As I sit in a hollow of this brook deep in the Mollem forest, my bulging stomach facing upstream, the water enters my navel carrying a few tadpoles, slim brown fish, fragments of floating moss, a red leaf, the song of a Malabar whistling thrush, a monkey’s shriek and a flower of a Kumbiyo tree. The water swirls around the depression in my back between the fractured T10 and T12 vertebrae and makes its way downhill, warned by the archives of my body of what awaits it in the flat inventive plains.