World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments

“I confess, at first I wanted to be back in the air-conditioned hotel room—anywhere but on an isolated gravel path with the odd bullfrog clamor interrupting the dark. But now I think of my sister and I scattered in different homes as adults and am so grateful for all of those family vacations where we could be outdoors together, walking this earth.”

Again, Nezhukumatathil uses her essay to express gratefulness toward her parents for things she didn’t appreciate or understand as a child. Stopping on the roadside to watch a congregation of fireflies isn’t physically comfortable in the moment, but it is one of several crucial occasions when Nezhukumatathil experiences wonder at a young age, shared with her family. Family vacations were rare, and in adulthood, Nezhukumatathil cherishes memories like this and makes sure to share as much time outdoors with her children as she can.

“For years, I pretended I hated the color blue. But what the peacock can do is remind you of a home you will run away from and run back to all your life.” 

The deep blue feathers of the peacock represent Nezhukumatathil’s vibrant personality and her Indian heritage. Because she wants to fit in at predominantly white schools, she tells herself that she hates color, peacocks, and India. She gradually unlearns this repression and embraces her identity. This book is a chronicle and celebration of Nezhukumatathil’s love of color and the natural world.

“I wanted to be like the inhabitants of the cacti—those wily birds with a nutty cap of feathers like a brush cut gone awry on their heads, who didn’t seem afraid of anything in the harsh and unforgiving desert […].” 

In several chapters, Nezhukumatathil expresses fear of kidnapping, violence, and death. As a child, she tries to hide and be tough, and she looks to animals as models for survival. She envies the cactus wren’s presumed fearlessness and its relative safety in its saguaro nests.

“What better animal than the narwhal to blend in with all that Kansan ice, all that white, all that snow?” 

The narwhal offers another demonstration for Nezhukumatathil of evasive survival maneuvers. It dives deep in the ocean away from its predators (orcas). In Kansas, Nezhukumatathil feels particularly vulnerable—almost everyone is white, and kids make fun of her for getting off the school bus at the mental hospital. Rather than expressing her frustration, she copes by sidestepping confrontation as much as possible.

“If a white girl tries to tell you what your brown skin can and cannot wear for makeup, just remember the smile of an axolotl. The best thing to do in that moment is just smile and smile, even if your smile is thin. The tighter your smile, the tougher you become.” 

If the cactus wren is tough and the narwhal is evasive, the axolotl blends in. Like peacock blue in elementary school, bright red lipstick means fun and excitement for teenage Nezhukumatathil. Her white friends tell her she would look better with more muted colors. To avoid conflict and gain approval, she smiles and acquiesces. Like her parents before her, Nezhukumatathil learns that survival as a person of color in America means picking her battles.

“Many herpetologists fear ‘unnamed extinctions,’ meaning that more kinds of dancing frogs might become extinct before they’ve even had a chance to be discovered. And to lose them would be no small disaster—we’d lose their unique connections to eighty-five million years of evolutionary history.” 

Nezhukumatathil constantly reiterates the fragility of species, ecosystems, and life on our planet. The essay “Dancing Frog” is a mix of loss and hope—species are discovered and immediately classified as endangered. Nezhukumatathil also hints at a concept of generational memory that is expansive and global, passed on through the history of evolution and explored by scientists today. Such a massive history is still vulnerable to extinction. For Nezhukumatathil, these are the stakes of sharing the wonders of the natural world.

“I emerged from my cephalopod year […] but I’m grateful for my time there. If not for that shadow year, how would I know how to search the faces of my own students? Or to drop everything and check in, really check, with each of my sons when they come home from school, to make sure they are having a good time and feel safe?” 

World of Wonders is a book of lessons, and Nezhukumatathil grows and learns from every experience. “Cephalopod year” refers to her junior year at a new high school, where she avoided everybody before eventually coming into her own and making friends. She uses this understanding of her own teenage coping mechanisms to empathize with her students as a professor and to make sure her children feel safe and empowered.

