Our house in Velim is about 110 years old, and a mango tree and a chikoo tree were there from almost the beginning.

The mango tree was around four or five stories high, a single vertical column rising into the air with a horizontal branch, on the flattened top of which, as kids we would be sitting, sleeping, singing or swinging from. An incident I remember is my brother falling off the tree and me running scared thinking that something serious had happened to him, but, fortunately, it was alright; he had no major injury. And the ritual of plucking of mangoes, tying a piece of meat around the base of the tree, getting the ants drawn to that, then torching them and then the pluckers would go up with the cobullem which would be used to pluck the mangoes and lower them down. Sometimes, the kids would be down with a sack to catch the mangoes, which was a kind of game for us.

My father loved the chikoo tree. He grafted two or three hybrid chikoo varieties on to it. I remember he would make a cut and then put a twig and wrap some mud around the base of it and tie it with some plastic or something like that, water it a little bit and then it would take off. Most of them worked.

Now, these younger trees, fully grown, are providing fruit. We’ve had to trim the mango tree because the fruits were falling in the neighbour’s property. We had a lot of coconut trees on the periphery. One fine day, the neighbour started complaining that the coconut leaves and coconuts were falling on their roof and my father, in a fit of rage—he was a very temperamental man—ordered around eight coconut trees to be cut. That solved the neighbour problem. Much later, when I was filling my father’s shoes, we had a problem with a healthy young tree with this woman who wanted it cut, so I said, rather than damage her house, this strong tree had to go down. It felt bad that this tree had to be cut because a human being on the other side didn’t like it. And as a result of anger, the original compound wall which was just one metre high was raised to two metres.

The breadfruit tree near the well also gave my father a lot of heartbreak. The fruit would grow to a certain size and then fall off. So, he called a doctor – a tree doctor– who gave the breadfruit tree injections, but still, nothing happened. But it gave a lot of cover and we loved the tree for that. For me, it is a ritual now to sweep all the dead leaves and collect them for the fire. I use them for compost as well.

During my childhood, we had a poskem—in Goa we have this adopted daughter-of-the-house kind of concept—so, we had an old lady who lived with us from our grandparents’ time. We used to call her Modon, meaning Godmother in Konkani. Modon had a green thumb. She could make anything bloom. While she was here everything around the house was green. There were fruit trees, vegetables (pumpkins, beans, ladyfingers, etc). There were banana trees. She would earn some pocket money by selling flowers. My Dad used to smoke occasionally, and we as kids would make cars with the packets of Wills Navy Cut, using bottle caps for tyres and drag those cars around the base of the banana trees which had mounds around them and we would go up and down those clumps. It was like a little forest…seemed like a little green kingdom. 

We had some country tiles lying at the back, and under the chikoo tree, we would make tiny huts using pieces of those waste tiles and build our own Gaulish village —we were strongly influenced by the Asterix comics. We even had little pathways going through the make-believe Gaulish village. There was a fireplace in that make-believe village with a little piece of tin on which we would make imaginary meals by frying leaves. So, at the base of this Chikoo tree was the village of the indomitable Gauls! Sometimes, I feel like building those houses again. 

There was also a little lime tree with very small limes. We used to squeeze the sap of that tree into these small, empty injection bottles and use it for our craft activities. Home-made gum! I think we also traded that gum. My grandmother was on a wheelchair. When she was not using it, we would use the wheelchair as a bus. There was a conductor who would issue tickets in exchange of a bottle of that gum.

I remember once my father had an argument with Modon about something and she left the house. It was a big shock for the whole family, even for the aunts who lived abroad. When she left, she was in a rage. She said, ‘Gorachea fatracher fator urpana,’ meaning, ‘not even one stone of this house will remain standing on another.’ It was a curse. I think it has played on the minds of my parents and all of us. Even today, we remember this. Sometimes, when things are not going well in the house, we think, ‘Oh, Modon…’ She has passed away but we try and give masses for her soul. We try to placate her. We hope that she is not unhappy anymore. I am not a superstitious man, but after her passing away, all the greenery vanished and all the barrenness you see around here came to be. I am now engaged with it, trying to revive it and getting it back to the lushness of her time, almost as a tribute to her.

Another tree I remember from my childhood is a tamarind tree. When we were at Borda, schooling at St Annie’s, the school was in a rented premise, an old house, and in the corner was a tamarind tree. We loved eating the tamarind, and I remember, all my childhood memories of the primary school level are around that tree. We would all gather around that tree, sit around, play…the crushes I had on some girls are all linked to that tree. Today that tree has gone. The house itself has been demolished. A building has come up there.

I also remember a coconut tree from my early courting period. I would walk Evelyn home around ten o’clock at night. There is no one on that route, so we could just lean against a coconut tree that had a nice bend. We would recline against it and the moon up there, the stars, the night sky, and the remote sound of the village around, foxes howling in the hills, made us feel like we were living millions of years ago, connected to nature, as it should be.

I also remember one day seeing a trail of blood a coconut trees leading up to the Velim market. What used to happen is that people would put blades on the coconut trees, or barbed wires, to prevent theft of the coconuts. What struck me is that the tree is an innocent bystander in all this. The blood is what one man does to another, while the tree simply looks on.

Jose Lorence is a civil engineer and a short-story writer.