Vishva, an observant girl in a bustling city, senses a hidden world beneath everyday life. Shrinking to a microscopic scale, she enters the “Holobiont,” where microbes, fungi, and organisms thrive beneath pavement, soil, trees, and water. Guided by voices of bacteria, trees, and a river goddess, she witnesses deep interconnections: microbes recycle nutrients, trees depend on symbiosis, and humans carry entire ecosystems. Beneath a Siris tree, she sees harmony, while a plastic-choked Neem reveals nature’s limits. In polluted drains and rivers, life struggles to adapt. Vishva realizes the city is not inert, but a living, interconnected web of visible and invisible life.
Explore this magical, nature-connection story both through Nauras’s engaging pen and as a forthcoming sonic fiction, codeveloped with Fayçal Lahrouchi (sound director & editor), produced by Francesca Masoero and interpreted by Anushka Kale, George Bajalia, Frederica Mergulhao, Alysha Nelson, Francesca Masoero, Pooja R Bhale, Adi Gangga & Fayçal Lahrouchi.
Read the text below or download the PDF here.
YOU ARE A GATHERING!
The city was mid-morning loud — Streets roared with engines, horns, rickshaw wheels, human footsteps. Exhaust curled in the humid air — when she noticed something peculiar. The pavement shimmered. Not visibly, exactly. More like it was breathing. Vishva felt a shiver, because this morning felt different.
With big, wondrous dark eyes that held questions too large for the world around her, and thick midnight hair that fell in loose waves down her back, she stood very still. A sharp, elegant nose gave her an almost uncanny sense of smell — she could separate diesel from dust, cardamom from concrete. Her skin carried a warm bronze glow that caught the sunlight, and a faint crescent scar curved just above her left eyebrow, pale against her complexion.
She was slight — long-limbed, wiry, built from years of weaving through crowded streets. High cheekbones framed her thoughtful face, and when she frowned, a small crease appeared between her brows. Her lips were full but often pressed into quiet concentration, as if she were always listening for something beneath the noise. Even in the chaos of the city, there was something steady about her posture — shoulders back, chin lifted — as though she were bracing for the world to reveal its secret.
And then it happened.
The concrete did not crack or split, but Vishva found herself shrinking — smaller than an ant, smaller than a grain of dust — until the city side-walk rose around her like a vast pale desert. “Welcome,” said a voice that seemed to come from everywhere at once. “Welcome to the Holobiont.”
At her new size, the side-walk was not blank and grey - but forested. Filaments stretched between grains of sand like suspension bridges. Bacterial colonies dominated the moist crevices left by last night’s rain. Fungal hyphae threaded through microscopic cracks in the concrete. “You thought this was empty,” hummed a Bacterium living in a crevice. “But cities are rainforests, if you are small enough.” Vishva watched as microbes feasted on the city’s remains, traces of spilled milk, scraps left from feeding the stray dogs the night before, wilted flower garlands that had adorned the deity at the corner temple, torn leaf fragments, even the invisible shedding of human skin. The city fed them constantly, without knowing. She had walked this street every day. She had never realized it was inhabited. A gust of wind roared overhead — enormous and warm. From it rained particles: skin flakes, pollen grains, soot, spores. “Humans shed,” whispered a Bacterium riding a dust mote. “You leave little versions of yourself everywhere.”
Vishva saw it now — invisible ecosystems traveling with every passerby. Each shoe carried Soil microbes from parks. Each dog tracked bacteria from distant lawns. Every handshake was a migration event. The crowd above wasn’t just moving bodies. It was mixing atmospheres of life. She remembered learning that each human body contains vast microbial communities — gut, skin, mouth — whole ecologies in motion. As she watched the rain of skin cells fall like snow, she realised: No one walks alone. The pavement dissolved into Soil. She walked towards the shade.
The noon sun shimmered above and then — coolness. She entered the vast canopy of a Siris Tree, (Albizia Lebbeck). The temperature dropped as if someone had poured water over the air.
“Rest,” said Siris, the tree.
Under the canopy of the mighty Siris, Vishva looked around curiously. The Soil below her feet became translucent. Roots pushed steadily through the darkness of the Soil, branching and re-branching in search of water and nutrients. Along the finest root hairs, small, round nodules had formed – a quiet, secluded chamber where a Bacterium called Rhizobium lived and worked.
“They breathe what you cannot,” said Siris. “They take nitrogen from the air and turn it into nourishment. In exchange I feed them sugars that my leaves make from sunlight, carbon dioxide.”
Around the roots, the rhizosphere shimmered with Bacteria feeding on exuded carbon. Termites dismantled a fallen twig nearby, their gut microbes enabling them to digest cellulose. Millipedes fragmented leaves. Ants aerated the Soil with their tunnels. “This is how shade is made,” the tree whispered. “Not only by leaves blocking the sun — but by nitrogen fixed underground, by microbes cycling nutrients, by insects redistributing matter, by fungi mining essential minerals from distant particles of Earth.”
