Book Box: How to Paint a Tree

DSpike Reader,In the morn we take our sketchbooks to Sabali, the coffee tree browse perched above the river Manalsu. The rains have stopped, the day is clear. All around us are hillsides full of conifer forests, and in the distance the snows of the Pir Panjal.“Let’s paint trees,” I say. It’s tough. How does one capture the myriad shades of emerald, viridian, and sap green with hints of white and Prussian blue? How does one get the textures of spiky grass and ancient bark, the brown, black, and burnt Sienna, the dappled light and shade?We spread our paints over the long wooden tables. Abidal, a software engineer from Sudan who has set up this beautiful coffee shop, brings us our order. For a moment, the only sounds are the clink of ceramic cups, and the scraping of wooden chairs, and the distant murmur of the Manalsu river. We settle into the work of looking.Bee sketches the hillsides around us. Vivs opens Milind Mulick’s Sketchbook, while I leaf through S. Natesh’s Iconic Trees of India with illustrations by Sagar Bhowmick. Here are the flaming red chinars of Naseem Bagh. Then come the magnificent deodars of Jageshwar, centuries old with girths touching nine metres.We stopped at one such magnificent deodar earlier this morning—a tree which is a temple to the warrior Ghatokacha, son of the Pandava Bhim and the goddess Hidimba. Standing at its base, looking up at the ancient tree ringed with the spirits of animals in the horns and antlers, we now feel the weight of history, mythology and botany follow us through the day.XXAfter that ancient deodar, it becomes impossible to look at trees casually. At Sabali, I sip my cappuccino and look across the Manalsu river to the Van Vihar forest. Large areas of this forest have been gouged out to make way for a road. The land looks scarred.We used to have picnics here, following the little mossy paths that made their way down to the river until we came to a spot with little pools of calm, still bits of water that overflowed from the currents and swirling eddies of the main river. We’d dip our feet into the icy waters and count to as far as we could go. When we could bear it no longer, we’d withdraw our frozen feet and watch them slowly come back to life on the sun-warmed rocks. We’d plunge our bottles of apple juice and beer into the icy waters, pulling them out all chilled to drink with cheese and tomato sandwiches and carrot cake.We can’t do any of this anymore.The forest is now separated from the river with barbed wire. There are tin shacks and JCBs where deodar trees once held sway. The pools of water are gone.Watching the destruction of this beloved forest makes our book of the month painfully relevant. Our Manali book club is reading The Overstory by Richard Powers. It felt slow at first, with stories of pioneers settling in the American Midwest and their chestnut tree and immigrants from China with their mulberry tree.But gradually I am drawn in. Today I read about Neelay Mehta, the crippled computer whiz who goes to Stanford University and designs a game around trees. The story reminds me of Richard Powers’ last book Playground. What strikes me in both books is how strongly attuned Richard Powers is to tech and artificial intelligence, and how he fuses these elements into the very spines of his stories. Through Neelay, Powers makes code feel strangely alive, almost botanical. For this alone, this chapter is worth reading.Tomorrow I will plant magnolia trees, setting a magnolia with white flowers beside one with purple flowers. My helper Etbari, her little daughter Ritika, and I will each take our spades, and we will dig three feet into the earth, set each tree in place, cover its roots with fresh soil, make a circle around it, and stamp the mud tight.I hope these trees will survive.The trees I planted last year did very well, sprouting beautiful delicate green leaves and growing tall. But then in August the floods came and water pooled around the trees. By the time the rains were over, the leaves began to wither. Slowly the trees died—their roots had rotted in the water.This year I will be more careful. I will stake each tree, and circle it with stones, and pray to the sun and rain gods to keep it safe.Still, I can’t help thinking about the Van Vihar forest across the river, the barbed wire, the JCBs, the scarred earth where hundreds of deodars once held sway, and wondering what difference two magnolia trees will make. But I will plant anyway. What else is there to do. And you, dear reader, do you have a tree?Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and Founder, Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. For all questions about life and literature email sonyasbookbox@gmail.com.