A Tale of One City and Two Trees

In the winter of 2015, I moved to India’s capital city for a job working with local governments on aspects of climate adaptation and sustainable development. It was my first time living and working outside the comfort of Hyderabad, where I’d grown up. After the anxiety brought on by misinformation and my prejudices subsided, Delhi struck me as rather green. I’d falsely conjured up a slew of sludgy-grey, pot-hole-ridden streets conspiring against me, an air of general unwelcoming and hordes of seedy men waiting for a hint of sunset to take advantage of vulnerable women. Although I did get cheated by an auto driver and found myself weeping loudly on the shoulder of my embarrassed boyfriend in Chittaranjan Park later that day, Delhi was nothing like I’d imagined.

The city possesses a special kind of magic, weaving old with new, traditional with modern. As I travelled across the posher suburbs of South and Central Delhi, where trees sparkled, free of the inch-thick dust, into less affluent neighbourhoods shrouded in grey and Tetris blocks of people who navigated their day, I noticed perceptible seams. How certain niches afforded the existence of manual rickshaw pullers while others pimped out sleek Bentleys and Porsches. Where button shops shared walls with designer boutiques, thelas catered to the stomach and restaurants to evolving taste buds, sprawling mansions interrupted barely pucca jhopdis. Where landlords doled out lectures on morality, “One boyfriend is fine, but if many boys come, this is not good”, where khatias were dragged onto roads into the weak winter sun, and gilded four poster beds sat behind frosted glass windows. Where modernisation was consumed with great gusto, and yet old ways remained. Delhi, the paradox.

The allure of the perfumed devil

In my journey to integrate into this new way of life, I became intimately familiar with two trees in my neighbourhood.

For almost two winters, I was haunted by an overly-sweet cardamom-like smell which lingered in Delhi’s air towards the end of the year. No one else seemed to notice it, leading me to conclude that the pollution was playing tricks on my olfactory lobe; until October 2017, when I discovered the source of the scent. A tree! And suddenly, I saw it everywhere, in practically every city I visited, along most avenues, in gardens, everywhere.

The devil tree, Alstonia scholaris, is a native and common moist-deciduous forest species, a darling of Indian afforestation programmes. The easiest way to identify the plant when it isn’t blooming is from its distinct leaf arrangement — a whorl of four-to-seven leaves, lending it its Sanskrit name, saptaparni. Its white-green blossoms, sometimes eclipsed by Delhi’s smog, perfume the night air between October and December. It is recommended in greenbelt development for its dust-arresting, sulphur dioxide absorbing, and noise-reducing properties. It is also considered a bio-indicator species for air pollution.

Not just me, night pollinators like the dark-bordered hummingbird hawkmoths, pellucid hawkmoths, and jasmine moths are attracted to the heady smell, while house sparrows, butterflies, bees, and flies find their way to the pollen and nectar offered by the flowers, in daylight.

Ironically, the perfume that caught my attention is also the reason for its sinister common name, devil tree. Western Indian folklore attributes the smell to the devil, believed to dwell in the tree. But if science is to be believed, the culprit is linalool, a terpene alcohol, one of many volatile aromatic compounds found in the flowers. Despite the ominous name, Alstonia scholaris finds myriad socio-cultural uses, incorporated into several traditional medicinal systems, Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha, Homeopathy, Chinese Medicine. My aunt would often subject her children and sometimes unlucky nieces and nephews to kashaaya, a miserable-tasting, bitter decoction made from the bark of the devil tree just before the monsoons hit Mangalore. Touted to strengthen the immune system and prevent diseases, the bark is traditionally peeled with a stone on the new moon day and mixed with pepper, ajwain, turmeric, and garlic. My brother and I often prayed for an early return to Hyderabad just to escape the dreaded kashaaya season.

The tree next door

While the devil tree was more of a meet-and-greet-you-in-the-park neighbour, African sausage tree (Kigelia africana) and I shared a balcony. Every morning we’d have coffee together after being woken up by muffled police-like whistles “zwee” of the resident Indian white-eyes or the “chew-ip” of a winter guest, the Hume’s warbler. Using the tree as a bridge to the nearby royal palm, five-striped palm squirrels visited our balcony, thieving bits of cloth to line large nests where they raised their young.

One hot April night, I noticed a flurry of activity around the tree’s deep red flowers, whose arrangement is termed flagelliflory, i.e., “flowers on long rope-like branches, dangling beneath the crown”. Bats, perhaps Leschenault’s rousettes and greater short-nosed fruit bats, were whirring in and out of the canopy. A closer look offered an intimate visual of a bat holding on to the flower’s petals with its forelimbs, probing with its snout to reach the nectar. After this dalliance, the bat left considerably more yellow than before, carrying pollen to the next flower.

Sharing our first home, my partner and I, with the tree, watched the world from that balcony as shikras took to the air to hunt while our neighbourhood strays, fondly named Uday, Mahabir and Jenny, frolicked and scuffled in the street below. Nearby, old men carried steel pails to collect milk in the morning, kids raced each other on bicycles, and plump yellow-footed green pigeons attempted to nest on unreliable, scrawny trees, their “wheet-wa-hoos” carrying into our ears.

With its pendulous, woody sausage-like fruits, the African sausage tree isn’t indigenous, hailing from tropical/subtropical Africa, an area I had the good fortune of visiting recently. Kruger National Park was peppered with the tree where I saw baboons, elephants, kudu, and impala consume its fruit, leaves, and flowers. In that landscape, I heard many stories of its ethnobotany, its ecosystem services, its significance, starkly contrasting with the overwhelming absence of information about it in India.

The neighbours cut down our tree one day in 2018. They’d wanted to build a taller house. That year had been particularly hard for us, marked by death, illness, and shattered dreams. And so, it devastated me to find an empty balcony facing an unpleasant grey building with only unpleasant grey rock pigeons for neighbours. I cried for two days, missing the enormous comfort I’d found in my African sausage tree’s grey, smooth branches and its companionable presence.

A few months later, I left Delhi with no intention of returning.

Returning to the solace offered by the Pongamias in front of my little white-and-red house in Hyderabad, I mourned for the African sausage tree. Not for its carbon sequestration potential, nor its aesthetics, oxygen production or nativity, or any of the things I tell cities to convince them that biodiversity matters to save this dying planet. Sometimes, the value of a tree is not in what it gives you but simply in its existence and what it makes you feel.

Paintings by www.meenart.in