The flowering tree by the window is an ode to greener days
The report of 85,000 thousand trees falling in Chennai after last year’s Cyclone Vardah makes for grim statistics. Walking or driving through the city’s denuded streets has become a painful experience. Summer was a raging furnace. But to me, the falling of the single flowering tree which curtained my third floor bedroom window — poking curious twigs in, its shifting shadows turning the space into a Japanese water colour painting, its resident birds waking me at dawn with earsplitting calls — remains an insurmountable personal tragedy. No longer can I look out of my window and feel I am on top of a tree.
The report of 85,000 thousand trees falling in Chennai after last year’s Cyclone Vardah makes for grim statistics. Walking or driving through the city’s denuded streets has become a painful experience. Summer was a raging furnace. But to me, the falling of the single flowering tree which curtained my third floor bedroom window — poking curious twigs in, its shifting shadows turning the space into a Japanese water colour painting, its resident birds waking me at dawn with earsplitting calls — remains an insurmountable personal tragedy. No longer can I look out of my window and feel I am on top of a tree.
The first time I had that experience I was in school, which was located in the Theosophical Society’s lush campus in old Madras, where we often had classes under the mango trees. One day my irate teacher found me crouching on a branch above her class. Our imperturbable headmaster appeared, gauged the situation and said, “Got stuck have you? Hold on. The gardener will get a ladder and fetch you down.” His advice to the teacher was, “Go on with your class. She can hear you from up there!”
We lucky children grew up with trees all around us. Striped hoopoes, aquamarine kingfishers, green parakeets, red-headed woodpeckers, scarlet minivets, raucous treepies, comical wagtails threaded through their branches.
Snakes and centipedes were part of daily existence. Along with botany lessons, our headmaster taught us not only to respect all forms of life, but to love them. The trees we climbed every day became our friends. We were lucky to know this utopia before getting trapped in the urban concrete jungle.
Once I met a man in the US who said that the best time in his life was the four months he spent on top of a giant Douglas fir in an Oregon forest, protesting against logging of virgin trees. Each tree-sitter had a platform 200 feet high, roofed with tarpaulin, and furnished with bare necessities of life. Was he bored? “I played the guitar, read books, watched birds… Never felt more alive!” he said. I told him about the Chipko conservation movement that was inspired by the sacrifice of 400 Bishnoi tribals back in 1731, as they were chopped down along with the Khejri trees they were hugging protectively.
Losing ‘my’ tree at the window makes me realise more and more that I had taken for granted something immensely precious. Now I understand just why the poet in the Mahabharata says to the tree, “Why, you are better than having ten sons! Though scorched by the sun, you give us shade, you shelter birds, insects, little animals, you fill the air with the scent of flowers, all your fruits you give others — is there anyone as noble as a tree?” When the Rig Veda intones, “The tree is the cosmos,” surely, the idea of conservation is not an abstraction, but a hands-on experience in the urgent present. Because a tree does not merely prevent the soil from eroding, and oxygenise the air. It gladdens the eye, calms the mind, uplifts the spirit. It makes life worth living.
Today I happen to look down from my bedroom window. What do I see? Brave little leaves shining on the dry stump. I sing aloud. The tree is taking a new avatar. It will grow. I won’t be around, but one day it will curtain my grandchild’s bedroom window.
The author is a playwright, theatre director, musician and journalist