Trees from her Backyard

by Preeti Madhusudhan

Arya woke to the shrill cries of birds. Her thin frame jerked off the bed when the next sharp aviary inflection was accompanied by what sounded to her like the cacophonous gurgling of a pack of hyenas. The room looked strange, the bed lower; almost near the floor, she realized, as she stumbled and almost slipped when the coarse coir mat caught her feet just in time.

“Arya! This is the Panch National park and those are just birds outside, shouting good morning”, mumbled a sleepy but clearly amused Sam.

“I know and I woke up for a walk.” She smiled, thanking God that Sam understood her so well. Reaching across the bed she gently kissed his stubbled cheek and shuffled to the bathroom, relishing the coarseness of the floor-mat as she went. She was in a pair of boxer shorts and a cotton t-shirt. It made her feel naked to be walking in boxers in India, though this was a luxurious resort and spa and she slept this way every night at New York.

The foliage that framed the wooden deck outside the room seemed to filter in pure golden drops of the morning sun. With a smile on her face, Arya could identify and name each tree that lined the deck and the pathway beyond. As she walked rapidly and then slowly picking up speed, began jogging through the serene resort, she couldn’t help but wonder at the contrast the place presented with her environs at New York. An editor at a leading publishing firm, her time was spent in the subways and the impersonal marble, granite, glass offices. She had crammed in as many potted shrubs and plants as was humanly possible in the tasteful yet compact town home they lived in. She had a penchant for staying organized and neat that bordered on neurotic and it never ceased to amaze her that Sam put up with it and even participated in her quirks. Through her work and home chores, she regularly watered and pruned her plants and shrubs and always hired a gardener during her vacation. Where other people had decorative objects and paintings she had plants. They were everywhere, but always unobtrusive. In a way it looked as though she was trying to re-create the greenery of her home-town.

Arya’s father, a journalist at a leading national newspaper, was the only liberal in a rigorously conservative family. Even as a child the conflicts within her family were tangible to Arya and were her consistent reality. Her name was the only aspect of her life that Arya’s father Sambasivam or Samba to his friends, reluctantly conceded to another person, his mother. He was immensely delighted when she, as a child, abridged her name to Arya, unable to roll her tongue through its entire length. In a clear departure from the norm of his family, her father had encouraged the girl’s natural inclinations towards sports and books. Through her adolescence, if she wasn’t at practice, she was reading. Her mother, grandmother and the large family’s extended set of relatives and friends knew better than to instruct her on domestic chores. “Don’t we have maids for these things?” He would hiss with ill-concealed fury at the sight of his only child doing or being made to do anything other than the elegant things he deemed suitable for her. “Don’t you want your daughter to be eligible?” his mother would plaintively start, to which he would retort, “For what? If that’s all a girl child needs to know, any man will be better off marrying his servant-maid!” She had kept her long hair to satisfy the women at home, but would always wear it in a long pony tail to please her dad. “No oiled plaits for my daughter.”

She would wear the traditional long skirts and blouses for her grandmother’s sake, but only in light cotton prints that her father ordered from the person who clothed most of the social elites of the day. She would chant slokas but learnt French, would sing classical music but played the piano. But for all the seemingly confusing signals she was receiving, what with the constant encouragement her father would offer to try anything novel and new, she never yielded to peer pressure and always seemed to “know” what she wanted and that was never inappropriate.

From her first moment each morning till her last waking moment, whenever she looked out or up from her sport or book or a warm moment with her mother or grandmother, she would be accosted and engaged by the lush greenery of her home-town. The old banyan and neem trees in her backyard used to be two of her best friends. Her peculiar upbringing had ensured that she was friend-less and quirky, but she always found solace and joy being near those trees. Somehow their strong roots and their sturdy friendship gave her warmth and firm ground to stand on.

She was the first girl in the family to travel alone for a sports tournament. She was the first one to stay in a hostel in the distant Delhi, to pursue a degree in English literature. No one was surprised when she applied to and gained admission with scholarship at an American university. It would have been shocking only if that didn’t happen.

