Making Roots
Priyanka Sacheti
Photographs by author
At the end of April this year, I entered a hospital room in Bangalore to deliver my baby. I was consumed with anxiety, both at the prospect of giving birth as well as entering into this singularly important new season of my life that would forever alter it. The first thing I saw upon entering the room was a gulmohur tree in bloom, its white-flecked crimson flowers embracing the floor-length glass windows. My husband smiled at me, instinctively knowing this glorious tree theatre would console me during these anxious hours, as trees had previously done at so many vital points in my life. I lay on the bed and gazed at the flowers peeking above my belly; it appeared as though they were reaching out to my baby and I in a gesture of tenderness. Originally from Madagascar, the tree had made its home here in the city, like me, a transplant from another land. Given that they heralded the turn of the year in places like Mauritius, they were the most apt tree I could have encountered just then. Inside me, my baby hiccuped; I closed my eyes and felt the flowers’ warm embrace.
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One mellow June morning in Bangalore a decade ago, long before I knew how significant the city would become to me, I experienced the first of many powerful tree moments in my life. Apart from a brief trip to the city as a ten year old, I was visiting for the first time as an adult, excited to see it through the eyes of my Bangalore born and raised partner. Yet, for all the vignettes he’d shared about the city, he had not mentioned its trees. They were what struck me upon my arrival, a tsunami of intense monsoon verdure offering almost unbearable relief from the heat I had escaped in Oman, where I lived then. Glimpsing a raintree in the garden of the city’s National Gallery of Modern Art would most definitively shape the nature of my relationship with the city in the future. As I examined in awe the tree’s octopus-limbed canopy embracing the sky, I realised I had never seen such a tree before. More accurately, I’d never previously paid attention to a tree the way this one compelled me to.
That raintree would stay with me for days to come.
I would continue to admire and photograph other raintrees during future Bangalore trips, but it was only after moving here in the early 2017 that I found myself engaging with the trees of the city in a way that would root me to it. Soon after my arrival, I attended a tree festival called Neralu. I couldn’t think of anything more wonderful than a spirited celebration of trees . I took my first ever tree walk as part of the festivities in the neighbourhood of Cooke Town, discovering and talking about trees while walking through the streets. I can still vividly conjure up the trees I met during that walk: a palpably fecund fig tree growing in a heritage bungalow garden, red seeds spilling out from the spiky fruit of the whimsically named lipstick tree, and the gulmohur tree’s cliff-like buttress roots, simultaneously functioning as miniature cradles for baby saplings.
The tree walk guide shared something which has indelibly remained with me since: many of the trees one saw in Bangalore were transplants from various places around the world. Trees otherwise alien to one another, who would never have interacted, now shared soil and sky space, each intent on the collective project of survival. As a new arrival to the city myself, I identified with this. The trees’ roots had long burrowed themselves into the earth just as my roots would be intertwined with Bangalore in years to come.
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For most of my life, I lived in a land of two seasons: fiercely hot and mildly pleasant. There were few trees to see in Oman’s desert landscape, and even if I did look, they almost instantly merged into the mountains and hills. It is perhaps unsurprising that my interest in trees deepened when I moved to the United States, becoming appreciative of how they were particularly vivid visual emblems of distinct seasons. I also acquired a smart phone at the time, developing a daily ritual of photographing my surroundings, basking in the shape, symmetry, and form of trees.
After moving to Delhi in 2014, migrating from one season of my life to another, nature became an urgent panacea. I struggled with acute asthma, anxiety, and disorientation at living in a country I’d previously only holidayed in. For me, Delhi was a city full of hostile barbed-wire walls, reluctant to admit me into its midst. I didn’t know many people there and found it hard to make friends. The enforced seclusion combined with personal losses meant my time in Delhi became increasingly difficult to endure. Only the neighborhood I lived in for two years, Sarita Vihar, allowed me to penetrate the otherwise intimidating city, creating a few pockets of joy. It provided me an entire forest of trees to discover - and I clung to each one as if it were a lifeboat in a chaotic sea, becoming obsessed with discovering their names, provenance, and the traits which endowed them with unique character.
The Delhi season was a particularly melancholic period of my life and I’m glad it ended when it did. I left in November, when nights become soaked in the overpoweringly strong scent of saptaparni or the Blackboard tree, its miniature icy-green flowers thickly carpeting the streets the following mornings. Its name comes from the fact that students’ blackboards, writing tables, and slates are derived from the tree’s bark, the scholastic association also embedded in its Latin name, Alstonia scholaris. Years later in Bangalore, the wind would carry the scent of a pair of Blackboard trees and I was once more walking the streets of Delhi in 2016, consumed with the urgent desire to leave it. I had always known I would be a temporary presence in Delhi and perhaps the trees knew too. Yet, they continue to light up the streets of my Delhi memories, pole stars which offered direction when I felt utterly unmoored.
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Bangalore has seen many a historical season over the centuries. A number of the trees growing in the city today function as a memory map of those eras, particularly the colonial one. In their stubborn dedication to recreating the homeland, the British meticulously invested time and energy into coaxing English gardens to grow on Indian soil. The endeavour was born not just out of homesickness but also, as Eugenia W Herbert says, to put a visible stamp of ‘civilisation’ on an alien, untamed land.
