I think the first tree that really stays in my memory was in Katari Bagh, Cochin. My father was serving in the Navy and we lived in a house with a lawn and trees outside. And as it is in Kerala, it was lush. Outside that house was a very large mango tree. It had small tart mangoes and I recall those as well. I have my memory of having taught myself to climb trees on that mango tree. One day, when I was in second grade or something, I scaled a very high branch of the tree and felt very proud of it. And then I wasn’t able to come down. Then what happened was that the branch broke, and I fell onto my chest. I had a feeling of not being able to breathe for a while. I had the first sense of a shock you feel when you dive from a dive board but you don’t dive correctly. Luckily, I wasn’t hurt badly. There was a sense of pride of having managed to reach that high on the tree with one’s little form. Childhood has a way of distorting perspectives, so I would not know how tall the tree was, but it felt like it was really magically tall. And what I’m sure of is that there was no way I knew how to come back down. So, falling off was probably the only way downward.

By the time I was seven or eight, we had moved to Goa. Here there were various frangipanis and guavas that were greatly loved, but one tree that I recall as being quite dear to my heart was in Altinho. I was in art college, up on the hill at Altinho in Panjim, and there was a line of old ficus trees past the Circuit House. I could see the form of Jesus in the belly of one of the trees. A kind of a Jesus with his arms up like a pin of Jesus. You know how ficus trees can have a fleshy, bodily form about them? I tried to find the tree again, but couldn’t. It is highly possible that the tree continued to grow, and my Jesus was engulfed somewhere within it. But I recall for about a good two years or so walking past my tree with the Jesus in it.

Then there was the tree that I met in 2009. It was a tree in a very particular valley outside the town of Angoulême in France. That valley had a bit of a microclimate, so it had a Mediterranean vegetation. This tree was a Chêne, which I believe is an oak. I’m not sure if it was a Chêne vert (green oak) or a Chêne blanc (white oak). I was deeply in love then. It was the start of a relationship with this lovely person and one of the few outings into the open was in this valley called Vallée des Eaux Claires (The Valley of Clear Waters). This tree was on a hilltop and it felt like it was standing on a corner waiting for a hug. It was a tree with many wide-open arm-gesture branches and was not forbiddingly tall. I had a very strong instant connection with the tree. Every time my beloved at that time, who became my husband, and I went for walks, we would meet this tree. Then in various episodes, we have seen sometimes flowers spread under the tree, so maybe someone buried their dog there. I think the tree probably occupied a similar space for other people. I never ever met anyone else there, but it felt like other people used it as a place to come and have a ‘moment.’

I ended up having a wedding after-party in the same valley. It was just a place that, to me, felt like a sacred space, and the tree was one of the little pit-stops. In the breakup of my marriage, I went back with a very changed painful equation with the country. And as time went by, I kind of reclaimed spaces that I loved, not trying to erase old memories, but seeing if there was just a rapport that still existed. I went back to this Chêne tree also with close friends afterwards and I found the same joyousness. In 2021, which was a particularly hard year for me, even as hard years go, I did a very tiny square painting, which was a kind of a dream painting that merged two different people’s dreams into one. At the central axis of this painting is this particular tree, so it did play a centring role in that sense.

Then, back in Goa during the Covid years, kind of getting a hold of life with a limb ripped apart, which was a personal relationship that went south, my nephew told me that he wanted to show me his tree. The two of us went to a little spot in Dona Paula, somewhere on the outskirts of Cidade de Goa. That tree, again, was a Ficus. I think Indians can’t thump Ficus out of their systems. We climbed this tree. I’m a lot less springy than I was earlier, and it was not easy for me, but my nephew was extremely encouraging. The tree had branches where a 40-plus woman can lay for forty-five minutes without a problem. I felt honoured to have been taken to the tree. Later, I painted that tree, too.

Amruta Patil is a writer and painter, and the author of graphic novels Kari (2008), the Parva duology – Adi Parva: Churning of the Ocean (2012) and Sauptik: Blood and Flowers (2016) – and Aranyaka: Book of the Forest (2019).