TREELOGY. Sent a letter to my tree

Soon after he turned six, my nephew began writing letters to me. They were a surprise for me, of course, but more so for him. His definition of surprise was, however, one of slight delay and deferral. He’d come with his father — my brother — and drop them in the circular post box in our house and leave without meeting me. A phone call at the end of the day — had I received something in the mail? I saw in these letters everything that I wanted to see — his tiny fingers curled to write on paper, his imagination gathering elasticity as he thought I would read his writing, his use of glue and colour to create odd folds on paper. Soon gifts began to arrive inside these envelopes that he made (they were anything but standard envelopes, more like buckets) — lozenges, eraser, pencil sharpener, mint tablets, things for which he’d stopped having any use.

Today — a day which would’ve felt more like spring had my throat not felt like something left behind by winter — the little boy sent me another letter. It had come after a long gap. Studying for his annual exams had robbed him of the energy to write — letters are a surplus, of course. Today, though, was different. He was as buoyant and light as spring. Inside the letter was his name and mine. And a young green leaf.

Leaf as page — that poetic equivalence is there in Bangla already, both are ‘paata’. Could it have come to him from there?

I was immediately transported to a favourite poem: Shakti Chattopadhyay’s ‘Postmen in the Autumnal Forest’.

I have seen postmen wandering in the autumnal forest

Their yellow sacks filled with grass like swollen sheep bellies

So many letters new and old they had found

Those postmen in the autumnal forest

I have seen them pecking away incessantly

Like a solitary crane at a fish

So impossibly, mysteriously, warily absorbed

They’re not like those postmen of ours

From whose hands our constant, indulgent love letters

Are lost all the time

(from Very Close to Pleasure, There’s a Sick Cat, and Other Poems ; translated by Arunava Sinha)

I just mistyped ‘postmen’ as ‘poetmen’. The typo made me smile. It was appropriate, and on the level of the poetic, not a typo at all. But that’s another story. The postmen — who are these postmen, people with yellow sacks? I ask myself how the six-year-old boy’s lonely leaf-letter reminded me of them, and, as if thoughts were transferred epithets, I saw the young green leaf and yellow sacks filled with grass and wondered whether there could possibly be any relation between them.

The poem constructs an easy binary between postmen of ‘our’ world and those in the forest. It might have been this that made me think of my six-year-old postman with his little green leaf.

We are moving away from one another continuously

Distancing ourselves out of greed for letters

We are getting many letters from far away...

And so we are moving away from the kind of people

We are ourselves

And so we are about to express our foolish weaknesses

And motives, everything ...

For a long time we have not embraced one another

For a long time we have not savoured human kisses

For a long time we have not heard people sing

For a long time we have not seen babbling children ...

The difference between human and forest postmen is, evidently, not one of locale alone. It is also about the quality and character of letters carried — what is love to grass? As in most of these poems, the slight moralising is always at the expense of the human — what man has made of man, and what man has made of nature. It is not this — The distance between letters has only grown/ I have never seen the distance between trees grow — that pricks my mind so much as the naturalised relationship between trees and the mail service. It is not only the well-known ‘Email-a-Tree’ service in Melbourne that I’m thinking of. A few days ago I read about a 500-year-old oak tree (‘the Bridegroom’s Oak tree’) near the German town of Eutin, in Dodauer Forest, where a lone postman delivers letters inside the tree’s chest. ‘“There’s something so magical and romantic about it,” said Karl-Heinz Martens (72), who delivered letters to the tree as its postman for 20 years, starting in 1984. “On the internet, facts and questions match people, but at the tree, it’s a beautiful coincidence — like fate.”’

Fate. Destiny. Surprise. Their easy association with trees — remember the s/he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not routine that is accompanied by the tearing of petals from a flower? In a world where almost everything is mechanised and predictable, this ascription of postman status to trees might be our last relationship with metaphor, with surprise, with the random, with the delights and harvests of cross-pollination.

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

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