One of my favorite places in Bangalore is, unsurprisingly, one of its largest green lungs, Lalbagh Botanical Garden. Having begun its life as a private, walled Persian bagh created by Hyder Ali and completed by his son, Tipu Sultan, Lalbagh became a public botanical park when the British established Bangalore as a military station in 1806. In his book, Bangalore’s Lalbagh: A Chronicle of The Garden And The City, Suresh Jayaram mentions that for the British, viewing Bangalore’s climate akin to that of Southern England, the garden became ‘an archive of diverse species…as well as a botanical laboratory that would cater to unique global transactions in the subcontinent.’ Meanwhile, their vision for Bangalore’s other green lung, Cubbon Park, was ‘rolling lawns punctuated by tree-shading nooks,’ the city’s well known tree lover Vijay Thiruvady saying ‘it is the best introduction to the British in Bangalore’..
Historically, the Park lay at the intersection of two entirely different ways of life - the Bangalore Cantonment, administered by the British, and the Bengaluru Pettah, administered by the Maharaja of Mysore, the park ensuring a clear distinction between the two. The British may have left decades ago but their imprints are scattered across the city in multiple incarnations. The trees, for instance, are in a sense ghosts of a distorted colonial hierarchy; exotic species grow in former Cantonment areas while native ones do in the markets. Harini Nagendra and Suri Venkatachalam mention in their illuminating piece about Bangalore’s relationship with trees that these exotic trees are ‘planted in an orderly, disciplined manner, and the trees stick to their allotted spaces, seeming to display a finely honed sense of decorum’. They further point out how ‘these “Indian” parts of the city seem to have integrated street trees more seamlessly into local identities’ as a metaphor for reclaiming the city as their own.
I love the idea of trees reclaiming the city. Having moved multiple times and forever questioning the idea of home, trees are both bridges to accruing memories as well as physical presences in my personal map of Bangalore. When I visit Lalbagh, for instance, I see in its library of trees signposts that show the journeys they have undertaken from distant lands . I gravitate sometimes towards species which are native to Australia, given that I was born there myself. One way or the other, we have both found ourselves in Bangalore.
One of my favorite trees in Lalbagh is a giant, sprawling centuries-old white silk cotton tree, native to Indonesia and Malaysia. While it is fenced off now, a reverent step for its protection, a friend who grew up near the garden recalls reading atop its many broad, welcoming branches. My very first visit to Lalbagh after moving coincided with the blooming of the tree; I recall standing below it thickly enveloped in tiny peach-ivory blooms, the flowers drizzling down upon me, blotting out the sunlight. I have yet to see the tree in bloom again, but the memory of that first achingly beautiful encounter will forever remain with me.
Cubbon Park, meanwhile, is home to my other favorite, the pink trumpet tree. On a crisp January morning as a new transplant myself, the tree’s cheerful pink blooms provided the best welcome. Originally from South America, where every part of the tree is used, they are more ornamental in Bangalore, given its climate and altitude. Often dubbed Bangalore’s cherry blossom, a moniker which I feel does disservice to the pink trumpet’s unique beauty, these avenue trees are a legacy of the German architect, botanist, and landscaper, G.H Krumbiegel. From the early 19th century, Jayaram mentions in his book that with his intimate knowledge of tree species and city planning, he introduced the phenomenon known as ‘serial blossoming’ - a careful curation of flowering trees.
Thanks to Krumbiegel and his subsequent successor almost a century later, conservationist and forestry official, S.G Neginhal, flowering trees bedeck Bangalore streets all year around. For me, they are more than just seasonal place holders; they are healing guides of a kind. During difficult years, anticipating the pink clouds of Tabebuia trees enveloping the city dispels the gray ones that gather in my head. I especially look forward to visiting the circle facing the State Library in Cubbon Park between November and January, because it becomes an eternity ring of pink trumpet trees in full bloom. Even when they lose their flowers and slip into a cloak of green, their blooming memories remain a flickering candle in darkness. This too will pass and there will come a day when the trees will be in flower again.
Other trees gift me reminders that I am a sum greater than all the individual seasons housed within me. On the banks of Bangalore’s lakes, I spot the acacia tree’s minute, meticulous nest of a canopy conversing with the rippling waters; it leaps out like a familiar face, having dotted the Omani landscape of my childhood. A few years ago, caught in a sudden thunderstorm at Agara Lake, we sought shelter underneath one of the acacias; watching the pelting rain. . Acacia trees have the deepest growing roots in their quest to seek water even in the harshest of conditions - ironically, this particular one was literally being showered with rain. They took me to childhood, when I would collect fallen tiny yellow globes of flowers, wondering if I could stitch them into a doll-sized blanket. I do not know who thought to bring the acacia to Bangalore but I am grateful for their largesse.
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Returning to the hospital that April morning, as I was wheeled back into my room after the surgery, registering my hours-old daughter’s face, it struck me that gulmohur flowers would be the first ones she would glimpse when her eyes opened. Like the tree and her mother, she had migrated from a different world to the present one. Each of us will make our home here, our roots merging with an alien soil and making it familiar in ways we know best.
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About the Author
Priyanka Sacheti is a writer, poet, and photographer based in Bangalore, India. She grew up in the Sultanate of Oman and was educated at Universities of Oxford and Warwick, United Kingdom. She's published widely about art, gender, culture, and the environment in international digital and print publications over the years. Her literary work and art has appeared in literary journals such as Barren, Dust Mag Poetry, Common, Parentheses Art, Popshot, The Lunchticket, and The Sunlight Press as well as various past and forthcoming poetry and short fiction anthologies. She's currently working on a poetry and short story collection. She can be found as @iamjustavisualperson on Instagram and @priyankasacheti on Twitter.