TREELOGY. Leave no impression

My nephew, who turned seven almost suddenly, has begun to take an interest in the plant world. Impatient with his lack of curiosity about flowers and leaves and how they come to be, I used to wonder about the age when children gradually grow curious about these things in the background. An energetic child who spends a lot of imaginative energy on the world of ‘men’ — Superman, Spiderman, Antman, Ironman, and so on — his world has been one of action. He mimicked these characters — running and jumping, flying and swimming — with actions that demanded vigorous movement of the limbs. How was the plant world to compete with these in getting his attention?

This month, as his mid-term exams loosened their grasp momentarily and the Puja holidays began, I bought him a scrapbook. It’s your leaf book, I said. He wrote it down promptly in the space after ‘Subject’. And, as if the name had some kind of power, an adventure began. Words wouldn’t suffice, and soon I was being dragged by the hand down the stairs to the garden. It is my father’s garden — though the whole family lives here, it is only my father who attends to those who cannot speak to have his attention. I do not live here any more, and though I feel a connection with the grass, having planted it with my father in 1991, using the style of planting rice instinctively, most of the plants are new, having become residents after I went to live elsewhere. The trees remain, their limbs closer to the sky than I can ever hope to be with my feet on the ground.

We are to gather leaves for the little boy’s scrapbook. He plays in the garden, and though he doesn’t know the plants and trees in it, he knows where the ant-homes are. Like a guardian he asks me to be careful — jump, he says, or they’ll bite you. I follow his instructions. As we grow older, the number of people who give us instructions decreases. I also have an instruction for him, only one — he will not tear any leaf from the plants, he will only collect fallen leaves.

The idea disappoints him temporarily. It is possible that he was expecting an animated response from the plants at their leaves being forcefully taken away from them, a plant version of kung fu. But he relents.

We pick leaves, he insisting that I follow — and repeat — his actions. We have no flower basket, and there are no baskets to carry leaves. It is from this that his first question comes. Why do we collect only flowers, why are there no baskets to carry leaves? I remind him about our excursion through the tea gardens a few days ago, of women with baskets attached to their heads, collecting tea leaves. But that is different, he says. I know it is, but I don’t know how to answer his philosophical question — why have human beings collected flowers and not leaves, not even created a container in which leaves could be carried?

Our palms are better than any basket, I tell him.

But my basket is so small, he complains, showing his tiny hands.

In a few minutes, our hand-baskets are overflowing. We walk upstairs to my parents’ room, the only space where such an exercise will be allowed. My father turns his helper — he’s getting Sellotape, he’s running to get a pair of scissors, then glue, then felt pens, the large infrastructure necessary to make such an operation successful.

“ Aekta paataye aekta paata ,” I tell him, trying to be poetic, but I mean it literally too, of course. The Bangla word for ‘page’ and ‘leaf’ are the same — paata ; a leaf on each page.

After this museum of leaves has been created, the next step is obviously one of nomenclature. We have to give them names. He’s begun writing — Abhijit, the name of his closest friend, below a periwinkle leaf. No, I say urgently in reflex.

Why? he asks.

“Because that’s a human name,” I say, not knowing how else to explain.

“What is its plant name, then?” he asks.

I am about to say ‘periwinkle’, but decide to say its scientific name instead. Catharanthus roseus , I say.

He looks up from his notebook, surprised. “No, that’s the name of a dinosaur,” he protests, before going on to name the kinds he’s inscribed into his memory: Apatosaurus , Segosaurus …

I look at the timid periwinkle leaf, made further docile by being chained by Sellotape.

I let him write the names of his friends below the leaves.

“This one’s a variegated leaf,” I tell him about one.

“Very good leaf,” he writes from mishearing.

My affection flows unrestrained.

When he asks me his last question for the day, I pretend to be asleep, like a fallen leaf: “Why do flowers and leaves that fall don’t get up on their own like humans?”

Sumana Roy is the author of How I Became A Tree;

Twitter: @sumanasiliguri

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