Treelogy. Hang in the balance

Boys climb trees and girls sing from swings attached to them. I’m aware of the essentialism of my pronouncement even as I type this, but it’s a thought that’s lived inside me for years. The ratio of the visibility of women climbing trees or swinging from their branches to men doing the same would be, in my intuitive estimate, approximately the same as female to male drivers of automobiles.

I must have come to this from my envy of Tarzan and my empathy for Jane. I can no longer remember what it was, except that both my brother and I tried to climb the mango tree in our garden with near-equal degrees of failure.

The ancient pomelo tree in my father’s ancestral house in a village near the Bangladesh border was more welcoming — my cousins and I, as thin as our childhoods, spent afternoons climbing its branches like ants, not worrying about falling, trusting in gravity intuitively, something adulthood would gradually take away from us. The pomelo tree was in the courtyard, a member of the family — we treated it like we did the bodies of our mothers and aunts, as beds and chairs, resting places. To climb on to it seemed as natural as perching oneself on an aunt’s knee.

The bamboo grove was near the pond, a mix between an interesting outsider and outcast, depending on the time of the day, for bamboo, in the village stories, was a home to ghosts at night. My younger cousins, skinny boys in once-white vests and shorts, dangled from the tips of spear-like bamboo shoots like spiders from a web, connected to it with something as fragile as gossamer. I watched with envy and wonder, taking it as natural that this kind of swinging was a gift meant for boys alone, like large playgrounds and the balls they kicked on them.

In the school where I studied were three swings, and encircling them were long queues of girls like myself, waiting for our turn to throw up our legs to the sky, smile from our highest point away from the earth in shyness and fear, knowing that we’d be happier once our feet touched the soil. There were hardly any boys in the queue. I notice it only now, retrospectively.

It was a time when I was still swinging on the school swing every day when my father forced me to watch Charulata.

Apart from the windows and the binoculars and the new ways of looking out on to the world that I found ravishing in Ray’s film, what stayed with me was the famous swing scene. The long swing hangs from a tree in the garden, Charulata asks her brother-in-law to help her swing, there is affectionate banter between the two, she sings a Tagore song about flowers in words that mimic their swing-like movement; she gets a notebook for him to record his thoughts, and then, swinging gently from the same swing, as if something has tempered the arc of her swinging high up to the sky, she spies on his writing with her binoculars, correcting a spelling, before her eyes graze through leaves and stems to a woman with a child, to return to him again. I find it telling that Ray gives Charulata this enchanting perspective — not just of the binoculars but of binoculars from the swing. Amal, the man, sits under a tree as all the action — of the eye — happens.

That Ray might have been gendering space and simultaneously trying to break its invisible borders came to me the first time I read Robert Frost’s ‘Birches’ at university.

“When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.”

In this beautiful poem about swinging from birches, why does Frost think of a boy swinging from the tree? I read the rest of the poem with joy, moving like the boy on the birches, returning to earth periodically (“Earth’s the right place for love:/I don’t know where it’s likely to go better”), feeling the tug of gravity, like Frost means us to. I’d have continued to be the boy in the poem, testing the birches and the earth and myself, had Frost implied that this swinging wasn’t for girls:

“You may see their trunks arching in the woods

Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground

Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair

Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

But I was going to say when Truth broke in

With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm

I should prefer to have some boy bend them (italics mine)

As he went out and in to fetch the cows —

Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,

Whose only play was what he found himself,

Summer or winter, and could play alone.”

Poetic truth or otherwise, I think a girl could ‘find herself’ and ‘play alone’, swinging from the trees, if the world and the male imagination allowed her. I’m sure the birches wouldn’t mind.

Sumana Roy , author of How I Became a Tree, writes from Siliguri; @SumanaSiliguri

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