by Ruskin Bond
At the height of the monsoon, the banyan was like an orchestra-pit with the musicians constantly tuning up. Birds, insects and squirrels expressed their joy at the termination of the hot weather and the cool quenching relief of the monsoon. A toy flute in my hands, I would try adding my shrill piping to theirs. But they thought poorly of my musical ability, for, whenever I piped, the birds and the insects maintained a pained and puzzled silence.
The branches were thick with scarlet figs. These berries were not fit for human consumption, but the many birds that gathered in the tree—gossipy rosy pastors, quarrelsome mynas, cheerful bulbuls and coppersmiths, and sometimes a raucous, bullying crow—feasted on them. And when night fell, and the birds rested, the dark flying foxes flapped heavily about the tree, chewing and munching as they clambered over the branches.
One of my favourite trees in Dehra was the jamun, also known as the Java plum. Its purple astringent fruit ripened during the rains, and then I would join the gardener’s young son in its branches, and we would feast like birds on the smooth succulent fruit until our lips and cheeks were stained a bright purple.
After I moved to Mussoorie in my thirties, I lived for many years in a cottage at seven thousand feet in the Garhwal Himalayas. I was fortunate in having a big window that opened out on the forest, so that the trees were almost within my reach. Had I jumped, I should have landed safely in the arms of an oak or chestnut.
The incline of the hill was such that my first-floor window opened on what must, I suppose, have been the second floor. I never made the jump, but the big silver-red langurs, with long swishing tails, often leapt from the trees onto the corrugated tin roof and made enough noise to disturb the bats sleeping in the space between the roof and ceiling.
Standing on its own was a walnut tree, and truly, this was a tree for all seasons. In winter its branches were bare, and smooth and straight and round like the arms of a woman in a painting by Jamini Roy. In spring each branch produced a hard bright spear of new leaves. By mid-summer the entire tree was in leaf, and towards the end of the monsoon the walnuts, encased in their green jackets, had reached maturity. Then the jackets began to split, revealing the hard black shell of the walnuts. Inside the shell was the nut itself, shaped rather like the human brain. (No wonder the ancients prescribed walnuts for headaches!)
I went among the trees on my hillside often, acknowledging their presence with a touch of my hand against their trunks—the walnut’s smooth and polished; the pine’s patterned and whorled; the oak’s rough and gnarled, full of experience. The oak had been there the longest, and the wind had bent its upper branches and twisted a few, so that it looked shaggy and undistinguished. It was a good tree for the privacy of birds, its crooked branches spreading out with no particular effect; and sometimes the tree seemed uninhabited until there was a whirring sound, as of a helicopter approaching, and a party of long-tailed blue magpies shot out of the tree and streamed across the forest glade.
After the monsoon, when the dark red berries had ripened on the hawthorn, this pretty tree was visited by green pigeons, the kokla birds of Garhwal, who clambered upside-down among the fruit-laden twigs. And during winter, a white-capped redstart perched on the bare branches of the wild pear tree and whistled cheerfully. He had come to winter in the garden.
The pines grew on the next hill—the chir, the Himalayan blue pine, and the long-leaved pine—but there was a small blue one a little way below my cottage, and sometimes I sat beneath it to listen to the wind playing softly in its branches.
Opening the window at night, I usually had something to listen to, the mellow whistle of the pygmy owlet, or the cry of a barking deer which had scented the proximity of a panther.
Some sounds I could not recognize at the time. They were strange night sounds that I now know as the sounds of the trees themselves, scratching their limbs in the dark, shifting a little, flexing their fingers. Great trees of the mountains, they know me well. They know my face in the window, they see me watching them, watching them grow, listening to their secrets, bowing my head before their outstretched arms and seeking their benediction.
Sometimes, there would be a strange silence, and I would see the moon coming up, and two distant deodars in perfect silhouette.
