My earliest memory of a tree is when I was a very young child and I was taken to Bombay where a girl from our village had become a movie star. She loved taking people out, showing them how films were made. She paid for many boys to study out, pushed parents into educating their children, even girls. She was an amazing young woman at that time. And, it was the monsoon, if my memory serves me right. We had eaten the papaya, something that I had never had in my village before.

This was a very old house on top of Pali hill, full of very elegant pedigreed mildew and mold and lots of interesting corners full of mysteries and creatures lurking in there waiting to be discovered by a young child far from his home in the cow belt. And, this old maali was an amazing man. This was a huge compound on top of a hill. It was a house built on three levels. There was a Parsee family who had one level, and this girl from my village had two levels. All the three levels were facing the sea. Below the second level the forest was allowed to run wild, so wild that a fig tree had a branch coming into the window of the house, into an elegant ballroom, designed with alcoves for musicians and things like that. A papaya tree grew right up to another window, and of course, one day I plucked a papaya, didn’t know what to do with it, and the servants explained how it’s eaten. As I was sitting with a slice of the papaya outside, the maali looked at me, smiled, and said, ‘Good?’  I nodded my head because he was speaking in Marathi and I couldn’t speak it. Then he gestured towards the ground and I understood, so I made a little hole in the ground and I put a papaya seed in. Now, this man was so sure of the fruit of the tree, so sure of himself and of his environment, that he said, ‘One.’ I was putting in a bunch of papaya seeds because we are wheat farmers and we plant differently. He said, ‘No, put one, just one.’ So, I put one seed there. The nicest, fattest, juiciest, pulpiest one I could find. And then, about a month or so later, there was this little shoot there! And before my eyes … because it was very humid in Bombay, and also tropical and warm … this little tree was first growing at my rate and then it was overtaking me and before I knew it was a mature papaya tree. In the second year or so it was bearing fruit. So, the way that tree came up … it grew from my mouth to adulthood, and then it bore fruit and I shared it with the maali. It was as though we had performed a sort of a sacred prayer … a sacred ritual … and I wasn’t homesick anymore. Until that day I had been terribly homesick. But, from that moment on I wasn’t. There was this great connection between the papaya tree and me for another two years while I was there as a child.

Then I came back to the village. My grandfather had been killed, and my father sold a piece of land. On that land there was a copse of Shisham. The new people who bought it, worked out a strange deal that the Shisham would be delivered half to us and half to them. That night, they dragged the trees into the village and threw them into our courtyard. I had a horrible feeling that I was seeing giant dead bodies lying in the courtyard. It was a terrible, and a terrifying sight. They were very, very strong because this was all kaali Shisham. The branches had been lopped off. I had this feeling of watching the death of elders. Like giant dead Jats, you know, as if they had returned dead from a battle or something.

My village is a village on a river. In one part of the village grow wild mango trees, near the river. When our cousins and sisters went to a part of the village called dhari­, which is like a table-land or a plateau, slightly higher than the rest of the village and above the canal, so it cannot be irrigated and is relatively drier. But nature is full of paradox and the mango trees there gave these tiny juice-mangoes. Each mango held just one mouthful of juice, but it was the sweetest nectar you ever had. So, what we would do is climb up the tree and shake the branches. The mangoes would fall into the river and float down. The sisters, and the cousins and aunts would run to a little culvert over the canal and put their odhanies out into the water. All the mangoes would float into them and by the time they reached they were cooled by the river. My uncle, or a cousin, would bring a big can of milk and it would be lowered into the river to be cooled. We ate the mangoes and drank the milk. It was like, what, two hundred mangoes per persons. They really gave you a good cleansing without going to any Ayurvedic Prayogshaala in Kerala!

When I grew up, I went with a group of farmers looking for the wild ancestor of the beans. In South India the bean is called Karamani, and the wild variety has not had a selection yet. It’s probably the ancestor of all our beans. It’s almost like sixteen-seventeen colours of beans on a single plant. That’s the amount of diversity in its gene pool. And, the karamani is a wonderful plant because it has five-six functions. One amazing thing is that it can grow on dew alone; secondly, it has a huge bio-mass and it makes an incredible green manure; the roots are nodulating, so they fix nitrogen; and when the pods come up, they are a delicious high-protein vegetable. There I was, up in the Nilgiris in the parts where the Toda tribals lived, with farmers looking for this plant along with a couple of Europeans. Up there, we suddenly saw this huge tree-trunk … massive … on a plateau that had only tiny, tiny trees. The foreigners asked me to find out from a tribal kid coming up, what this tree was. The Todas, I find, are a wonderfully wise people. They’ve forgotten more about nature than we’ll ever learn in our lifetimes. In my broken Tamil, I asked the boy what the tree was. The boy replies, ‘Tell them it is a dead tree.’ Now, it was a very simple exchange. I asked the boy what kind of tree this was, and the boy says tell them, it is a dead tree. It was only long after this incident that it occurred to me that in the course of accumulating all this knowledge and wisdom about trees we have destroyed them. Because, every time we analyse something and find a purpose for it, that thing gets sucked into industry and the species vanishes. So, this child, in his wisdom, was giving a very important message: how does it matter what kind of tree it is, if it is dead.

Then, I remember, once a friend of mine was coming from Thailand. His wife was a keen cook. They tasted this very fine Thai ginger, so they asked their hosts if they could take a ginger plant to grow back in India. Next morning, when they were leaving, there were five plants. They said, but we can only take one. The host said, ‘No, you see, this does not grow in your country, and it is going far, far away from its home. It will be lonely. So, let there be five. That way, they will be happier.’ Now, what can you teach a man like that about trees, or plants, or about faith or religion?

Amit Dahiyabadshah is a poet with 21 collections of poetry. He is the founder of the poetry movement, Delhi Poetree, which has hosted one poetry reading event a day for ten years across the vast expanse of the National Capital Region of New Delhi.