Fallen Leaves

Afternoon light slants into KBR Park in Hyderabad’s Jubilee Hills, delightfully highlighting lighter colours and deepening darker ones. Alongside the walking paths are swards of fallen leaves, dry as tinder, bleached of all their chlorophyll, muted in the pale earthen palette of brown, umber, ochre, lemon, khaki, olive, and beige, curved and twisted in the agony of their dehydration. Piled upon each other in layers that form as their mother trees let go of them so that they themselves might survive, in a shocking act that jousts dichotomously in my mind between altruism and selfish self-preservation by abandonment. Their deciduousness lightens canopies, allowing the angled rays of a dying sun. The resulting contrast creates a striking depth of field and perspective.

To many walkers and to the park’s management, this is trash. It is an eyesore, a fire hazard, and certainly harbours little creatures that frighten bipedal ones that are several hundred times larger and stronger than them. So, they are best swept up, piled here and there, and carted away. There is no evidence of them being burnt — which would, mercifully, still retain and return some useful minerals from the smouldering ash to the soil. But letting things be would destroy the charade of the forest department’s management plans. To the need for their very existence! So a band of sweepers swishes through the park.

What a joy it is when they’ve left out sweeping some stretches. Striding along a bend in the trail, my breath catches at the site of a patch of ground, undisturbed but knitted in a hotchpotch carpet of deciduous leaves patterned by the irreverence of time, air, and gravity. A pocket of perfection, except for my presence and that of other walkers. Here, we might disturb a foraging sisterhood of yellow-billed babblers, who, trilling their protestations, unfurl their dusty shawls and shuffle away from our insensitive stomping sneakers.

They babblers are in their true element in the inches-deep carpet of leaves alongside walking trails, beyond the knee-high hedge that invariably runs along the edge of the path, where the peaty substrate is a rich dark loam, the very thing that this year’s fallen crisp leaves disintegrate into — sometimes within a year, or in many years. They form a teeming microhabitat for myriads of nonhuman life forms.

The eternal coolness around trees results from the moisture in their exhalations. The detritus-strewn ground receives part of this, moistening into a fertile mush that includes ambitious seeds and clockwork earthworms. How magically everything is interconnected, in constant motion, and how chaotic!