'One Red Leaf' - Third place in the Wild Muse Nature Writing Prize

A Journey Through Grief, Nature, and Writing

"Trees grow slowly, imperceptibly, maintaining their inner balance. They know when to be cellularly still, when they expand, when to reduce their load and prioritize."

Vinitha: winning third place in the 2024 Wild Muse Nature Writing Prize

---

Over the next few months, I’ll be publishing some of the longlisted essays to the Wild Muse Nature Writing Prize for you to enjoy. Today’s piece also has a short Q&A with the author.

My hope is that you’ll be inspired now that we have opened the door for submissions for our 2025 prize.

Make sure you’re subscribed to be the first to know about new pieces as well as helpful podcasts.

This week I am sharing ‘One Red Leaf’ by Vinitha, which took third place in the 2024 prize.

This piece masterfully intertwines personal grief with the healing presence of nature. The narrative moves fluidly between the sterile, mechanical hospital environment and the vibrant natural world outside. Vinitha’s ability to find solace in trees, leaves, and earth gives the story a deeply lyrical and meditative quality.

I found thw writing to be raw, poetic, and profound, evoking a visceral connection to both loss and renewal. This depth of emotion, combined with an appreciation for the natural world, made it a worthy winner!

Vinitha will be joining me on the Wild Muse Podcast in May.

Now, I invite you to dive into this beautiful piece and enjoy the Q&A!

---

One Read Leaf

The curtain print is of leaves. Two dark brown leaves are alternated with one gold-beige leaf. I’ve not even looked to see through the windows that the curtains cover. What would they look out to? More buildings? On this side of the cascade of leaves is my mother, hooked onto a ventilator. The whooshing sound from the ventilator is soothing. It is easy to think this is her soft-snoring in bed. But she is hooked onto multiple support systems. Hospitals are hulking dementors—they have ways of sucking the joy out of your brain and body and soul. The machines beep, constantly. How quickly the brain and the body learn things. These sounds of alarm, no longer set off panic. This too has become part of the white noise.

In the background my sister speaks. Four of us were born of her. Four of us, same food, same economic circumstances, same lifestyles. Yet, we think and do things so differently. We don’t even like each other too much.

We clean her down, my sister, two nurses and I. Her breasts, deflated with age, are still beautiful. Her back, unscarred, is alabaster. I remind myself that we came out of her, through her. When we change her clothes, she lies there, so vulnerable, so disconnected, this woman who was so particular about not being seen naked. I remember how she let me bathe her last week, for the first time. I ought to have gauged how ill she was when she let me undress her. She was wearing a pale green night gown with a print of purple flowers on it.

My mother loved flowers. But more than flowers she loved trees and shrubs and leaves. She was an amateur botanist, trained by her grandmother who used to collect leaves, herbs, roots, bark of trees, the skin and seeds of edible and inedible fruit, and sell them to doctors, healers, and alternative medical practitioners. My mother would go for a walk wherever she was and could identify trees, shrubs and herbs growing in the wild or in concretized streets. I grew up with this and never realised what a privilege it was to be with someone who was a sorceress.

My mom was a witch, an alchemist. Like a tribal, she was born with the skill to know how much to take from trees; how to take and perpetuate thriving while taking. How to pinch leaves, how much to tweak off, what to do with living flowers without de-stalking them and how to make use of dead flowers.... This list could go on. I have barely understood the range and depth of all that my mother knew.

The BiPAP machine my mom is on, stands there quiet, inscrutable. But the oximeter machine my mother is connected to gives off shrill whistles when the oxygen drops. A patient of atrial fibrillation that has gone crazier, the machine is alarming and noisy and I am so remorseful. AF has been part of her life for some time now. She would say, “My heart is racing” to which I would respond, differently, according to my mood with, “Have you done pranayama?” “You’ve just been to the cardiologist, what did he say?” “You’ve just gone to the cardiologist, mom! You are doing okay!” Why did I not pay more attention? Why could I not have been kinder? I try not to think of her smiling or hobbling to cook my favourite meal. If I do, I’ll unravel. I cannot unravel right now.

Truth is, my mother is dying. I knew this when I rushed her to the hospital a few days ago. From the time she had the stroke, she went on having seizure after seizure, until she was medically paralyzed and intubated.

“I’m here for her injection.” I spin around. We have moved my mom from the CCU to a room so that we could spend more time with her, now that we know that there is no way for her to recover from the stroke, especially since we chose not to go with craniotomy. The oedema has set in but my 86-year-old mom, already on blood thinners and now suffering from pneumonia, is no candidate for any major surgery.

And now, I won’t have time. I have wanted to take time off to learn her magical cooking. I have told myself I would get a book commissioned on trees and healing and then ‘officially’ spend time with her, listening to her download all that she has learnt and knows and practised. It is too late now. One part of me wants her to wake up so that I can gather her preciousness and store it for generations to come. Another part of me knows I must pray that she moves on—she is suffering too much.

My mom is one of the most resourceful people I know. I also know that once she decides something, the universe bends to her will.

Stay mom!

It’s okay, you can go mom!

The nurse walks in, smiles at me and heads to add the injection into the IV. My mother’s hands are swollen. The IV moves sluggishly. Her veins need to be flushed before each injection because nothing seems to move forward in her swollen blood vessels. My comatose mother only responds to pain by flinching.

