The Death of Trees

We were all young, perhaps in secondary school when the gardeners gathered around the old silk cotton tree. 

That tree in the public garden opposite our home has woven through most of my childhood memories. I see it still in snapshots in my mind’s eye. Blooming with its red flowers while the rest of the tree looked spiny and knobby. Cotton pods bursting sending waves of feathery cotton balls gentling rolling through my home and compound. Sometimes invoking wonder at its soft, filmy fibres. Sometimes irritation as those soft, filmy fibres got into everything. So, it was with horror that we saw the gardeners gather around that tree, axes in hand.

We had a hushed conversation among ourselves and decided that it was wrong to cut trees. All our books said so. So we were going to stop them. Onward we marched to the garden and the gardeners with their axes, expecting ferocious opposition.

But the gardeners were rather kind. They explained the trunk of the tree had rotted from within. If they didn’t cut the tree now, it could fall on someone. We didn’t know trees could also get diseased, so we stepped back, saddened. The tree was cut and the next day, the empty space where it used to stand felt like a gaping wound in our memories.

Years later, when we moved to another home it was to one surrounded by all shades of green, having grown up in a home amidst trees. The new place even has a sloping pathway lined by tall trees leading up to our building. Seeing coppersmith barbets fluttering around young trees, on the day we went to look at the flat, had seemed like an omen to me. :)

Every day I set out to work, my head would be up in the clouds of green. Till one day, during the monsoon, one particular green canopy went missing. It had fallen in the rains. Again, that empty space within. Again, that pulsing pain.

Then came Cyclone Tauktae. A dance of wind and rain and trees. For the first time I heard the wind howling like in those horror movies. It was beautiful to look at from the comfort and security of my balcony till my reverie was interrupted by a huge crash. Three old trees had fallen to the might of the wind and the rain in the playing field between the wings of the building. 

These were trees I had loved looking at on my walks. These were trees I had often focussed my binoculars at—to spot the bird, hiding within the six-storey frame, whose sweet call I had been long following. 

The trees fell on vehicles damaging some and crushing a few others. We were all relieved that there had been no one around during the crash. I was restless that day and the next and the next. Perhaps it was the long-forgotten chapter on Jagadish Chandra Bose in our school textbooks where the botanist had said that plants have feelings and plants have life. Since then, I have not been able to pluck a leaf or a flower without saying a heartfelt ‘sorry’. 

Days later, it finally dawned on me. That gaping wound? That empty space within? That restlessness? They were all signs of grief. Grief I had not given credence to because they are only trees right? They are everywhere. But that day I realized that over the years, trees had become as vital and real as people to me. 

And so, when I felt the death of these trees, I mourned. Here’s hoping there is a tree heaven in one of the multiverses where all these fallen ones rise again, leaves fluttering in the wind and the sun and rain.

Image Courtesy: Andrew Mercer, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons