TREELOGY. Tree at the window

A couple of weeks ago my sleep was broken by the rattling of windows. I was angry with the windows — why did they need to do this in the middle of the night? Disturbed by their lack of consideration, I tried to go back to sleep. Soon after, it began to rain. The windows, aided by the rain and wet wind, were stubborn, but I, drugged by my greed for sleep, wouldn’t surrender. My sleep was gone by the time this wrestling match got over. The rain too had stopped, almost. Raindrops had pockmarked the glass but it was impossible to not notice what lay immediately outside the window. A debdaru — the Indian mast tree, also known as the false ashoka; Polyalthia longifolia ) — shivering in the wind, raindrops procrastinating on the tips of the long leaves. I stood there, transfixed by the slivers of street light reflecting on the wet bodies of leaves. When, at last, I returned to my bed, I felt that the architectural definitions of my bedroom had changed. That though it was outside, in the backyard, the tree — my consciousness of it — was actually inside my room.

I’ve seen this tree for more than a decade now, ever since I moved into this room. It’s not far from where the lamp post is, so that its invisible branches, loaded with leaves, are trimmed every few years, to avoid entanglement with the electric wires that cause “short circuit”. But the tree is not the lamp post. The lamp post will never be able to sneak into my room the way the tree has.

Now, writing this from a much smaller room in the German town of Wurzburg, I sit by a window overlooking a building that looks like a gallery of windows. Such is the prettiness of the curtains and the combination of sill and jamb and lintel that, for a moment, it looks like a supermarket of windows available for sale. A moment after the charm of the new sight is gone I begin to miss something. I cannot decide on what it is, not until I walk on to the street and spot the absence. Everything is too clear, too visible, my eyes reach the sky without any hindrance. I am homesick for the tree — a tree? — that would hide something from view. The totalitarianism of unobstructed views is not for me. I like something kept back, hidden, something that doesn’t come toppling all at once but in increments, in instalments of changes.

Is this why we are fond of a tree outside our window?

I lived in Darjeeling where I woke up to the sight of the Khangchendzonga, I’ve stayed in hotels just to hear the bark of the sea at night and watch its peplum of waves by day, I’ve spent a night on a balcony from where a neighbouring mountain seemed as easily within reach as soap near a basin, but in none of these have I found the homeliness of a tree outside the window. It’s a family member, as necessary, but, like a family member, also taken for granted. It is this intimacy, of mental weather and naked knowingness, that Robert Frost writes about in ‘Tree at My Window’.

Tree at my window, window tree,

My sash is lowered when night comes on;

But let there never be curtain drawn

Between you and me.

... But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,

And if you have seen me when I slept,

You have seen me when I was taken and swept

And all but lost.

That day she put our heads together,

Fate had her imagination about her,

Your head so much concerned with outer,

Mine with inner, weather.

The lack of curtain between the speaker and the tree is, apart from the many possible phenomenological interpretations, a metaphor for an aligned selfhood.

It is as if, like the two birds in the Rig Veda (“Two birds associated together, and mutual friends, take refuge in the same tree; one of them eats the sweet fig; the other abstaining from food, merely looks on”), one participant, the other observer, the tree and the speaker in Frost’s poem are one and the same person, the tree living the “outer” life, the speaker dealing with “inner weather”.

Reading poems and looking at artwork on the subject (Pinterest is full of images, particularly of stained glass, that try to replicate the effect — and illusion — of a tree waiting by the window), and trapezing briefly to O Henry’s short story The Last Leaf , whose protagonist's life is dependent on a tree outside the window, I have the sense of a “window tree” being an extension of our self, one that stays awake as we sleep, stays at home while we extend the reach of our neighbourhood, and stays alive after we die.

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

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