No tree lover, even if he or she is a city dweller, can ignore the sal and the mahua, two of the most splendid and most valuable of our trees.
The sal can be grown in a city, but it does not like being alone; it is much happier amongst its own kind in the forests that cover the moist foothills and plateau lands of northern and central India. It is a valuable timber tree, and in northern India most of the wood used in buildings comes from the sal. But it is not only the wood that is useful. When tapped, the sal yields a large quantity of resin, which is burnt as incense in Hindu religious ceremonies. The resin is also used to caulk boats and ships. The large, shiny leaf is sometimes put to good use too. The Santals of Bihar gather fresh sal leaves daily, and use them as plates or as drinking cups. When fitted cleverly into one another, the leaves make excellent plates for holding dal and rice, while one large sal leaf, twisted round to form a hollow, will hold water quite effectively.
The leaf is used for building too: not by men, but by ants! The nest of the red ant consists of a mass of green or dead sal leaves stuck together with a sort of gum which the adult ant extracts from the young ant grubs. If you examine one of these nests (do not disturb it!) you will find it humming with ant life. But do not try making pets of these ants; they are as aggressive as the big bees, and bite quite fiercely, as many a shikari has known to his discomfort when he has brushed against a nest when out hunting on an elephant.
Another insect inhabiting the sal tree is the cicada. You may have heard it singing away through the long hot weather and the rains. One cicada is shrill enough; a forest full of singing cicadas is like an orchestra tuning up, each musician trying out a different tune. Even the birds are shocked into silence.
The sal takes the place of the peepal among the tribes of central India, and when the tree blossoms in March a festival called the Bahbonga is held. During marriages, two poles, one of bamboo, the other of sal wood, are set up in the marriage-shed, and these are anointed with oil and turmeric. If one of the couple is unwilling to go through with the marriage, he or she may take a leaf of the sal and tear it in two.
There is a tradition that at the time of the Buddha’s birth, his mother stretched out her hand to hold a branch of a sal tree, and was delivered of her child. Sal trees are also said to have rendered homage to the Buddha at his death by letting their flowers fall on him out of season, and bending their branches to shade him.
The beautiful mahua is another forest tree that plays an important part in the lives of the tribal people. The flowers of the mahua can be eaten, raw or cooked, and are an important item of the food of the Gonds and other tribes in central and western India, particularly in time of drought when rice is scarce. In fact, the poorer people depend almost entirely upon the mahua crop.
From the seeds of the mahua, an oil is extracted which can be used for lighting as well as for cooking (as a substitute for ghee). Oil from the seeds is also used in the manufacture of soap.
The mahua tree bursts into full bloom at the very beginning of the hot weather, when the fortunes of the tribal people are usually rather low. As it is the slack season among cultivators, the gathering of the mahua blossoms is a welcome task, the whole village often turning out to bring in the crop. Sometimes the grass under the mahua tree is burnt so that the blossoms may be gathered more easily. The women equip themselves with baskets, piling them one on top of the other on their heads, and the children carry brooms so that after all the blossoms have been gathered the ground can be cleared in readiness for the next fall.
During the short period—only about fifteen days—that the mahua blossoms fall, the villagers practically live in the jungle, the men carrying away the crop as fast as the women and children can collect it.
L
aid out to dry on a smooth bare patch of ground that has been especially cleared and prepared, the blossoms become quite dry and shrink to half their normal size, changing from white to brown. The mahua is often eaten by itself, but sometimes sal seeds and rice are mixed with it to improve the flavour. The mahua is first boiled; the sal seeds, which have already been dried in the sun and roasted, are then added with a small quantity of rice.
Wild animals, particularly bears, are fond of the flowers of the mahua, but no one, human or animal, has to climb the tree to gather them. The tree blooms at night, and the flowers fall to the ground at dawn.
The Gentle Banyan
Just as tall men are often the most gentle, so are big trees the most friendly. The banyan is probably the biggest and friendliest of all our trees.
