For the love of silk cotton trees

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree
                                 Joyce Kilmer

I haven’t met too many people who have fallen in love with trees. I didn’t even know I would be one of them till the day I read some strange book from the musty attic in my house. The book was borrowed from the Punjab Agricultural University. No one in my family went to that university. It remains a mystery how that book got in my bookshelf.

So this book had pictures of the flowering trees in bloom. I saw this one particular photo and was absolutely blown. It was like recognizing from the shadow a face an old loved one. This I realised much later was the same tree that appeared in my dreams of heaven, where an avenue of cotton silks spread till forever connecting this world to that.

However the first time I really found that rapture of  delight was in 2006. I was staying over with friends at the DSSW Hostel in North Campus and was very sore and heavy hearted after a bad crush. We had gone out to the community canteen to get some chai right at the fag end of the evening.

Standing dispirited I suddenly noticed this hearty silk cotton tree standing with grace. I must have looked at it for some ten minutes in the mad stare that lovers give on recognising that first sight of each other. My heart stopped. Dropped its complains. Stood Still. Like a deer struck by headlights of a car. Many clouds passed through my life and bad spell broke! I feelt like a pink baloon growing bigger and lighter and lighter with this old/new love.

From sad tired and weary I felt reassured and and in love with the world again. Like an old friend from far away had suddenly visited with all his gifts and memories. Like a tall graceful spirit stood there in the campus calling out to my love

It didn’t do much or make any effort. It just went on being itself, big majestic and forever a silk cotton tree. And I struck by thunder stood there and stopped feeling cold and had this sudden strange urge of hurling myself at that tree and hugging it. I didn’t do it for fear of scandalising others!

The memory of that day still warms my heart. Just thinking about how this tree had followed me there, in that disappearing patch of sunlight always stays in my memory.

That’s the thing about silk cotton trees. They’ll appear in the strangest of places. Peeping into your tea from the picture window on a 6th floor of an apartment while you sit through an interview. In the dark shadows of an empty ground where road rollers hurl around earth to make a new building, standing tall and silent in the impending doom. In the junk yards of childhood where little girls with pig tails ran over their fallen flowers burying dead butterflies under them.

Much later I read about how D.H. Lawrence would go naked and climb mulberry trees so that the muse would strike him. I can completely understand the urge. The big smooth silver trunks of a tree do call for petting. At least the pulchritude is not alien to our species. We love butterflies peacocks and tall handsome trees!

But there is something more than sheer physicality. This tree talks to me! Everytime I pass them I sense warm whisper, and conversations much more heartwarming that human conversations. It affects me when it changes shapes, sheds its leaves, bounces sunlight off its glistening bare branches and then grown little fist sized buds like a teenaged girl growing breast. And then suddenly it would light up with those majestic big flowers and then blow the flowers and carpet the earth. Its tides affect me like moon affects the seas.

Have you seen the deep red of its flowers? Just the color an Indian girl dreams of her trousseau to be one day. The way its bare branches divide the sky. How the sky in frame of these branches gets different shades of blue and deep blue and white cotton fluff. Have you seen the size of its flowers? The plonk with which they fall on the ground AND STAY THERE for days till they finally become the ground on which they’ve fallen.

I talk like a love sick person. And I am lovesick for silkcotton trees. I hope someday they find the words for those of us who’ve felt the Eros for trees. For those of us who’ve blushed with delight at watching them…For those of us who write these love letters to trees.