So when Arya politely asked to be married before she left the country for higher studies, there was a sharp intake of breath or rather breaths, as the entire extended family and set of friends and acquaintances immediately heard of it and waited with bated breath. They had all been waiting for some news of an embarrassing affair or an elopement, for they could attribute a college degree and free upbringing as being directly proportional to the increased possibility of family disgrace. What no one knew or rather was informed of was that Arya not only wanted to be married to travel to the States but specifically to Saminathan or Sam, their neighbour’s son. Though the two families had lived next to one another for generations, they knew nothing about Sam except that he had migrated to the States a few years back to pursue his higher studies and was now an investment banker with a leading bank.

It seemed like Arya had always known Sam, even if she hadn’t spoken to him once. Perched atop her banyan or neem tree, she had seen him since he was a wee boy in a pair of shorts, pretending to play soldiers, practicing his marbles skills, tops, kites, cricket and everything in between. He preferred the clump of banana trees near their well as his favourite spot in their backyard. Sam’s banana ‘forest’ was always dense despite their leaves being voraciously cut down for every meal, their stems cooked up to a stew and whole trees being uprooted and planted in the front-yard to announce every wedding in the family.

Her folks were pleasantly surprised at her wisdom in requesting an arranged marriage and her parents secretly thrilled at her choice for they knew that Sam’s parents had been looking for a suitable match for him. She almost certainly knew he would say yes. She smiled and didn’t feel silly thinking that the trees would have talked to each other across the moss laden compound walls.

He acquiesced with elegantly-expressed passion and so, it was as Sam’s wife that she left India to pursue her higher studies. The tree-lined avenue they lived in, the vibrant flora at the campus, acutely reminded her of the greenery she had left behind. Though she enjoyed connubial bliss and the very successful career she worked hard at, she couldn’t look at a tree without a sigh. Sighting difficulties at maintaining the large rambling homes at their advanced ages, both their parents had sold their rambling houses and moved into apartments in the city.

When they failed to conceive a child after five years of marriage and with Arya’s sighs becoming audible, Sam suggested they move back to India as they had “made their money”. Arya somehow couldn’t conceive the notion of a home that was other than the tree-laden ones they had grown up in. It wasn’t home to her anymore. Which was when, quite by accident, she happened to stumble upon an article on this lush resort and spa in what was previously tiger country. Thus began their annual pilgrimage to the resort in the national park at the junction of the lush forest region of three states. What was at first a hopeful yet sceptical visit, soon became an annual norm.

When they had an event to celebrate, a personal milestone to gloat over, they came there. She waited through the year, savouring every moment of the wait to arrive and bask in its green air. She had brooded over the passings of their parents in the jungle outside their suite. She felt strangely at peace and comforted. And every year when they had to leave, Sam would ask her, “Why not just move back ?” though by now he knew her reply.

The place was a novelty, the prize at the end of an arduous task or the monotonous routine of everyone’s everyday lives. If it became her everyday existence, then it would become part of her everyday monotony. She wanted to thrill in the first touch of her bare feet in the coir mat atop the cool red-oxide floor. She wanted to peek lustily at the alternating tiny and vast glimpses of the green leafy canopy through the car window as they drove till their lodge/suite with the smell of fresh earth and leaves in the air. She wanted to tear through the pathways touching every tree bark as she jogged her way through the property every morning of her stay. She wanted it to be as fresh, delightful and unattainable and thus covetable as the first time she saw it. He knew it all, yet it pained him to see the pain in her eyes as she said good bye each year.

As she jogged through the tree, shrub-lined mud path, she paused at the by now-familiar gaping holes in the rows. The property seemed to have shrunk in the last few years, and seemed a little sparse. That was the fifth plane that had passed overhead since she left her room. The resort’s website had announced the new airport that had sprung up, connecting the place with other busy cities of India. They had still preferred to take a train till the nearby town and hire a car from there as they had always done.

Somehow, something was different. She could almost point at the places where there had been trees before, she could even remember what trees they were in most cases. It was as though she had come upon a graveyard. Standing at the middle of the track, she absentmindedly massaged the spot in her chest where her left breast had been till two months back. That was their excuse for this year’s visit, the removal of a cancerous tumour.

Preeti Madhusudhan is a freelance architect/ interior designer living in Sydney with her husband and six-year-old son. She is passionate about books and is an ardent admirer of P.G.Wodehouse. She inherited her love for books and storytelling from her father, a Tamil writer. Preeti is trying to publish her maiden novella in English.

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