Chapter 2: Plant response to elevated CO2 - DRUM - University of ...

Clutching her khadi bag close to her, Megha trudged on through the loamy, soft
earth no longer mindful of her salwar, which had long turned sullied and soiled,
slipping beneath her kolhapuris. The lunch dabba in which her Mother had
packed in some laddoos clanged against her body and added a metallic note to
the sounds of the jungle around her.
Her map of the Raj Pipla district that Mrs. Kadam had drawn, lay stashed
away in her large khadi bag, a bag she had used since her days at TISS where
they drank milky, diluted coffee, discussed Marxism and applied social theories
to fictional villages born in their project submission notebooks. They sang
‘Summer of 69’ with a passion that had faded over the summers since their
graduation. Now she thought it was fool‐hardy, perhaps it was all Mrs.
Sachdeva’s fault that she motivated them with beautiful ideas of equality and
justice and not real things like walking through a malarial forest and bad
transportation systems. Perhaps they could have courses that taught them how
to walk through one.
Here, through these green paths she had only come across banyan and
ashoka trees, leaves wet and quivering from the dense rain, squirrels and parrots
with damp hackled coats and then a spotted deer that contentedly munched on
tiny leaves from a lowered branch of the peepul tree, its neck gracefully bent for
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