Always half-asleep

Niggling feeling that I was given messages of doom while I lay half-asleep and I failed to pay them any heed and now it's too late. What remedial action can there be when it's doom anyway?

It must have to do with reading a book with an escalating body count. I should have read impenetrable science or economics for the right amount of torpor as a prelude to deep sleep.

Instead, I lay half-asleep until I became half-awake when the trucks arrived. From the sound of it,  they had brought metal in preparation for what is going to be a whole day's roof-laying today. At 5am, two men were sleepily hammering at something on the not-yet-laid roof.

(When I say the roof will be 'laid', where on the spectrum from egg to person does a roof - well - 'lie'?)

Somewhere, over all the sounds that continue to overwhelm sleep, is the more-insistent scent of Peltophorum. The roads are carpeted a sulphurous yellow and when I lay awake at night, trying desperately to sleep, to keep the noises off but welcome the scents in, I look for that colour behind my eyelids.

Every single leaf

One new neighbour has just cut down a peltophorum because it ruins the view of her shiny new house with the weird landscaping and All! Glass! exterior. Another tree nearby has had branches cut off to make way for a pole that will have their personal transformer perched on it.

At other times we have heard other neighbours complain that:

1) The trees shed too many leaves and their servants (yes) complain about having to keep sweeping.

2) The trees cut off all the sun. Apparently this is a bad thing.

3) There's no place to park because of trees on the pavement.

I'm actually surprised that they don't cut down trees during Diwali, because, you know, rockets.

Meanwhile, spring continues. The Tabibuia have flamed their yellow and are shedding. The figs have come and gone. The pungamaram's tender green is everywhere. The badam has finished with the red and has settled into summer's bright green. The rain trees still drop long seed pods that always, always, embed themselves into the softening tar on the road which, given the state of it, is an improvement.

Soon, even the leaves that so annoy our neighbours will cease to fall, though every cut branch and trunk will continue to put out shoots.

Clearly this last is something our neighbours will not stand for. Hence this:

Completely besides the point that this tree was outside a GHMC park and it wasn't for any of the people around here to burn it down.

I don't want to move. I'm wondering how I can persuade my neighbours that the desert - any desert - is the best place for them. 

Two Minutes Older: The Dying Tree

In my last column, I wrote about death and it seems I am not done with the subject. Recently, a teacher from my old school mourned the slow death of a banyan tree.

This tree had stories gathered under its aerial roots: in 1926, when J. Krishnamurti was looking for some land near his birthplace, Madanapalle, where he could set up a school, he came across a banyan tree in a valley. He was struck by the beauty of the tree and the silence of the place and over the next few years, the land was acquired and the Rishi Valley School set up.

In the years that I was there, our annual dance dramas took place under the tree. We persuaded our teachers to take a class outdoors and took them by the long way to the banyan. Everyone I know from school has at least one annual photo that was taken with the tree as shelter and background.

There was a stage made of cement, and stone benches had been placed at some distance, in a semi-circle. Beyond the stage, some roots had become secondary trees, but most always dangled and never reached the ground – I am not sure if it was because they weren’t allowed to, or because the madly-swinging children put paid to the ambitions of the parent tree.

The big banyan, as it was known – there was another one elsewhere in the school – was as much a landmark of the school as Asthachal (when we watched the sunset from half-way up a small hill) or the distinctive rock formations that surrounded us to which we gave absurd but oddly fitting names.

Such permanence do landmarks have in the minds of people that we forget that even trees must die.

For years there have been rumours of the slow death of the banyan tree. Friends who visited shook their heads in sorrow. They said the cement stage had been removed, that there were supports for the tree, but still it was dying.

I visited the school a few years ago, and I thought the rumours of its death were exaggerated: it seemed to be doing well – maybe it wasn’t as healthy as it was when I had been there, but so many things had changed so why not the tree? Besides, it could have been a matter of perception – the way childhood places often appear smaller and shabbier than one remembers.

Recently, concern for the big banyan has once again erupted. It appears that something – it is not clear what – is eating away at the tree from the inside. The main trunk is dead, so it is unable to support the branches connecting it to the surrounding prop roots. Some friends have been trying to find ways to conserve the main trunk. I’m not sure if it’s an effort worth making.

Of all the trees favoured in mythology and philosophy, it is the banyan which represents immortality, and the enlightenment that comes with the understanding of the nature of death. Its continuing existence is a fact, plain and visible: if another part of it survives, it is still the same tree, no matter how many leaves it sheds or how many roots it puts down. It demands no metaphysical leaps of the human mind – as other trees and plants do – in seeing in a seed the ghost of its parent and the promise of progeny.

In the eighty years since J. Krishnamurti first saw the tree, the big banyan has maybe three of four big prop roots in addition to the main trunk. Understandably enough, the school may not have wanted the tree to spread over a large area, and so it has always stayed in the shape most of us remember it. A banyan that cannot spread probably cannot perpetuate itself in the way it is supposed to.

For this tree to survive, it must be allowed to spread, to change its point of view, to see the world from a slightly different place. Some day, the school children will remember some secondary tree as ‘the’ big banyan, and have stories to tell about it that will also be stories about themselves. There are, after all, many ways for trees to live.

(An edited version of this in Zeitgeist, the Saturday edition of The New Indian Express.)

Tree of Gold

Spring in the air.

(to which Freddie Threepwood, I think, asked, "Why should I?")

Short notes on Sweeney Todd

1. All the gushers were censored. Every time the knife sliced someone's throat, there was a jump of a few frames, the sound went up and down to cover up and bodies slid into the pit below. So no Old Reliables were seen at Hyderabad.

2. I have realised that what I like best about Tim Burton films is the title sequence. Whatever else he does or doesn't pull off, the title sequence of every film is a carefully structured piece of work describing process. It's a whole factory floor out there, in the first few minutes - an intricate assembly line manufacturing an almost-human, or chocolate or pies filled with dubious meat (I can't remember the beginning of Sleepy Hollow).

3. I still can't decide whether I liked the film because of its essentially transgressive script (that has nothing to do with Burton) or because Burton avoided cutesification. No one is innocent - not even Johanna (who says she never has dreams; only nightmares). Even the recognisably Burton-esque Picnic Scene is ironic because impossible.

4. And what a tree that was in the Picnic Scene. No, km?

Pink Thoughts in a Pink Shade

Since the year-end list making time is upon us, I thought I'd avoid books and films in favour of flowers. Pink ones. All from, or near, our garden.

So, in order of appearance (I shouldn't have centered them. Sorry about that.): Tabibia, Balsam, what I used to think of as Periwinkle but now I know it isn't, Bauhunia, I don't know, Bougainvillea, ditto, a variety of Hibiscus that turns pink(er) as evening comes, Geranium, Tabibia (close up), Roses, Bougainvillea, Coleus, Frangipani, Rose, Tacoma, something with pink leaves, Coleus, Anthurium, Penta, Rose, Hibiscus, that thorny cactus like plant but hybridised for bigger flowers, Hibiscus, more pink leaves, Bouganvillea, a kind of Orchid, Impatiens, Bouganivillea.

Phew!

Oh - click for larger image.

Update: I find that it's tabibuia and tecoma. Who knew I had to have a Telugu accent to say the names of (some) flowers?