Shade was a collaboration. An elderly man read his newspaper at the base of the trunk. Two women paused with heavy bags, talking quietly. A courier leaned his bicycle against exposed roots and wiped sweat from his neck. “This,” said Siris, “is also my ecology.” Its pods rattled softly in the breeze.
Vishva placed her palm against the bark. The world shifted. She did not shrink suddenly — she softened into another scale. The bark became a landscape of crevices that housed ants navigating highways invisible from above. Lichens — algae and fungi living as one being — painted the surface in pale maps. Moss held moisture in miniature forests. “I am not one organism,” Siris said gently. “I am a gathering!”
Inside the bark lived endophytic fungi and bacteria — quiet tenants. Along the leaves, microbes dined on sunlight-altered sugars. In the canopy, caterpillars chewed. Spiders stitched silk between leaflets. Mynas and parakeets hopped through branches, feeding on insects. Droppings fell. Nutrients returned. Nothing left without becoming something else.
Vishva returned to her small self and she saw them. Threads — luminous, impossibly fine — weaving between roots, Soil grains, fragments of leaf. Fungal hyphae.
“My other roads,” said Siris. The threads stretched far beyond the tree’s trunk, connecting to neighbouring plants, bridging dry gaps in the Soil. Along their surfaces clung microscopic films of water. Within those films, bacteria moved. Some swam. Some clung.
Some rode the growing tips of hyphae as they extended through new terrain.
Where Soil would otherwise be an impassable desert, fungi built corridors. Bacteria travelled these moist highways toward root exudates rich in sugars.
Exchange accelerated where connection existed.
Carbon flowed from leaf to root to fungus. Minerals travelled back along hyphal networks. Bacteria altered chemistry wherever they arrived — fixing nitrogen, releasing enzymes, defending territory.
“What you call stillness,” the Siris said, “is only movement too small to see.”
Beneath the pavement, migrations unfolded constantly. A gust of wind swept through the canopy.
Dust descended — skin flakes, pollen, spores.
“You are also walking ecosystems,” murmured Maati, the Soil.
Aboveground, pigeons strutted — feathered cities carrying mites, bacteria, fungi. A spider web trembled as a fly, once nourished by decomposing matter, became food. A bird swooped.
Soil to Insects.
Insect to Birds.
Birds to Soil.
Circulation.
A metal grate nearby exhaled a warm breath.
The smell rose — sulphurous, sour, strangely sweet. Vishva did not recoil.
The ground shifted again, and she descended into the city’s underbelly — brick tunnels carrying wastewater in a slow, dark river.
The ground shifted again, and she descended into the city’s underbelly — brick tunnels carrying wastewater in a slow, dark river.
“Here,” said a deep bubbling voice, “is digestion.” Bacteria clustered in drifting flocs, breaking down human waste and food scraps. In oxygen-poor pockets, anaerobic microbes reduced sulfate and released hydrogen sulphide — the sharp scent rising to the street. Others fermented organic acids, creating sour notes in the air.
It was not filth.
It was a transformation.
The drains were bioreactors. The city’s hidden stomach. What humans flushed away became methane, carbon dioxide, nutrients — matter rearranged by microbial labour.
Choreography, here as well!
One species’ byproduct was another’s food. Complex molecules simplified. Energy extracted. Cycles closed.
Nothing disappeared. Vishva rose again beneath the Siris canopy.
The elders were still speaking softly. The courier had fallen asleep for a moment against the trunk. A child traced patterns in fallen leaflets.
The air here smelled faintly sweet — blossoms preparing for pollinators.
“Under me,” said the Siris, “strangers become neighbours.”
Moisture lingered longer in shaded Soil. Microbial communities thrived differently here than in the sun-baked road. Leaf litter decomposed slowly, richly. Fungal threads expanded. Ant trails braided through Earth.
Shade was a microclimate.
Microclimate was a possibility.
As Vishva wandered through the shade, she came across another tree, Neem – Azadirachta Indica, its roots sprawling widely beneath the pavement. At first, she thought the ground was crowded with Soil debris — but the more she looked, the more she realised the tree’s roots were entangled in ribbons of plastic, wrappers, bags, and fragments of synthetic packaging.
“Hello,” whispered Neem. “I have been planted to shade the street. I was meant to host life. But now…” Its voice trembled slightly.
Vishva knelt closer. Tiny threads of fungus reached toward the plastic, but the materials were stubborn, chemically foreign. Bacteria clustered near the fragments, releasing enzymes, trying to break down the polymers, but progress was slow — almost imperceptible. Microbes could nibble at some edges, leach some chemicals, but they could not fully digest this matter.
The tree sighed, its leaves trembling in the breeze.
“I provide shade, I host insects, I feed birds,” Neem said. “But my roots are smothered by what humans leave behind. My microbial community struggles, slowed, choked, learning to work with what should never have been here.”
Vishva smelled the faint chemical tang of plastics in the Soil — an odour she realised was artificial, synthetic, alien to the usual geosmin of rich Earth. She could feel the frustration in the Soil: nutrients trapped, water pathways obstructed, fungal threads curling around obstacles instead of connecting freely.
“This is a lesson,” the tree whispered. “Even the smallest, most tireless workers — bacteria, fungi, invertebrates — have limits. Nature is resilient, but not infinite.”
Vishva felt a shiver. Here was the Holobiont at its most human-impacted: a microbial network strained, learning to decompose what it was never meant to encounter.
She touched the plastic gently. The bacteria were working, the fungi reaching, the roots shifting — but slowly. Very slowly.
“Watch,” said Neem. “This is the city as it truly is: cycles interrupted, energy trapped, matter refusing to return to the web. And yet… life persists. We learn. We adapt. We continue.”
Vishva stepped back, her mind holding two truths at once: the wondrous circulation beneath the Siris tree, and this struggle under the plastic-laden roots. Both were part of the same city, the same Microbiome.
And for the first time, she felt the urgency of the unseen work — the work that humans had yet to honour.
She had thought the city was concrete and glass.
Now she saw:
It was fungal highways and bacterial migrations.
Nitrogen-fixing nodules and termite digestion.
Pigeons dispersing nutrients.
Drains fermenting waste into gas.
Humans carrying invisible ecosystems between doorways.
Trees cooling air through networks built in darkness.
Plastic laden roots.
The Siris leaves trembled once more.
“You call yourself an individual,” the tree said gently.
“But you are also a gathering.”
Vishva felt the microbes on her skin, in her breath, in her gut — ancient companions shaping immunity, mood, digestion. She was not separate from the Soil beneath her.
She was continuous with it.
The sun shifted westward. The city roared on.
Vishva walked onward, leaving the shade of the Siris tree and the plastic-choked Neem behind. Soon, she reached a stream winding through the city. Once, it might have sung over stones, full of life. Now, its surface was streaked with rainbow-coloured oil sheens, and near the edges, pipes hummed as industrial effluents poured into it.
A faint, chemical odour rose, sharp and bitter against the sweet geosmin of nearby Soil. Vishva could see microorganisms in the water struggling: bacteria that once filtered nutrients now processing heavy metals, algae blooming in odd patches, small invertebrates gasping in the oxygen-poor zones. Fish darted weakly, some tangled in floating debris.
A voice, soft but vast, rose from the river itself. Vishva blinked and looked again. A form appeared in the currents, shimmering like water folded over itself — the Water Goddess, her hair long, a cascade of liquid entwined with reeds and tiny fish. Her eyes were deep pools.
“This river was once full of song,” she said. “Its currents carried nutrients, microbes, fish, and waterbirds in endless cycles. Now it labours. Humans pour chemicals into me, plastics, poisons. My children struggle to survive.”
Vishva knelt at the edge, watching microbes cluster at the interface between water and sand, attempting to process what flowed in. Some bacteria metabolised industrial chemicals slowly, creating small zones of detoxification. Fungal mats grew along rocks where the water remained cooler. Invertebrates scavenged, carried by micro currents.
“They adapt,” whispered the Goddess. “But adaptation is not restoration. They cannot carry the burden of human neglect alone.”
She gestured with her arm, and Vishva saw fish flicker like silver flashes in cleaner pockets, algae bloom in tiny rhythm, and microbial colonies clustering where nutrients balanced. Even here, life persisted, but the struggle was visible — a tension between resilience and overload.
“The River is alive,” the Goddess said softly. “It sings through the microbes, the fish, the roots that dip into it. When humans pour poison into this song, it changes the melody. But I continue to flow. I continue to teach.”
Vishva smelled the mixed scents: sweet wet Soil upriver, the bitter tang of metals and chemicals, the faint, living aroma of microbial decomposition. She felt the city above and the river beneath as one entangled organism — and she understood that even Water, sacred and strong, could be choked and wounded.
Yet, she also felt the pulse of resistance: the fish surviving in the eddies, the fungi breaking down what they could, bacteria attempting what chemistry allowed, the Goddess herself flowing patiently.
“This is a microhabitat,” said the Goddess. “Every element, every current, every microbe, is part of the city — and part of your world. Learn it. Respect it. Protect it where you can.”
Vishva stepped back onto the bank, carrying The River Goddess’s message in her lungs, her ears, and her mind. She understood now that city life was a network not only of streets and trees but of streams, drains, microbes, and the deep work of all who struggled unseen to keep the cycle alive.
But now, every step she took felt different.
She was not walking on the pavement.
She was walking over woven worlds.
And for the first time, The Universe — Vishva — recognised itself in the smallest of beings.