We don’t see many banyan trees in our cities nowadays. These trees like to have plenty of space in which to spread themselves out, but in our overcrowded cities, where there is barely enough living space for people, banyan trees don’t have much of a chance. After all, a full-grown banyan takes up as large an area as a three-storeyed apartment building! Of course, many parks have banyan trees. And every village has at least one.
The banyan has, what are called, ‘aerial roots’, that is, its branches drop to the ground, take root again, and send out more twisting, trailing branches, so that after some years the tree forms a forest glade of its own. No wonder, the banyan was chosen to represent the matted hair of Shiva!
The aerial roots of the banyan are like pillars supporting a great palace. If you destroy the pillars, the palace will fall, and so will the banyan, because its main trunk isn’t very deeply rooted. So naturally it needs plenty of space in which to put out its supporting roots. Tiny gardens and busy roadsides won’t do. Nor should the tree be planted too close to your house: you might find it growing through your bedroom wall!
It is always cool, dark and shady beneath the banyan. And it is a good tree for climbing. You can get up amongst its branches without much difficulty, and there is no danger of falling off. It is also one of the most comfortable trees to sit in. You can lean against its broad trunk and read a book, without any fear of being disturbed, for you will be completely hidden by the broad, glossy leaves.
The banyan is also very hospitable. Apart from boys and girls, it attracts a large number of visitors—birds, squirrels, insects, flying foxes—and many of these interesting creatures actually live in the tree which is full of dark, private corners suitable for a variety of tenants. The banyan is rather like a hotel or boarding house in which a number of different families live next door to each other without interfering very much in each other’s business.
The banyan belongs to the fig family, and, in India all the figs—the best known of which is the peepal—are held sacred. The Akshaya Vata, the ‘undying’ banyan tree at the sacred confluence of the rivers at Allahabad, is the subject of many legends, and still attracts millions of pilgrims. It was first described by Huen Tsang, the Chinese pilgrim, who visited India over a thousand years ago.
A group of three sacred trees known as tentar, ‘triad’—a banyan, a peepal and a paakar planted together—is especially sacred, and is known as Harsankari, ‘the chair of Hari (Shiva)’.
In Hindi the banyan is known as the bar, in Tamil, the ala. But how did it get its English name? Well, it seems that the first Europeans who came to India noticed that the tree was a favourite with the banias, the Hindu merchant class, who used to gather beneath it for worship or business. So they gave it the name banian, which later became banyan.
Lest you should feel that the banyan is a magnificent giant of little or no value to man, it should be remembered that its wood, which is tough and elastic, has for centuries been used for making tent poles and yokes for bullock-carts, while its leaves and twigs have always been a favourite snack with the elephants.
Avenues of banyan trees are not as common as they used to be, and roadside banyans can often be seen with their beautiful supporting roots cut off—a sad spectacle. No other tree provides so much cool, refreshing shade on a hot summer’s day, and for this reason, if for no other, this noble tree deserves our love and care.
These lines by George Morris could well be applied to the friendly banyan:
Woodman, spare that tree!
Touch not a single bough!
In youth it sheltered me,
And I’ll protect it now.
The Tree of Wisdom
In some ways peepal trees are great show-offs. Even when there is no breeze, their beautiful leaves spin like tops, determined to attract your attention and invite you into their shade. And not only do they send down currents of cool air, but their long slender tips are also constantly striking together to make a sound like the pattering of raindrops.
No wonder the rishis of old chose to sit and meditate under these trees. And it was beneath a peepal that, Gautama Buddha gained enlightenment. This tree came to be called the Bodhi, the ‘tree of wisdom’.
To the Hindus, the peepal is especially sacred. Its roots, it is believed, represent Brahma, its bark Vishnu, its branches Shiva. ‘As the wide-spreading peepal tree is contained in a small seed,’ says the Vishnu Purana, ‘so is the whole universe contained in Brahma.’