I stand by her, holding her hot, swollen hands, my teeth gritted, my jaws clenched. I look at the nurse with pleading eyes. Please be gentle. But they are. Injection done, the nurse walks off briskly. I want to distract myself. Hospitals have a way to blend day and night into one swirling, endless cycle. What day are we on? I move to the curtains, telling myself that I ought to look out of the window.

Even as I part the leaf-printed curtain I am steadying my heart from disappointment. Dripping pipes, the backs of tall concrete buildings, rust and garbage? What would I see? I almost recoil when, the thick, black-out curtains part and, I see foliage. Coconut fronds lit by the afternoon sun, creepers with neon green tender leaves that weave out of a tapestry of shrubs, the shiny leaves of the jackfruit tree, these are what I see. A wild almond tree with its platter -large leaves, is so close that if I could open the window, I would be able to reach out and touch its leaves. Most of the leaves of the wild almond tree are green but, like poetry, in between these, there are deep red leaves.

The door opens again. I turn around, feeling calmer. There are three people with a machine. They need to take a chest X Ray. No, I cannot stay in the room. I pick the hospital pass, my wallet and my phone, and step out. They’ll take time. Enough time for me to hurry down. I want to find that grove. I want to remove my shoes and walk bare feet and pick some of the red leaves that have dropped from the tree.

Big things are too overwhelming. I want to do little things like looking at the veins of the leaves and caress them. I want things I can feel under the sole of my feet. I want to stay with the coolness of moist earth. I want to inhale the scent of crushed leaves. I want to run my hands on the trunk of trees and look at the browns and greys of tree-bark. I have rubbed down my mother’s smooth back. The fissures and bumps of a tree trunk will be a relief.

Kochi, where I am, is a small island city loosely made of a group of islands. In the last ten years that I have been away, the sleepy town has become a busy metro. Malls and high-rises closely pack the length of roads. Very little remains untouched by greed or progress. And yet, there are bits and pieces of space that still retain the wild. My mother, loved the wild.

The hospital my mother is in, lies at the centre of a busy crossroad. All three sides are flanked by traffic. I move anticlockwise, looking at the 20 storeyed building and calculating where my mother’s room is and where the leafy place outside her room window could be. I find it in 2 minutes. Behind the hospital is a plot with a tiny gate that is unlocked. I walk in, looking around. Is this a private plot. Will someone shout at me?

The honking of traffic is already lower. I take my shoes off and look down as I walk to the centre of the plot. Right next to the plot, the hospital looms high. I look up, counting the floors, wondering which is the window I looked out through. It rains in Kerala twice a year and it is hot all the time. Despite the ever-growing concrete, trees, flowers, and fruit burst from every crevice possible.

I find the wild almond tree and walk towards it. There are two more of these and the floor of the plot is scattered with red, orange and yellow leaves. I look carefully, choosing which leaf I want to take back with me.

Trees grow slowly, imperceptibly, maintaining their inner balance. They know when to be cellularly still, when they expand, when to reduce their load and to prioritize. As they shed leaves and grow new ones, as they prepare for fruiting and flowering, they absorb, they love; they teach philosophy through their indiscriminate generosity. My mother is beside me. We look for leaves together. She loved every tree. They knew her as well.

I hear the distant beeping of machines. Persistent. I pick a leaf and walk out unhurriedly.

I know what to do when I return to the room in the hospital where my mother lies, hooked to machines. Grounded and earthed in the presence of trees in a tiny plot outside the hospital, I will budget my strength and be. All I need inside the hospital is right outside. Hold on, I tell myself, as I walk back to the elevator, one red leaf in hand.

---

‘Reflections on Writing and Witnessing’ a short Q&A with Vinitha

What inspired you to write your piece, and how did you approach capturing the interplay between the human experience and the natural world in your narrative?

From the time I received the invitation to write, to the time I actually wrote the piece, too many things happened. From travelling reluctantly to take care of my mom who, at that time, was down with a cough, to rushing her to the closest hospital after witnessing a stroke, to putting her on life-support and then to deciding to take her off life-support—this was the foreground and my backdrop of the ten days that I came across the Wild Muse Prize. There was too much happening for me to grieve so when the opportunity came, I think there was nothing I could write but this. Inside the place I was in I was witnessing the end of life and outside was life going on and on—bright, gentle and magnificent.

What challenges did you face in crafting your entry, and how did you overcome them to create such a vivid and evocative piece?

Time was my only challenge. I had written nothing on the 15^th when I was reminded that I had only up till 9 pm GMT. And so, I sat down and poured on paper. I wonder now, if witnessing death wasn’t where I was at the time I wrote the piece, what would I have written. I don’t have an answer to it.

What role does nature play in your life and creative process, and how do you think immersing oneself in nature can influence storytelling?

I discovered the term: slow looking a few months ago. This is what I do on a daily basis. I have no idea if you know anything about the city I live in. Mumbai is a mass of concrete structures, (it also houses the biggest slum in Asia) and infrastructure in this city, often called ‘Maximum City’, is a whole other thing. And yet. I walk every morning, finding beauty in this indescribable city, through nature that co-exists despite the concrete. This is my grounding time. I look, pause, take pictures and walk on, identifying trees, birds, flowers, bird calls and fragrances. I seldom take the same route and I always find beauty. I use this to write. I think most of everything I want to say I learn from just being. Nature - it’s stillness, its generosity, its wisdom, its rage, its magnificence - constantly inspires.

---

What speaks to you?

Does anything in One Red Lead resonate with you? Vinitha and I would love to hear from you in the comments!

Please share your thoughts below.