har-ish

I have been fascinated by fungi since I was a child.

Science classes only fanned the flames. There was Alexander Fleming and penicillin, the strange invisible world of microorganisms, and the wonderful realisation that something as apparently insignificant as fungus could change the course of human history.

Naturally, I wanted to grow some.
My first successful experiment involved nothing more sophisticated than a piece of wet bread, which I left in a dark cupboard and promptly forgot about. When I checked on it, it was a glorious success. Colonies of fungi in different colours had appeared, each seemingly determined to establish its own little civilisation on the bread.

I was in Class 2 when I conducted my next experiment. This time I used a mixture of coffee decoction, jaggery and molasses. I had apparently decided that fungi deserved dessert.

They rewarded me spectacularly. The stuff grew out of the container like champagne from a bottle.
I was perpetually in awe.
In retrospect, some of my childhood experiments with fungi were perhaps less than sensible. I have occasionally wondered whether my enthusiasm for cultivating mysterious colonies had anything to do with some of the lung trouble I encountered later. I have no idea whether there was any connection, and I am rather grateful that my youthful mycology never ended in actual poisoning.

As I grew older, mushrooms continued to hold my attention, affection and admiration. For a while, becoming a mycologist seemed like a perfectly reasonable career choice.

And then there was the Nilgiris, where my fascination with mushrooms took a considerably less academic turn, involving the other kind of mushroom entirely. There was D, there was my youthful indiscretion, and there was the aftermath. I am not particularly proud of that episode. D, being the generous soul she was, forgave me.

Perhaps this drawing is simply the latest manifestation of the same old fascination.
Give a child a piece of wet bread and a dark cupboard, and thirty-odd years later he may still be drawing fungal colonies.