Quite weirdly, one of my first tree memories is of a dying tree. I grew up in Panjim city, opposite the Fidalgo hotel. Ours was a ground-plus-one house and we stayed on the first floor. Behind that was an old traditional Goan house. There was a small patch of kitchen garden in it and an open space in which grew a huge tamarind tree, with a big trunk. According to my grandmother that tree was the residence of a deochar (a spirit). At night he used to come to our window with a stick in his hand and make a sound—khal khal. So, she used to tell us to go to sleep early, otherwise the deochar would come to the window. This was my bedroom window from where I could see the tree. I must have been about four or five years old. Of course, now it is hard to imagine that you had such a massive tree there, but we still refer to that place as the place of Vataro, or a guardian spirit. There was no shrine assigned to this spirit. It was just that tree, that in many ways symbolised it. The people from that locality continue the tradition of keeping an offering there during the Indian month of Paush—a sweet Khichdi preparation, a bottle of liquor, usually feni, and a packet of bidi. Someone still goes from our house and keeps the offering, usually around twilight. Now there is no tree there. There’s not even one leaf there, only tall buildings, but there is an assigned place where the offering is made. Currently, we are probably the only family that makes the offering.

I have a vivid image of the tree being brought down—a massive rope around the enormous trunk of the tree, and four-five men pulling it down. It was to make way for a new building in the locality. That image in my mind is what city development looks like, or for that matter, how you destroy something living to create something non-living. Not many people were happy about it, but nobody protested either. This would have been in the mid-1980s.

Then, in our house we had a small backyard where we had one coconut tree, three guava trees and one very old drumstick tree. That coconut tree and the drumstick tree were there even before my grandmother bought the plot for the house. I grew up climbing those trees and collecting drumsticks. Late one night, we heard a loud sound. The coconut tree had come crashing down. We felt sad, and for me it was a very emotional moment. Very intense, as if a family member had died. But even when dying it gifted us all its coconuts, which were scattered on our terrace. Then we planted two more coconut trees there. One survived. And those guava trees had three different types of fruits. One, a small one, then an oval-shaped one, and a round one. But somehow, they had stopped fruiting. Once, when I had gone for fifteen days for an NCC camp, my father chopped down all those trees. I had been protecting them for many years. I cried and fought with my father. He said they brought a lot of mess, the leaves fell into the well, etc. I said, I don’t care, I will plant again. Around that time a lot of buildings started coming up in the area, so there was a lot of blockage of sunlight. The wind was also not flowing very naturally. You couldn’t plant whatever you felt like, especially fruiting trees. I worked on that land for many years, removing the debris from the renovation of the house, did a lot of mulching and composting to make the soil living and fertile. And then I planted bananas, a breadfruit tree and the coconut tree standing tall.

Another tree that I remember is a Devil’s Tree (Alstonia scholaris) at the Jogger’s Park. I remember going to it with my friends after work and sitting under it. In the month of November, December, it starts flowering when the winter is arriving in Goa and its flowers have a heady smell. It blooms at night. I remember sitting under the tree and analysing my life. Sadly, that tree died.

Then there is the big banyan tree opposite the police station in Panjim. I can see parts of that tree from my veranda since I stay on that same road. I have grown up watching that tree.

As I have grown up in a very urban setting, I have always felt the urge to know more about trees. My association with tree walks is I feel is the best possible way for me to do that.

I’m not a very social person, and with trees, I feel some sort of a connection. I believe they understand me and I try to understand them.

Arti Das is a Goa-based freelance journalist who writes about art, culture and ecology for various national and international publications. She also conducts tree walks, and blogs about a tree every month at her tree blog: https://aratigoa.wordpress.com/category/blog/