The scholars of Proto-Indo-European peoples, our hypothetical prehistoric ancestors believed to have lived in Eurasia during the late Neolithic age, have theorized that Dyauspitar shares etymological roots with Zeus, the Greek sky deity, and Jupiter, the Roman sky deity. Dyauspitar is also called heaven and with Prithvi (lit. earth) as his consort, or wife, he creates the universe. Together, they have many children including the sun, the fire, and the rain. The sky-father is always a paternalistic figure in the creation myth of the Vedas, as well as in Greek and Roman mythology.
The sky-fathers are omniscient and judgemental. If they’re not worshipped or feared, they feel enraged and unleash their wrath on humans. Once, as the Mahabharata narrates, the god Krishna convinced the people of his village, Gokula, to stop worshipping Indra, the chief sky-god and the god of rain. Indra responded with much fury and brought thunder and torrential rain to Gokula. Krishna had to take shelter under the mountain Govardhana to save everyone. The moral: to be under the sky is to exist at the mercy of the sky god(s).
The sky may be charitable for it bestows rain and sunshine, but it’s also unpredictable and needs appeasing. In Punjabi folklore, there are more songs and myths about the monsoon than any other season or even being of the natural world. The fate of our agrarian land with water-intensive crops, such as paddy, rests on the right timing and nature of rain. A folksong begins, ‘Rabba Rabba meeh varsa, sadi kothi dane paa,’ which roughly translates to, ‘God oh God, give us rain, shower our home with food-grains.’ Punjab can also get extremely hot in the summer, the pre-monsoon months, with barely a cloud in the white skies. People wait for the sky to pour anxiously. As kids, my sister and I used to stare at the sky from our rooftop and beg for rain. We believed that if you rub the knuckles of your right hand with those of your left hand, it begins to rain. I don’t know how this myth reached us, but it made us feel important, as if we had a say in the sky’s arrangements, as if we were part of a universe in which the sky was animate and ours to speak to.
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A few months ago, I visited Cornwall with my husband. With the beautiful turquoise sea to our right, we walked on the edges of the hills that make up the Southwest Coast along Porthkidney Sands. Just as we were about to descend to the beach near Carbis Bay, we saw to our right a small flight of stairs sinking into the hill. My husband descended the steps and entered a dark room. Outside, several pine trees had enshrouded the rooftop of the room, but inside, it could hold five to six people. And then we noticed the sea-facing wall of the room. It had three rectangular holes, wide enough to attack an enemy at sea or perhaps in the sky, if using a gun. It could have been a World War II structure, a dugout, or a surveillance site, constructed when the American troops arrived in Cornwall as allied forces to help defeat the Germans. We thought about all those men looking at the gorgeous sea and the stunning sky and hoping to make it alive.
In 1921, Giulio Douhet, former Director of Aviation of the Italian army, wrote a book, The Command of the Air. His book theorised that the sky will become the most important battlefield in future wars. Douhet proposed that along with aircraft bases, urban centres and capitals should be bombed during the war to undermine civilian morale. The military powers of the WWII world were only too quick to test and implement his theory. It is estimated that between September 1940 and May 1941, about one-third of London was lost to the Blitz, the German aerial bombing campaign against the UK that killed thousands and left even more homeless.
But aerial warfare is not just an issue of the past. A century later, the military powers of the world use the sky to variously attack Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen. In 2018, research conducted by the Brown University’s Costs of War project found that ‘801,000 people have died due to direct war violence,’ owing to conflicts that arose after the U.S. War on Terror in 2001. For those who lived during WWII, or who presently reside in nations regularly bombed, what does the sky represent? Will the sky bring drones, bombs, toxic chemicals, or all of these?
Beyond destroying human lives, the wars over air supremacy since WWII have also punctured the very fabric of the sky. The toxins released into the air and the soil pose a grave threat to local ecosystems, wildlife, and biodiversity. Our actions have caused massive military pollution, environmental damage, and loss of geological information about our planet. Human interventions, war included, have drastically changed the air quality in several local habitats around the world. New Delhi is one of the worst-hit places. I remember living in Delhi in my early twenties, waiting and waiting for the smog to clear up and the sunlight to reach my bones.
