Treelogy. The grass roots

That we shall walk on those whose screams we cannot hear seems like a given in our life. We walk on grass without thought and without guilt. Perhaps no artist has imagined Shiva as grass — imagine the millions of Kalis then, embarrassed to be stepping on sleeping bodies.

There are mythologies about walking on grass. A couple of weeks ago, when I complained about pain in my head and eyes to Happy Anand — his name a tautology, of course; his parents were investing all they could in his happiness quotient — he suggested I walk barefoot on grass every morning. Because suggestion isn’t enough, he set out to provide evidence.

His grandfather, a man in his late eighties, did not need glasses to see the world. This was only because he’d walked on grass every morning. Then, adjusting his sunglasses, he said, “But I’m a driver. My feet are always on the brake and accelerator. That is why I need these glasses to protect me even from the sun!” I haven’t tried to find out the scientific veracity of his claim, and neither have I followed his prescription, not yet.

Does walking on grass change us in any way? I am thinking of a Tagore song, Akash bhawra shurjo tara (I won’t translate this, for fear of the spiritual experience of the words being reduced to a Twinkle twinkle-like accumulation of the sun and star in the sky; I’ll just translate the three nouns in this first line: sky, sun, star). In it, towards the end, is a mention of the experience of walking on grass.

Ghashey ghashey pa phelechhi

Boner pawthey jetey...

I’ve walked on grass while going to the forest, I’ve been surprised by the fragrance of the flowers, I’m surrounded by songs of joy, I’ve waited to hear, I’ve opened my eyes... And then the list of action gradually moves from the material to the abstract and the spiritual. I see it move northwards as it were — from the feet on the grass to the nose through which the presence of flowers is sensed and then to what has traditionally been considered to be the highest-placed resident in our being: to the praan , the soul, for lack of an equivalent word. What is this leading to? To bishmoy , to wonder — from where the delight in life and the impulse for seeing anew, the trigger for creation, is known to spring. I find it significant that Tagore’s song begins from looking upwards to the sky, which is a ready-made trope as a site for wonder (‘How I wonder what you are/Up above the world so high’), to eventually reside in grass — the joy and wonder, one related to the other, as singers are in a jugalbandi , must come through the senses, from the touch of grass and the smell of flowers. Tagore is unequivocal about this — it says something about our culture that we tend to elide this and focus only on the abstract, the soul, giving it the status of a first-class citizen in our layers of being. I think it is the same impulse — and the same journey — that makes us tear grass and throw it in the air, to land on the feet of Hindu gods and goddesses and the offerings made to them.

I am thinking of DH Lawrence’s poem, A Baby Running Barefoot , as I write this on a Monday morning. There are bird-cries though the birds are invisible. I see two toddlers in what is called the ‘lawn’ in this housing complex in Haryana’s Sonipat. I’m not wearing glasses. Even if I were, I wouldn’t have been able to see the grass, not its ‘leaves’, except sensing its presence as a film of green. In that, the grass is like the birds — mostly invisible in our consciousness. When I look for the poem on the internet — for I cannot remember it line by line — I am surprised to discover that Lawrence makes almost a similar analogy.

When the bare feet of the baby beat across the grass/ The little white feet nod like white flowers in the wind/They poise and run like ripples lapping across the water/ And the sight of their white play among the grass/ Is like a little robin’s song ...

Lawrence cannot see the grass as grass — the “bare feet of the baby” transform the grass into water, and soon, as in Tagore, because the journey must be northwards, we have moved to the near-bodilessness of “song”. This makes me wonder whether humans really don’t know what to do with grass. As Lawrence says in another poem, Leaves of Grass, Flowers of Grass , “Leaves of grass, what about leaves of grass?”, ending with something like a truism that never fails to make me laugh: “Only the best (grass) matters; even the cow knows it”. Perhaps only cows know grass the best?

Sumana Roy

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

COMMENT NOW