Tree Memories by Salil Chaturvedi
Anita Pinto
Mapusa, Bardez
I’ve always been very fond of trees. Wherever I go I am constantly looking at trees more than flowers or houses.
The earliest tree I remember is a mango tree from our neighbourhood. We lived in Mahim, Bombay, where there were cottages built during the East India Company time, quite similar in feel to the Goan Portuguese houses. I must have been four or five years old and, naturally, we were never allowed to go beyond the boundary wall. We were only allowed to go out with each other and play hide-and-seek and things like that. There was one mango tree at the end of this locality. Now, when you are little, all you remember is mainly the trunk of the tree. In those days there were no fences, no walls, and we were always running around from one house to another, and the elderly lady who owned the tree was a widow, I think. At least, I don’t remember her having any children. It was her mango tree and I remember we called her Aunt Polly-mango. She was such a gentle soul. She’d let us play around the tree. In fact, she always kept that area clean, picking up the dry leaves before we came to play. What I remember about the tree is how it welcomed us. The tree was always the base when we played hide-and-seek, and we put our arms around it and closed our eyes and counted off. And then, as we grew a little older, we’d sit and chat under the tree. And you know, that tree was the first thing to go! Maybe Aunt Polly-mango died. I don’t remember too well, but that was the place where the first building came up. It was a sad moment for us because that tree was really our headquarters.
The second tree I remember was at my grandmother’s house in Bandra, where we spent every weekend and holiday. She had a one-storey house overlooking the sea, and a frangipani tree grew in her compound. My cousins taught me how to make buttons from the flowers of the frangipani. We’d fold up the flowers and make them look like a big button and then we’d put them in our buttonholes. I still love the frangipani. I like it when the leaves and flowers all fall and also when it is in full bloom.
The other tree my grandmother had was an Awla tree. The foliage of the tree was huge and my grandmother would never let me go under that tree for some reason. Whether there were snakes, or thorny bushes, or some superstition, I really don’t know.
Then there was the Gulmohur tree that my father grew in our garden in Mahim. The tree grew big and had lovely foliage and flowers. It was lovely to look out of the window and see this tree. Towards the end of his life my father would often go out to the garden and have a look at the tree, stand underneath it for some time and then come back in.. When he died, we decided that instead of getting lilies and flowers and things like that, we’d get branches of flowers from the Gulmohur and put it all around his grave.
Then one morning, at about five o’clock, my sister who lives in Bandra, woke up with a start on her bed thinking that somebody had just banged the door. She went to the door and looked outside, but there was no one there. She asked her husband, ‘Did you hear any noise?’ He said, ‘No.’ A couple of hours later she went to work, and my other sister who was living with my mother called her up and said, ‘The Gulmohur fell early this morning.’
The tree was so close to the house, but fortunately it just collapsed in the garden. When they called me, I was so upset, but at the same time I was thankful. The tree knew where to fall. Then we had to chop it off and dispose it. But slowly the shoots began to grow again. The whole thing came up! New tree!
You know, at one time I went for one of these emotional workshops. And we were asked to do a tree. We were asked to lie under a tree, or sit under a tree and after some time to draw it. I drew the Gulmohur. Then we were told to divide it into four or five parts, like ten years or twenty years of your life in segments. I could see it at once. My whole life in the tree. The root that was strong…my family life is very strong, you know. I had drawn a lot of flowers fallen near the base of the tree and the branches on top were barren. That was around the time my husband had died and there was this period of nothingness in my life.
In the house that I live in Goa now, there is a mango tree. It’s a pairee mango. I love that variety of mango. It’s a huge tree and gives a lot of fruit, but a cobra is supposed to live under the tree. So, I was always afraid of my children going to play there. If we went to pluck the mangoes, we would all go together and make a lot of noise to let the cobra know we were around. I had a domestic help who was a real tomboy. She would climb up the tree and throw the mangoes down for me to collect. My husband would always want to eat a mango that fell from the tree. Sometimes he would read the newspaper out in the balcony and as soon as he heard a mango fall—he was a huge man, so he would never run and there was none of us to run for him—he would go slowly, pick the mango, come back and cut it and say, ‘Come and taste this mango. There’s nothing like it. It’s still warm from the tree!’
Anita Pinto is an author, and teaches communications, creative writing and emotional intelligence at business management colleges in Goa. She is the proprietor of the Anita Pinto Institute, through which she conducts progressive workshops in voice culture to professionals in Goa and Mumbai.