At Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda Arts Festival in early February this year, on what was my first public discussion about the book I’d written, my friend hid behind a tree in the garden of the David Sassoon Library. I’d forbidden her from being in the audience — my self-consciousness would choke me, I explained. She offered her reasons for not keeping her promise, but more than all the affectionate and predictable ways of showing support was the hilarity of the unexpected — she showed me a slender plant behind which she’d hidden for more than an hour. I laughed, first out of disbelief, and then about the incredulous irony of the situation. I had been talking about Matthew Hall who, in his book Plants as Persons , uses the term ‘plant blindness’ — a human tendency to not notice plant life. My friend, without bothering about all of this, had chosen to turn this ‘plant blindness’ into her secret weapon.

Among the many philanthropic jobs trees perform, giving humans oxygen and food among other things, this too must count: shielding the human from view. For someone like me, who grew up in an indolent small town where trees were left to live — or die — where they’d sprouted on their own, without the midwifery of a gardener, they were the safest and dependable refuge in a game of late-afternoon hide-and-seek.

That they could offer shelter to adults as well dawned on me only when I went to Santiniketan for the first time. I was 12. My cousins, whom I was visiting, asked me to avoid the ‘ jhnop ’ — the bushes — on our evening walk. I thought it was a forewarning against snakes, common in Bolpur. Instead of the slimy tails of serpents, however, what I saw were the legs of boys and girls in amorous intertwining. In the dark of the evening, those limbs might have looked like branches of trees. All of us looked away, even though we could partly see — and partly imagine — the activities in the undergrowth.

That, then, is the thing about trees and their code of hiding — they are incapable of hiding completely from view. Looking for online images of people hiding behind trees, both photographs and drawings, I notice one thing in common: in nearly all of them, the tree trunk covers the body of the human but the head sticks out. In them are the faces of those hiding, watching out for possible detectives. This ability of trees to provide camouflage, however unreliable that might be, is a thread that connects childhood with adulthood and the world of classical literature with the contemporary world. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses , to take an accessible example, whether it is Daphne trying to escape from Apollo or Syrinx who’s running away from Pan, or others fleeing from the violence of love — no, that’s not an oxymoron — hiding behind a tree is almost literalised: the human turns into the tree to hide.

No such technology is available to the modern man. And so, instead of metamorphosis — no cosmetic surgeon offers a human-to-tree transformation yet — he must hide. Two photographs of men hiding behind trees made me laugh recently. The first is of the basketball player Shaquille O’Neal. The US Magazine reported this in August 2016: “The 7-foot-1 former NBA star, 44, was waiting for the valet to fetch his car after his lunch at Wolfgang’s Steakhouse when he spotted the cameras and ducked behind the sidewalk plant. The tree didn’t even cover one arm of O’Neal’s 344-pound frame.” The other is of the British Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who was reported to have hidden behind a tree to avoid a Wall Street Journal journalist. The comparisons even fit to describe new-age morality — the lover of Ovid’s time has been replaced by the paparazzi of ours.

Walking through the tree-lined streets in Churchgate later at night, after my friend had spent the evening hiding behind a tree, we saw the branches of Mumbai’s aged trees hiding the full moon from our view. It was the nature of trees to hide, man or moon. Wasn’t it this that Shakespeare invoked in Macbeth , when he made the prophecy hinge on camouflage: ‘Till Birnam wood come to Dunsinane ...’, the foot soldiers hiding behind broken boughs?

Trees hide more than they reveal. Among all forms of life, it is them that we see only, and always, in part — the root is forever hidden. Perhaps it is this, apart from the colonies of insects and other dependants that hide inside its knots and holes, that makes it a natural ally in the human’s desire to be hidden. In this is the illustration of a lovely parasitic relationship — the tree, like water, can hide only partially; but man is incapable of being a hiding place to either the tree or to water. Perhaps that is the sad beauty of one-sidedness.

(Treelogy is a new monthly column about plant life, aesthetics, politics, and memory)

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