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My sky correspondents led me to two major ways in which the sky has featured in the history of Homo Sapiens: as a natural resource to be used and extracted, and as a dangerous unknown to be worshipped and feared. But the sky has also exceeded and transcended these relationalities over the centuries. In her essay ‘Poetry and the Moon’, Mary Ruefle writes, ‘The moon is very clearly the Other – capital O, full moon O – in relationship to which we stand and exist. Every glance at the moon, whatever phase, pinpoints our existence on earth. For the sky is the only phenomenon that can be seen from all points on earth.’ She calls this realisation, borrowing from Paul Auster’s novel Moon Palace, ‘You there – Me here.’
The sky may be out there, but it invites us to wonder at it, wander with it. As Gene Tracy says in his essay, ‘Sky Readers,’ ‘Knowing where you are in the world is fundamental to knowing who you are.’ For our ancestors, this ‘where’ wasn’t a plot of land which could change dramatically due to floods, droughts, or scarcity of food, but the sky itself. And knowing the sky was also knowing oneself. The fifteenth-century poet, saint, spiritual thinker and innovator, commonly known as the founder of Sikhism, Baba Nanak, travelled the whole of present-day South Asia and Middle Asia with his Muslim friend, Bhai Mardana. Together, they walked over 28,000 km, composing poems and music along the way. It’s not too difficult to imagine that Nanak and Mardana were very good at directions, at reading the landscape as well as the sky. Wherever they went, the sky went with them, meaning that they never lost their sense of where and who they were. But, as Haroon Khalid suggests in his book Walking with Nanak, Nanak’s sense of self wasn’t restricted to where he came from. Born into a Hindu family, Nanak studied Islam and read widely in Persian, Sanskrit, Arabic, and Punjabi. He condemned the casteist Hindu society in his poems and the rule of the Mughal emperor Babur in his epic poem, Baburnama. If Baba Nanak’s identity was rooted in always knowing his birthplace through the stars, his sense of self was also as boundless as the night-sky.
My primary school in Jalandhar was named after Baba Nanak, ‘Guru Nanak Public Primary School.’ Each morning, students from grades one to five queued in the tiny quad for the morning prayer. Grass under our feet, hands folded, eyes shut, we joined the choir and recited the Japji Sahib, a Sikh prayer composed by Baba Nanak himself. At the end of it, we sang a salok, a four-quarter-verse couplet: ‘Pavan Guru Pani Pita Mata Dharat Mahat’, meaning ‘Air is my Guru, Water is my father, Earth is my eminent mother.’ Baba Nanak famously questioned religion, caste, and gender-based inequalities in South Asia. He refused to belong to any religious orthodoxy of his time and instead put his faith in the elements of the world—air, water, and earth. For him, every entity in the universe was animate, not as an arrogant deity, but like a living being to have a relationship with. Through his verse in the Japji Sahib, he admits us into a cosmic relationship with the universe, one that is intimate, ancestral, and familial. To the sky, Baba Nanak might say, ‘You there – Me here’ but also all of us here, together on a journey. Let us accompany each other, let us learn from one another.
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‘What are the stakes of striving to view the earth as if we were gods?’ asks the academic Jeffrey Jerome Cohen in his essay, ‘The Pull of the Sky.’ To achieve a viewpoint from the sky, which could also be a view from nowhere, is an ancient impulse, Cohen writes, tracing it in the work of Chaucer and the medieval writer Gerald of Wales. But, as he continues, the idea that the natural world and the sky was animate in the art of our ancestors—Nanak included—did not prevent them from harming the world or sky. Bringing the sky to the earth, if only in myth, has its dark side too: it allows us to stake a claim to that which we share but do not own. Once within our reach, the sky is not only the kingdom of gods but also a territory to conquer.
It doesn’t matter if the stories and myths we tell ourselves are fictional, for this fiction arrogates to us a right over the sky. My elliptical meanderings might make more sense if we juxtapose the history of folktales about the sky and the history of ozone depletion. For why, after centuries of storytelling about the sky, does the history of the sky feature loss and holes, not respect and capaciousness?
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Our stories, folktales, and creation myths are far from perfect. But, despite the obvious anthropomorphism, our ancestors, the Proto Indo-European people, got one thing right: we are the children of the sky. I don’t mean this in a paternalistic way, nor do I mean to anthropomorphise the sky. We are earth-dwellers, or earthlings, as the American astronomer Jill Tarter calls us. By reminding us that for any extraterrestrial species, we are first and foremost children of the earth, she urges us to take responsibility for our actions. Perhaps, we need a similar shift in our imaginings for the sky. What would it mean if we could call ourselves the creatures of the sky, without needing to turn the sky into a father figure or worse, control it?
