The first tree that I remember in my life is not a specific tree. I was born in Safdarjung hospital and taken home to what used to be Curzon Road and is now the Kasturba Gandhi Marg. There was a flat my father lived in. There’s a little bit of greenery, mainly lawns, separating these flats. Kasturba Gandhi Marg is a very broad avenue. What I remember is that the road was lined with trees, and I remember looking up and seeing the way the trees met overhead, and you saw bits of sky through them.

When I was ten years old, I went to LA (Los Angeles) for about a year-and-a-half, and there were no trees and no birds. There would be trees on the sidewalks in LA about five feet high; it seemed like they had been recently planted, and they were enclosed. So, I remembered the trees in Delhi. I missed them physically. I missed them in my body; I missed them in my eyes. I could never feel satisfied with the way the trees in LA were, how meager and puny and spindly. There were palm trees that were large in LA, but that sense of breadth and shade that the Delhi trees provide was missing.

LA is pretty hot and it has a very bright light, and we used to walk to school a long distance and I lived right in the heart of LA, on a street called Normandy between Sunset and Hollywood. It was a pretty grim walk with a lot of video parlours and some sex shops and Mom and Pop grocery stores. Once, these boys harassed me and I ducked into a grocery store. I had a quarter which I had to part with because I had to buy something, otherwise what am I doing there, and they came in after me so we spent a long time in a very small shop with two aisles, sort of circling…I was ten years old. Finally, they got bored and left. I went back home and I cried and I cried. I don’t know, when I think of that I feel like if there had been trees it would’ve been better. I was only there for a year-and-a-half, but the missing trees in LA was a haunting sense. It was all about being in a strange society.

Between when I was growing up in Delhi as a kid and that move to LA when I was ten, when I was about five-and-a-half, we moved to Bhutan for about a year, a year-and-a-half. And there is a specific tree that found its way into my writing. I don’t know if it was a drumstick tree, because my memory of that time is filled with stories that have been told of the time so I don’t know what was true and what was made up stories of the time.

We lived on a hill, and the tree was right on top of the hill and the backyard fell away from this. At the bottom there were many boulders and a creek and then there were many more boulders and another creek, so there were parallel creeks and it was really quite breathtaking. At the top of the hill, at the back of the house, there was a tree, and it was sort of midway on the hilltop and midway down the hill. It had roots that spread and held the hill in place. We did hang a swing from that tree. It was a swing with a metal frame. It was the most magical time of my life. This one tree in the back of the house had a rope swing that hung from it. I believe when you swung out from the tree you swung out over the hill. It seems so improbable, that it could even happen … what would be the angle of the tree that would allow it to happen? It’s got to be some sort of exaggeration of my imagination, but the image was so strong. I wrote it into a story called The Companion and I ended up describing the tree sort of striding down the hill because for me it was a very animate creature. And when my mother said it was a drumstick tree, I thought it was a drumstick that you play drums with. It was a very large tree and that attitude of heading off the hill, and that if it did, it would be fairly cataclysmic and everything would slide off with it. It was a great tree.

Another tree I remember is when I was about six years old. Having lived in Bhutan for a few months, I was sent to a convent in Kerala and eventually to a boarding school, also in Kerala. In Kerala, Onam is an important holiday and everybody goes home, and I was alone in the boarding school. There was some confusion. I’m not really clear, but, one holiday, one by one all the boarders left and it was down to me and this girl, and the nuns were anxious for us. I remember spending a whole day hanging on the gate with this girl. We were worried, and it was also a little frightening, but mostly we were terribly embarrassed. I think both of us had this unconscious understanding that whoever’s parents came last was the real loser, the other one was safe. I wished with everything I had in me that her parents should not come before mine, and I’m sure she felt the same way.

Somebody felled a tree across the road from the gate we were hanging out on, and we eventually went over and sat on it, and this thing was like, nearly half a lorry big in girth. It was so big that you had to climb to sit on it, even though it was lying on its side. When you sat on it the curve of it was like a planet, and you were almost on flat ground, that’s how big it was. And, I think, this girl was the one who figured out that you could peel it and eat it. We sat on it and we peeled the bark, which was red, and we chewed on it and it was sweet. A long, long time went by and finally somebody came and got me, so I wasn’t the big loser, you see, she was. And, when I left, I just left, and I felt I was doing something very wrong. I felt I should talk to the person who came to get me and ask, should we take her, and there was definitely an understanding between her and I that we would never, ever, ever talk to any of the other boarders about it. We would never say we were forgotten, that nobody came for us. It was only when I was an adult that I was able to go back and piece the memory of the tree and understand that it was a cinnamon tree. The tree is very central to that memory. The gate and the tree and the taste of it. I’ve never written about that.

I guess, I stopped noticing trees as I grew older. The things that happened in childhood, things like, having a tree as a companion … the drumstick tree was a companion for me, and so was the cinnamon tree … they were both markers for the moment; they witnessed huge truths of my life. The tree as witness stopped later in my life.

Mridula Koshy is a writer and a free library movement activist. She is a member of Free Libraries Network’s Steering Committee and a Trustee of The Community Library Project in Delhi NCR.