“I let her order for me in Malayalam—the language my father uses only when he is angry with me—and I don’t even frown when she shares a joke with the waiter where I am obviously the punch line.” 

Nezhukumatathil loves her grandmother and feels a deep connection to her and her Malayali heritage. At the same time, she feels a sense of cultural loss—she doesn’t know the language and makes a blunder ordering ice cream while visiting Kerala. This loss of generational memory mirrors the loss of evolutionary history she mourns in other chapters.

“I can’t get over the plant’s temperature. When you touch the spadix of a corpse flower, it feels almost human, full of blood, and you might expect to feel your hand pulse at its heartbeat.” 

Nezhukumatathil is fascinated by corpse flowers and goes on long road trips to see them bloom. In several essays, Nezhukumatathil describes a sense of extraordinary connection to a particular organism, blurring the lines between human, plant, and animal life. This connection contributes to her sense of wonder and to her belief that humans are responsible for taking care of the planet and mitigating harm.

“Bonnet macaques reminded me how good it felt to laugh, to keep laughing in love.” 

On their honeymoon, Nezhukumatathil and her husband, Dustin, are briefly afraid of the bonnet macaques surrounding their rented houseboat. The boatmen laugh at this reaction because the macaques are harmless, prompting Nezhukumatathil, Dustin, and the macaques themselves to join in laughing. Experiencing and spreading joy is particularly important to Nezhukumatathil. She finds joy in the world around her and tries to share it as much as possible with her family.

“Apple aphids attack my cherry tree, I am back to some semblance of a writing schedule. We work in shifts, my husband and I. He takes mornings; I am afternoons.”

In “Calendars Poetica,” Nezhukumatathil addresses parenthood and her writing schedule through a seasonal lens. At times she writes prolifically and at others none at all. She and her husband take shifts monitoring their newborn and attending to their own work. Inspiration, wonder, and love don’t have to be perfectly steady—they can ebb and flow, as long as we can be present for their return.

“I had brought back a whale shark hand puppet for my son. […] he promptly slipped it over his tiny fist, which he unclenched to make the puppet’s mouth open-close/open-close/open-close. He giggled in his car seat as my husband drove us home.” 

Nezhukumatathil introduces her interest in wildlife to her children at a very early age. She brings the whale shark puppet from an aquarium and feels guilty about the whale shark’s captivity. The hand puppet, then, represents both appreciation for the natural world and humankind’s domination and commodification of it.

“I learned how to be still from watching birds. If I wanted to see them, I had to mimic their stillness, to move slow in a world that wishes us brown girls to be fast.” 

The pace of our world gets faster and faster. Like her writing, Nezhukumatathil’s practice of bird watching and communing with nature is slow and deliberate. If it weren’t, she would scare off the birds. The history of nature writing is dominated by white men. Because she knew no models of outdoor enthusiasts who were women of color growing up, she had to learn how to be outdoors from the birds themselves.

“When daily news seems to bring forth another fresh grief—more children killed, the Amazon rainforest ablaze for weeks—I think of this orange, its sweetness and the smiles it brings to so many families.”

Nezhukumatathil’s mother shares oranges with the people she loves, and she grows more of them every year. Global and environmental news grows increasingly bleak, and Nezhukumatathil combats hopelessness by remembering her mother’s love. Throughout World of Wonders, Nezhukumatathil balances sobering facts about extinction and endangered species with messages of hope and love.

“I focused on its golden eye, how it fixed upon my shape. How its arms wrapped and drooped around my wrist and up my forearm while it took me in, tasted me […] I only know that I have never been looked at, consumed, or questioned so carefully by another being.” 

As with the corpse flower and the whale shark, Nezhukumatathil feels an intense bond with the octopus that dies in her arms in Greece. She emphasizes the octopus’s intelligence and curiosity, presenting the octopus on equal terms with herself. This moment intensifies the feelings of disturbance that she and her son feel when the octopus dies.

