Tree stories

In tree news today I discovered this. Now I’m terrified that the next time I’m in Bangalore I won’t recognise MG Road. Where will all the dowwers doww? [If none of this is making any sense you didn’t click on the link.]

I have to admit I’m not really into nature. Wait that sounds terrible; what I mean is I’ve never been the watering my plants type. My dad still made me do it and I did it sulkingly. After all what was the maali being paid for?

Oh funny story about the maali. He liked to talk a lot except no one could understand a word he said because he spoke only Telugu. It was hysterical watching my dad and him try to communicate. He did a good job with the garden though because it turned out really pretty. In fact it was featured in a local newspaper recently and dad was thrilled.

Maali [and he has a name, I just can’t remember it] was very regular to work. He’d show up at the weirdest hours but he’d make it everyday. This one time I was talking to my friend on the phone and it was raining outside and I heard noises and I looked up and it was maali watering the plants holding an umbrella in the rain. It was like the funniest thing I’d ever seen. Okay it was not really THE funniest thing I’d ever seen but since when does one have to mean everything one says? A lot of times I just tell people what they want to hear in the hopes that they will leave me alone. Like if someone were to ask me if i thought they'd lost all their pregnancy weight I'd nod vigorously but that wouldn't necessarily mean that I meant it.

Now I can’t remember what the hell I was talking about. Oh yeah trees. They’re pretty no? Growing up we had 3 guava trees. One was the pink guava type and one was the white guava type [which my dad claims has no flavour. I liked it though with uppu khaara (chilli powder & salt)] and the third tree was kind of sad looking. It did give us plenty of shade. Ooh funny story. There were these school children who climbed the trees to try and steal guavas [which I didn’t really think was stealing] but anyway they did it all the time and they would thrown stones at the branches hoping a guava would fall down. This was normally around two thirty/threeish in the afternoon which apart from being school children freedom time was also dad’s afternoon nap time. So as you can guess this annoyed him. I heard that this one time [and I have absolutely no recollection of this having happened so I must have been really young] a bunch of school kids were climbing the tree and my uncle [who happens to be super mean] went outside and picked up their school bags which were on the ground and brought them inside the house. The poor kids were really scared when they found out and they begged him to give it back and they cried and he supposedly threatened to call the cops and one kid [again supposedly] started peeing his pants and then mean old uncle let them go. So that was my tree story.

Fun fact: The cricket ground at Kent had this big tree inside the playing area. It had been there forever and they got so attached to it that they decided to leave it standing. Every time a ball hit the tree it was an automatic boundary. Eventually the tree died and they did what anyone else would do … they planted a NEW TREE in its place.

[adorable tree story courtesy John Wright’s lovely book Indian Summers]

p.s Did you like my little tree drawing? I looked for a picture of a tree online but all the trees i found looked very i don't know western and i wanted a tree that looked like it was from Cubbon park.

I realise my tree doesn't really look like a tree. I took a poll around the office and i got ice cream? mushroom? feather? but no tree. Oh well this is the way i was taught to draw a tree so it will have to do for now.