When I happened to step into the balcony of my flat in the
morning after a night of torrential rain accompanied as it was with a vicious
gale, the first thing I noticed was a bit of a void in the direction of my line
of sight which normally did not intersect with a part of the balcony and a good
part of the terrace of the two-story house in the neighbouring bungalow society
right outside the boundary wall enclosing ours. By then I realised that a stout
and big branch at the upper flights on the right side of the Krishnachura
(‘Royal Poinciana’) tree I am used to seeing from my balcony was no more, being
substantially broken down from the main stem and was precariously dangling
above and across the boundary wall with a medley of sub-branches, leaves and
flowers further threatening to go where gravity would pull them to. And that
meant on top of a lot of spanking cars parked on either side of that wall.
Three things bothered me, in no
particular order. Both my neighbours in the opposite two-story house and I
would forego a part of the privacy (without having to pay any premium for this
privilege) naturally provided by the leafy branches of the tree. The latter,
which had a symmetrical expanse as it diverged upwards, well nigh lost it, much
like a human shorn of an arm from the shoulder. A cuckoo that used to station
itself on some branches and from the leafy incognito issued its unrelenting
calls since early morning fell silent, probably confused by the mayhem had gone
to a safer abode.
By mid morning there was a flurry of activities on both
sides of the wall involving responsible men and a few concerned women,
watchmen, safaiwallahs and later one or two babus in grey safari suits from the
corporation in-charge of the garden department. They paced up and down the
sidewalk, looked up the tree and estimated its broken segments, furiously
argued among themselves. An hour later, a thin agile young man armed with a
chopper climbed up the tree and bracing himself at a convenient junction on the
stem, methodically chipped at the sides of the broken branch before chopping it
off close to the corresponding Y-joint, the huge panoply of branches and leaves
and flowers being caught hold of and drawn safely down by two more workers from
the department standing below. Some further pruning later those workers pulled
the remains of the tree, much like an animal carcass, across and out of the
colony on to the main road en route to its designated transit area of the
municipal ward awaiting further denudation and decapitation towards an
appropriate utilitarian end.
Presently, the reasonable and the
practical men and women from our colonies, having successfully resolved the
fall out of an act of god went their ways. Safaiwallahs got busy with their
daily chores. Babus sped away on their two wheelers. Then the tree was left
alone to reflect on its bruises and cuts. The places where the chopper had
amputated the branches were looking white in the rising sun, bright and raw.
In time the injured stem will be
washed by rain of any memory of a presence and tanned by sun, collect grime and
look like the others. If its fecundity serves it well the tree might shoot out
new arms thereabouts or elsewhere and grow leaves on them and again aspire for
the sky, no less, and fill the void in the direction of my line of vision. When
the air will rise, the tree will slowly allow its bruised hope to flow up and
down the sinews of the branches for them to be swayed, with leaves aflutter and
flowers aflame. In time the pint-sized birds will think nothing of their busy
flitting across the branches and resume their preferential perch on the
lightest among these dangerously tempting gravity. And the cuckoo will be back
to pull me out of my slumber with amazing persistence.
Perhaps there was no need to be
despondent about this act of god and its human follow up. The tree will
survive. And so will all those that animate the nature.