Where Did All The Rocks Go?
I was an avid rock collector during my childhood. One day, I stopped collecting rocks — and I thought they had disappeared from my life altogether. Turns out they never did go away.
This is a childhood picture of myself sitting at the foot of a white marble-veined gray mountain in Nakhal, a town in Northern Oman known for its hot-springs and fort. I haven’t visited it for years and I last remember going there on a seventh-grade school field-trip, where we made notes about the fort, including its horrid dungeons and waded through the decidedly un-hot springs. This photograph however was taken on a day-long family picnic to the town. While we probably also visited the fort and ritually dipped our feet in the lukewarm waters then too, what particularly leaps out to me from both the photograph and my library of memories is my sheer happiness at being in the company of a mountain.
When I was eight years old, I developed a mania for collecting rocks. In those days, I didn’t watch much TV and instead whiled away my time reading exhaustively, writing reams of poetry and short stories, and filling one sketch-book after another with water-colors. When I discovered Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, I also decided to start keeping a nature journal. I first tried bird-watching but gave that up pretty soon, too impatient and restless to cultivate the discipline of identifying, following, and contemplating a bird. Next came plants. My mother is a botanist and I would accompany her on seed-collecting expeditions for a paper she was working on, lugging along a guidebook to desert plants to identify the flora. But then, I was living in a desert, a desert which only exploded into incandescent fertility when it rained — which as it happened, occurred twice or thrice a year in Oman, if we were lucky. Sometimes, it did not rain at all. The plant obsession as swiftly arrived and vanished from my life as post-rain desert blooms.
The fact that I started collecting rocks is not particularly surprising considering Oman’s landscape. If you google Oman and geology, you will see a link somewhat superlatively describing it as a paradise of geology. Yet, paradise is an apt enough word given that its etymology is derived from the Persian word for walled garden. In that sense, Oman is certainly a fantastical and gorgeous garden of rocks, a landscape pulsating with geological fertility and narratives.
I grew up in an university campus encircled by mountains and built upon a hilly landscape. When I awakened in the morning, the first thing I saw were apricot-tinted mauve mountains in the distance. They changed color and texture all throughout the day and I could never decide whether they looked their most beautiful during dawn or sunrise. When I began exploring the hills then studding the campus, I started to encounter so many interesting and diverse-looking rocks that it but seemed natural to bring them back home. There were only so many that I could take with me in one go though — which happily meant that there were always more waiting to find me whenever I returned. I started to go on regular rock-hunting expeditions.
Unlike birds which swiftly vanished at the slightest sound of your presence or irritatingly evanescent post-rain plants, the rocks were always there. I would spend hours minutely examining and sorting through the rocks, as if I was shopping for fruits or vegetables at a grocery store, before finally selecting which ones I would eventually take back home. Many of them were firmly lodged in the soil and when I would finally pry them out, it was almost as if I was uprooting a tooth or a plant, which had been growing there for so long.
If the front-yard was a repository of my mother’s lovingly tended plants, I annexed a spot in the backyard to store my increasingly burgeoning rock-collection. After a while, I had accumulated so many rocks that the collection assumed the shape of a collapsed pyramid — and if I ever needed to find a rock, I would have to carefully pull it out lest the pyramid disintegrated altogether. In any case, I arranged my most prized rock finds on my room desk, where they shared space along with other current precious possessions.
My interest in rocks gradually became more academic, so to speak. I started frequenting my school library’s natural history section, determined to thoroughly educate myself about rocks. What essentially and honestly fascinated me about rocks at that time was that they were just so old. They were pieces of history just as much as the artifacts found in an Ancient Egyptian pyramid. Whether it was a rock or a gold tumbler one held in their hand, those objects spoke of places and people and situations far, far away in the annals of time — and that notion was unbearably exciting. It was impossible for me to travel back in time but when I say, held a rock, it was like holding a conch shell to your ear and seemingly hearing the sea swirling within its whorled walls
I started compiling and presenting my rock finds in form of rock reports: they consisted of a water-color or color-pencil rendering of the rock accompanied by detailed description of its appearance, mineral composition, geological story, and the location in which it was found. I drew the intact, distinct layers of a textbook sedimentary rock, describing it as a rock layer-cake. There were rocks which resembled pieces of a fossilized beach, shells stone-locked. Others looked as if they had been sliced open to reveal the fruit of crystals within.
