This is for the history-minded
common people who care to know about small things. We trees are highly
underpaid and under-appreciated. What’s something preposterous is that it’s we
who have sired the evolution of mankind and now we depend on him for our
survival. We are numbered now—from that countless status when mother earth was
lush green earlier—and there will be a time when the heritage lobby will be
fighting to keep our ruins as a memorial for the past when mother earth was
alive. There will be machines all around and human brain itself will be
replaced by the artificial intelligence.
I’m a seemal (silk cotton) tree standing by the canal-side pathway. It
used to be a beautiful thin ribbon of solitude between the canals overgrown
with few trees and lots of grass, bushes and reeds. A poetic man would walk in somber
profundity on the path. Then the developers hoeing the dirty grind of parasitic
business arrived. The sand mafia would arrive at night and scoop away the sand
from the canals and the path between them. The chauvinistic pigs would scrape
out as much grains of sand as possible to build their big buildings. The
earthmover’s claws were lucid, pertinent and driven by soulless precision. It
would work with pure sense of abstraction. Its zealousness would cut the upper
lateral roots of we trees to dig out more and more sand to fill the truck to
the brim. The solitudional luminosity for the lone poetic man was gone; the
grass, reeds and bushes obliterated; the smaller trees fell and bigger ones
like me survived the onslaught with cut limbs and big gaping wounds. The cast
and crew of development are too big actors now.
When the poetic man came and saw
my big roots exposed and cut, he put a healing sad hand on my trunk. The edifying
notes of his love touched my innermost rings in the trunk. He made a very
little effort, this is all he could manage being a poetic man, and sweated for
a couple of hours to gather soil around my wounded roots. For me the spiritual symbolism
of this love is beyond its physical limits. It feels good to be cared and one’s
pain acknowledged. But a small group of thugs took away even that little heap
of earth this man’s poetic hands had built around me. I think they did it
specifically to make it seem self-mocking to the poet—that your kind of
emotions are meaningless in the modern age; that this artistic outlet is
nothing more than a speck of dust in the face of the horses of greed in full
trot. Since then I have tried to muster up courage to the extent of granitic
endurance just for that poetic man who sometimes comes and puts a friendly hand
on my bark. But I missed my flowers this season, the beautiful big red flowers,
one of which I had intentionally dropped on his head as he walked under me.
That’s when we became friends. So there have been no flowers because I have
been using all my energies in keeping myself up with the remaining roots. My
foliage also has been the same for the last one year. It’s pale without any new
shoots. I’m still in mourning, you know.
They have cut a little square on
my bark, a sort of numbered nameplate declaring my number, a kind of my
leasehold to stand on this small portion of earth till they decide to terminate
it any time. I sanctify their insinuations and grotesqueness by oozing my sap,
my tears, through the square marking. This disquieting incision on my skin
keeps reminding me that I’m their numbered property under some forest law that
easily allows some thugs to lacerate me. I have a message for the bloodhound. I
let out a yellowish sap through this little square of licensing cut. It
coagulates to a meaty sanguine blob. I have obliterated their despicable number
that they had assigned me. It’s my revolt. I don’t agree to their lease
contract under whatever forest laws they have. The law that doesn’t provide me any
protection and leaves me open to be vandalized by any thug whose spirit itches
to play truant.
The poetic man sometimes comes
and puts his gentle fingers on the protruding sanguine crust from my guts. I
see his mournful countenance. This human touch is astonishing. It snaps off the
thread of pain for a few moments. How I wish more humans could touch we trees
like this! How I wish that more humans realized we are half of their lungs!