In rural areas, when the new moon falls on a Monday, the peepal is still worshipped by women, who pour water on its trunk, and lay at its roots a copper coin and sweetmeats.
It is said to be dangerous to lie or cheat beneath a peepal tree, and sometimes to tease shopkeepers they are told that they ought not to plant one in a bazaar. All the same, there are plenty of peepal trees in our bazaars. It is a tree that grows wherever its seed falls; it will take root in a wall or on a rooftop—or even in the fork of another tree if given the chance. As its roots are quite capable of pushing through bricks and mortar, it is best to plant it some distance away from buildings.
No other tree has a leaf which tapers to such a perfect point as the peepal. When it rains, you can see the water drip from the points. Water runs off more easily from a point than from a blunt end, and the sooner a leaf dries the better it is for the tree.
The leaf is beautiful, and has been likened to the perfect male physique. From the stalk (the human neck) the edges of the leaf run squarely out on either side (the shoulders) and then curve round inwards to end in a finely pointed tail (the waist), so that the suggestion is of a square, broad torso upon a narrow waist—a body such as we see in pictures of Krishna.
While the chief occupants of the banyan are various birds and insects, the peepal is said to be the residence of a wide variety of ghosts and mischievous spirits. The most mischievous of these is the Munjia. He lives in lonely peepal trees, and rushes out at tongas, bullock-carts and buses, trying his best to upset them! Our grandmothers still advise us not to yawn when passing under a peepal tree. Should you yawn, it is best to cover your mouth with your hand, or snap your fingers in front of it. ‘Otherwise,’ says Grandmother, ‘the Munjia will rush down your throat and completely ruin your digestion!’
Peepal trees have very long lives. There are some ancient peepals in Hardwar which are even older than the present town, probably as old as the eleventh-century Mayadevi Temple. A peepal tree taken from India to Sri Lanka in 288 bc is still alive and flourishing. Records of its growth were carefully preserved over the centuries, and it must now be over two thousand years old.
To fell a peepal tree was once looked upon as a great sin. On the other hand, anyone who planted a peepal was said to receive the blessings of generations to come.
Let us also earn the blessings of future generations by planting not only more peepal trees—which are quite capable of looking after themselves—but all kinds of trees for shade and shelter, fruit and flower, beauty and utility.
Can you imagine a country without any trees, a country that has become one vast desert? Well, that is what could easily happen here if we keep cutting our trees and forests without bothering to grow others in their place.
No one in his right mind would want to chop down a mango tree. Every mango tree, even if it grows wild, is generous with its juicy fruit, known sometimes as ‘the nectar of the gods’, and sometimes as the ‘king of fruits’. You can eat ripe mangoes fresh from the tree; you can eat them in pickles or chutneys or jams; you can eat them flattened out and dried, as in aam papad; you can drink the juice with milk as in ‘mango-fool’; you can even pound the kernel into flour and use it as a substitute for wheat. And there are over a hundred different varieties of the mango, each with its own distinctive flavour.
But in praising the fruit, let us not forget the tree, for it is one of the stateliest trees in India, its tall, spreading branches a familiar sight throughout the country, from the lower slopes of the Himalayas to Cape Comorin.
In Gujarat, on the night of the seventh of the month of Savan (July-August), a young mango tree is planted near the house and worshipped by the womenfolk to protect their children from disease. Sometimes a post of mango wood is set up when Ganesh is worshipped.
If you live anywhere in the plains of northern India, you will often have seen a grove of giant mango trees, sometimes appearing like an oasis in the midst of the vast, flat countryside. Beneath the trees you may find a well and a small temple. It is here that the tired, dusty farmer sits down to rest and eat his midday chapati, following it with a draught of cold water from the well. If you join him and ask him who planted the mango grove, he will not be able to tell you; it was there when he was a boy, and probably when his father was a boy too. Some mango groves are very, very old.