“The neon pink of a dragon fruit screams summertime, pop music, sunglasses balanced on the top of my head, weather too warm for socks. It means vintage MTV and stretchy spheres of Bubble Yum popped and snapped in the back rows of a school bus.”

Plants, animals, seasons, and colors all have a wide array of associations and memories for Nezhukumatathil. Her role as a poet is to draw, revel in, and explore these associations. Aesthetically, dragon fruit reminds her of her adolescence in the 1980s, even if the first time she ate one was years later. This quotation is one of many wherein Nezhukumatathil lists colorful memories she associates with a subject.

“I see young coeds lining the sidewalks near campus on their way to dance. And dance and dance, even in the middle of the week, as I once did. I say a silent prayer for them all to come back safe to their nests late at night, again and again.” 

In “Cactus Wren” and “Flamingo,” Nezhukumatathil explores a fear of abduction and unknown danger. Rather than allow this fear to dictate her life, she learns to live with it. She knows it’s important to get out and dance, and in some situations, a silent prayer is the most she can do.

“And that is how we passed our quiet days at home together during the first cold season of his life […]. Mouths wide open in astonishment at things I’d easily pass over any other time during the busy academic year […] Maybe the only real thing I could do in those blurry months was marvel. Wonder.” 

Nezhukumatathil takes maternity leave after her younger son is born. He never sleeps very long at night, and she carries him around the house on many quiet, wondrous nocturnal journeys. As much as Nezhukumatathil is trying to instill a sense of wonder in her children, they are teaching her to slow down and marvel at things she would otherwise ignore.

“What happens if there is a bird count when I’m forty and we don’t find any birds? Will you be missing when I’m forty? Will you be missing when I’m sixty?” 

The phrasing of Nezhukumatathil’s sons’ innocent question allows for expanded meaning. As in other chapters, death and individual human relationships symbolize extinction and the interconnected global ecosystem. Her sons say “missing” because they don’t know better, but it is an apt word for the loss of species and generational memory.

“In one evening, at the beginning of a summer filled with new love and joy, a cacophony of color and laughter and dancing signaled the start of a love story unexpectedly born and grown from the wheat fields of Kansas and the tropical shores of India and the Philippines.”

Nezhukumatathil sees her wedding as a colorful and diverse culmination of her cultural heritage and experience. Her mother is Filipina, her father is Indian, and her husband is from Kansas. People from all parts of her life come together in a celebration that mirrors the diversity of plant and animal life she reveres.

“A red-spotted newt spends years wandering the forest floor before it decides which pond to finally call home.”

Nezhukumatathil identifies with the red-spotted newt and other animals that move from place to place before settling down. Like the newt, she is able to survive and make a temporary home in many places, but she spends a great deal of time looking for a place that feels right instinctively. Her “homing instinct” brings her back to Western New York, and finally to Mississippi.

“I wonder if it takes a zoo or aquarium for us to feel empathy toward a creature whose habitat is shrinking due to humans, toward a creature most of us have never seen or heard?” 

Ignorance, rather than explicit malice, is Nezhukumatathil’s enemy in the fight for the protection of the natural world. Because southern cassowaries aren’t as culturally ubiquitous as other animals like ostriches, they enjoy fewer environmental protections. Part of Nezhukumatathil’s goal in including lesser-known species in World of Wonders is to spark curiosity and to make humans feel connected to a greater swathe of the animal kingdom.

“These butterflies and their offspring can still remember a mass they’ve never seen, sound waves breaking just so, and fly out of the way. How did they pass on this knowledge of the invisible? Does this message transmit through the songs they sing to themselves on their first wild nights, spinning inside a chrysalis?”

The migrating monarch butterflies avoiding a nonexistent mountain is a central metaphor in World of Wonders for generational memory. Nezhukumatathil ruminates on a sacred, spiritual connection between generations of butterflies. She is concerned with passing on “knowledge of the invisible” because she herself is trying to pass on love and wonder, which are essentially indescribable.