Translator’s Introduction

If a parent worries for their child, what do the childless worry about?This is not a question that has been put to me yet, but it is one that I have imagined.Every time you hear of a plane crash, you think of your own child.You are grateful that they were not on that plane.I read these words in Reader's Digest when I was in middle school, when I couldn't have known what it meant to be either-parent or child.A life with my parents, and later with friends and acquaintances, produced this shorthand: a parent was someone who worried for their children, the worries changing contours at different stages of life.But none of this might have come to me had I not met a similar strain of worry in the work of Jagadish Chandra Bose.Jagadish Chandra Bose was a Bengali scientist who convinced a largely skeptical world that plants are living beings.I first encountered his work in an essay called "Ahoto Udbhid" ("The Injured Plant"), in which he records a plant's response to different kinds of stimuli.Passionate and defensive in his argument, Bose, groping for analogies that would convey the emo-learns in his mother's arms is the language in which he expresses his happiness and sorrow," he writes in the preface to Abyakta, a collection of his essays published in 1922.