And now, brick and mortar will sprout on the brown earth where coconut, arecanut, jack and sundry other trees lived, their foliage so thick and green that the morning sun never got beyond the coconut palm fronds that did a dance whenever the wind tried to pass that way to visit my house.
A rude whirr... whirr... whirr...(alto sruti), eerie and macabre, woke me up last week instead of birdsong. And when the bedroom door to the balcony was opened, like executioners they stood there, men with some kind of automatic saws, operated with a pull of a belt. And a couple of whirr….whirrrrs later, coconut trees that took years to reach that far in their ambitious journey to meet the bright blue sky, fell with a melancholy thud, lying in state, the fronds spread out like a ballerina's skirt, and the stump, yearning for that something that it could never ever have again.
And then came the chief executioner. The JCB. With its demonic claws, it wiped out all traces of life. All the trees had their funerals lined up and methodically, their lives were snuffed out in like fashion, so that two days of whirr....whirrs..saw a plot denuded of all things green. The last to fall was the tallest. My heart weighed a thousand tonnes.....an emptiness that refused to fill. Crows and mynah, woodpeckers and the koel, flew around like displaced orphans, directionless and disturbed, crying in silent agony. Squirrels were the only inhabitants who proclaimed their displeasure as loudly as they could. But they have all our smaller trees to live, I invited them quietly.
And the sun shines bright, walking right into our balcony at all times of the day now, warming up spots that it fought shy of gracing, all these 30 years. Dead trunks are yet to find their resting places. Today, a posse of quiet beings surrounded a nilavilakku and a few bricks. Ah…the foundation stone being laid.
My tomorrows will be dusty, devoid of birdsong, but I will have the sun meeting me uninterruptedly and someone will have a house…maybe one of those trees will metamorphose into a window, door or even a tiny bench in a regimented garden, where plants will never have the freedom to live and grow old as they like, in whichever direction they choose, as did the trees that stood there once.
Adieu, romantic, recent Past, and welcome, practical Present!
Prema Manmadhan