Perhaps, if I had been collecting rocks today, I would have blogged about or Instagrammed them all but in those dinosaur days, I used whatever spare paper I found to file my rock reports. One of my proudest moments occurred when a leading geology university professor invited me to present the reports and talk to a few of his students, generously acknowledging and encouraging the sheer enthusiasm I nurtured for rocks.
In those days, when someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I did not have to hesitate even once to say: a geologist.
And then, just like that, I stopped collected rocks. Was it that the onset of adolescence and its orbit of preoccupations so consumed my life, making rocks and collecting them entirely irrelevant? I no longer went on walks, the rock reports certainly ceased being written — and as for the pyramid of rocks, it gradually diminished until there was nothing left of it. Where did all the rocks go? Did I return them to their original homes? Or simply flung them out? The funny thing is that while I distinctly recollect when and where I collected them, I have entirely forgotten altogether as to how I got rid of them.
Many years later on, I still take walks and my habit of collecting too endures: I can rarely walk through a garden or a beach or any landscape without collecting something or the other. My husband jokes about the preserved fall leaves I insisted on bringing with me when I moved from America to India and which I had collected during walks exploring Pittsburgh; I still have shells that I picked up from Oman beaches years ago. However, it has been years since I have collected and brought a rock home though.
Seeing that picture few weeks ago made me remember something which had once been such a vivid, essential, intense part of me — and then disappeared into the ether, much like those plants which would briefly green Oman’s dun landscape before performing the vanishing act. But nothing that once has been part of you ever really goes away. Those plants’ seeds lie buried in layers of hot soil. They are dormant, not dead: it takes but a few drops of water to rejuvenate and resurrect them.
I may no longer collect rocks but I still cannot pass by a mountain without idly reflecting on its composition. Last summer, when we drove through national parks in the American Southwest, I delightedly witnessed and photographed some of the most stunning geology I had ever seen in my life. At the Grand Canyon, which itself is home to many of the world’s oldest rocks, I felt that eight-year old’s childish glee and wonder course through me when I touched its oldest rock specimen, which was two billion years old.
I now realize that my love for unbottling histories and stories from objects began from the time I started to collect rocks. It was then I learned to appreciate that an object itself can be a story; the pyramid of rocks was as much a library of stories as the book-crammed bookshelf sitting in my room.
A short story that I am currently working upon begins like this:
There are five rocks currently sitting on the top of Beatrice’s desk. She has names for each of them: the first one, sliced open to reveal a fruit of purple amethyst within is called a little predictably Violet. The second one is a dull, white veined gray character, going by Timothy. The dun rock with fossilized ferns is called Lady Margaret. The gold-flecked one is Greta and the fun, striped one is Olivia. And even though she’s not supposed to have favorites, her favorite one is Olivia. She has always liked Olivia, the name that is. When she was a child, all the characters called Olivia in the books she read were glamorous, exciting, and dynamic. It would make sense that she would call her favorite rock Olivia.
She’s bought two of these rocks, the rest she pilchered from the mountains and hills she has hiked and climbed and walked through. Beatrice doesn’t really think of it as theft though, honestly speaking, more like picking up a fallen leaf or flower and pressing it in between the pages of a heavy book and preserving it for posterity, rather than letting it dryly crumble into nothingness or decay and become plant-food. There, the rock is just a rock — and here it is a character, a being in its own right with a name and personality of its very own.
I no longer wonder about where my rocks all disappeared to. They haven’t. They are here, there, everywhere, mostly hidden but making themselves visible, when they need to. I can start building my pyramid of rocks once again, one story at a time.