It’s hard. The earth is something we touch, feel, listen to, and see. The earth is right here. But the sky is far away, mysterious, aloof. The impulse is to bring it here or go there, but what if we fought this desire? What if we made peace with the sky always staying a little mystifying, a little out of reach? What if we told ourselves a different story?
We may not need a sky-father, only a sky-heart. A piece of the sky stays with us wherever we go, as stardust, as rain, as sunlight, as mist. The sky-heart grows with us, and we grow around it. And if all of us carry sky-hearts within ourselves, can’t we learn to take care of them? Together, we may be able to create a new language for the sky, a new ontology that features the sky and all the species of our planet in a relationship of respect, gratitude, and friendship.
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In his poem, ‘I love you to the moon &’, the poet Chen Chen writes,
‘…, let’s wear
our sailor moon jean jackets while twirling in that lighter,
queerer moon gravity, let’s love each other
(so good) on the moon, let’s love
the moon
on the moon’
I’ve been on a journey in search of sky-hearts in this essay. Today, as an immigrant in post-Brexit Britain, the skies of this foreign land also denote displacement and danger for me. Yet, the sky’s promise of freedom remains eternal. To be free from the shackles that bind us on earth, which in my case include patriarchy, gender performativity, sexuality and racism. Its offer of flight. For Chen Chen too, the moon has a queerer gravity, one that doesn’t tether us to earth and its norms. But it’s more than escape. The poem calls us to love each other but also ‘the moon/ on the moon.’
In my early twenties, I joined a feminist organisation, Pinjra Tod, which means ‘break the cage.’ Its logo portrayed a bird flying out of its cage. It was a call to break the chains of patriarchy for the world to witness, to make a spectacle of our resistance. We demanded freedom from hostel timings, dress codes, and the general patriarchal behaviour of our educational institutions, including my college in Punjab.
It was during those long summer days, when we painted birds and skies on the walls of our college, that I began revering the sky. I started hungering for starry skies, textbook blue skies, lenticular clouds, purple sunsets, inky red dawns, pink twilights, sheets of rain, the fragrance of mist, and double rainbows. I urged the sky to open itself to me, to put on a show like it does in other parts of India and the world, but it didn’t. It couldn’t. Too much had happened to it. We’d done too much. Centuries of British colonialism, partition that halved Punjab’s rivers, the so-called green revolution that destroys agriculture and depletes water sources to this day, carelessly planned industries of ‘modern’ India, and overcrowded cities hardly left any room for the skies of my imaginations to come into light. Even in remote villages, the round-the-clock smoke from brickworks kept the sky at a distance.
The sky wasn’t free. It was cooped up, like us. But learning to care about the sky was more than longing for my freedom and more than a newfound love for the aesthetic beauty of our planet. It was a political call too. For people who’ve been colonized and marginalised in the past or continue to be so today, loving the sky or the natural world is neither far nor separate from vowing to oppose the powerful forces that are wreaking havoc on the planet. Our sky-hearts are thoroughly political.
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From the west-facing window of my flat in Oxford, I often worship the live, dynamic, beautiful painting that the sky is. Sometimes, late in the afternoon, the sun hides behind wool-like cumulus clouds such that it sends beams of golden, crepuscular light in all directions. I sit immobilized, glued to my couch. I wonder what Baba Nanak did when he saw the skies of his destinations and journeys, when he saw angelic clouds, dark desert skies, moonless nights, the milky way and the north star, thunder and lightning, orange and pink horizons, torrents of rain, hail and snow. His skies changed rapidly and dramatically with his journeys, but he never othered the sky; instead, he made it his companion, one full of surprises and miracles.
Nanak wrote, ‘Awwal Allah noor upaya, kudrat ke sab bandey/ ek noor te sab jag upjeya, kaun bhaley kau mandey?’ First, Allah created the light and from His nature, He created all mortal humans/ From the One light He created the entire universe, so who is good and who is bad?
For Nanak, we’re all born from the One light, the light of the universe, the light in the sky. This light is present in each of us, across races, genders, religions, nations, castes, classes, abilities. Nanak was a radical reformer who preached the message of love, equality, and social and political freedom for all his fellow humans. Through his travels both in the outer world and in his inner world, Nanak grew a sky-heart that was big enough to practice gratitude for the natural world and all its species. Maybe you and I can learn to grow a sky-heart too.