Every now and then, someone will tell me of their plan to find a plot of land outside the city and do some farming. When this happens I am always reminded of Carvalho, a much-loved Kannada novella from 1980 by Purnachandra Tejaswi.

It would be called auto-fiction these days, I suppose. Its narrator has bought land to cultivate in Chikmagalur’s Mudigere — as Tejaswi did himself. But soon the rain and slush, crop diseases and pests, and the infuriating locals make him miserable. He plans to sell the land and make his exit. This is when he runs into Carvalho, a biologist who teaches him not only how to save his crop, but shows him new ways of relating to the natural world.

Our narrator accompanies Carvalho on an expedition to find a flying lizard that’s never before been observed in the area. Accompanying them are Mandanna, who is formally uneducated and seems not-very-bright until his instinctive skills as a naturalist shine forth; Biryani Kariappa, to whom every animal is a potential feast; and a couple of others, including a traditional snake catcher. Between them, these characters display a range of attitudes towards the natural world.

And the book’s animals too exist at various degrees of overlap with the people. There’s the narrator’s spaniel, Kiwi, written with as much empathy as is extended to any human in the book. There are the bees that swarm into the story periodically, almost as a motif — they have been domesticated for honey, of course, but their behaviour is not always well-understood, leaving our characters with painful stings and swollen faces. (A favourite scene of mine involves an independence day flag hoisting. The antics of an overenthusiastic drummer disturb the bees enough that they descend on the gathering and scuttle it with great comic effect.) And, of course, there’s the elusive flying lizard, at the farther reaches of what is known to science.

I first read Carvalho years ago in an English translation by Padma Ramachandra Sharma published by Penguin. I later read it in Kannada, and then in another translation by D.A. Shankar, published by the Sahitya Akademi. This last one seems to be the most readily available translation of late.

While there’s a lot of good nature writing from across the world, it strikes me as particularly valuable to be able to read books set in places we actually know and can reach easily. That is one of the joys our local literatures allow us. And so, when I first went to Mudigere, the place was already special to me as the setting of Carvalho. When a naturalist took me to see the shola forests nearby, I couldn’t help but be transported to Carvalho’s little expedition through endless fields of fish-tail palms to reach the thick forests of the Western Ghats. One of these days, I tell myself, I shall do a similarly elaborate trek in the area.

Clearly humans have developed the ability to control aspects of the natural world while being a part of it. Carvalho probes the boundaries of that relationship. There’s all manner of frantic activity we can get up to in nature — but maybe there’s something special and meaningful, the book suggests, about those rare interludes in which we quietly allow ourselves to be part of a larger whole.