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Quiet

My Home in the Old World
By Thomas Palakeel
first published in India Currents, February 1996
 

When I was promoted to the fifth grade, what appealed to me the most was the long distance I could travel, one mile, to reach the new school, actually an old, dilapidated government school, located right near our little market-square in Thidanad, a village too far away from everything of importance in Kerala. But, the one mile offered a thousand sights for a boy sent out to face the big world. The grove of teakwoods on the way I gladly mistook for a jungle.

I sneaked in and out of the grove with a mouthful of sour berries. Sometimes I took a brave short-cut through the churchyard into the paved road busy with traffic. Buses, bullock-carts, school-children, wayside huts, the tinsmith's workshop, an occasional car.

Every morning, as I crossed the bridge into the Thidanad market, I began to notice a huge nutmeg tree that towered above an old house right by theriver. The tree stood there majestically, bearing a harvest of mouth-watering nutmeg fruits, and each fruit treasuring inside the rind, the costly, oval-shaped nut laced with a blood-red aril.

The sight of the tree was enough to make any boy or girl crave to chew the nutmeg rinds with salt-crystals, or better still, to possess the whole fruit, one of those complex, natural wonders that seldom came into a child's hand. As the nutmeg kernels fetched good price at the market, few boys would have been able to steal one, for the trees were often fenced in and closely guarded. In this case, the whole yard around the nutmeg tree was hedged in by thorny creepers and barbed wire.

Even if there were no hedges, I would have been dwarfed by this gigantic spire of a tree whose lowest branch started high above the ground. The girth of the trunk appeared to me as big as an elephant's belly, pitch-black, gnarled, mossy, alluring. My hope upon first noticing this tree was that someday I would get lucky, that the wind and the sun would conspire to drop me one fruit out of its million-leaf foliage. The truth is that I did not have much luck with the two smaller trees at my mother's house. Since round-nutmeg was so valued in foreign lands where they used it in cakes, medicines and perfumes, a child couldn't easily obtain a nutmeg.

After I discovered the tree by the old house, I often stood at the edge of the road, gazing after the fruits. The tree branched out in every direction, casting a vast shadow over the house. Gazing at the tree from the roadside, what amazed me was the view of the thousands of fruits that hung from the branches that looked like little yellow-colored bats. The sight became even more beautiful in the summer, when the fruits mellowed together and their thick, fleshy rind began to appear broken up and halved by the sun. The fruits would remain on the tree a few more days,Then the inevitable moment arrives: each fruit falls to the ground, quietly.

One day, my father brought the news that he had purchased the old house by the river. Yes, the huge nutmeg tree with it.

The day we were handed over the keys to the old house, I remember many elderly people who passed by the road come into the courtyard to congratulate my father. All they talked about was the nutmeg tree. A twelve-year old interrupted the gathering and asked for a fruit. His wish was granted so graciously, making me envious of the boy. One eighty-year old said, as long as he could remember the tree existed; the same size, and equally bountiful. Such a tree was a blessing, he said.

Auspicious for our future generations. Take good care of the tree. Care for it as if it's your home. Many years later, after my graduation from college, I returned home from the city in the middle of an unusually long, hot summer. The river had dried up. Even the well dug in the middle of the river was empty. Trucks had to lug in drinking water from neighboring villages and ration it out.

As the Monsoon refused to arrive, most of the trees began to shed their leaves: tamarinds, mangoes, jackfruits, coconuts, teaks, papayas. Our nutmeg tree held forth its leaves until the end of May. We were relieved. But by mid-June, the dark greenery of the tree had turned yellow. I remember seeing my father standing at the foot of the tree, gazing sadly at the branches. He said the tree was gasping for breath. He felt a deep personal feeling for the tree. An empathy. My father never spoke sentimental words. No poetry either. When I heard him speak, I went and touched the tree with love and I could share the thirst of the earth.

At the end of the month, the Monsoon did arrive, bringing with it thunder and lightning and the wind that woke up the landscape. The Lord of the Skies let the reins loose. "Rain fell like a shower of stars. We heard the thrumming on the roof, nut meg nut meg." We knew the skeleton-tree would grow leaves. The nutmeg sprang back to life, dressed in exquisite verdant foliage. The tree appeared younger than before, and in the following year, the tree yielded better harvest than ever, surprising us further, year after year, until the summer of 1992, when I returned home after seven lean years as a student in the United States.

The village had changed; a new concrete building had replaced the old house. The tree looked smaller, but the fruit tasted as tangy as ever and conjured up a range of my boyhood memories. It was a time of rejoicing, for I had recently married and was bringing my wife to my home and my old world, for the first time.

The Monsoon had begun. On time. Then, within a week of our arrival, at the end of a rainstorm, a messenger brought the news that the big tree had fallen.

The tree was waiting for my return. Yes. I understood. Quickly I set out to the market-square. To walk the one mile that I loved so much as a boy. My path was blocked; rubber and coconut trees had fallen into the middle of the road. As I crawled underneath the broken branches, I felt exhilarated by the tactile experience: the bleeding leaves, the cracked branches scratching at my skin, the smell of rain and mud and vegetation; it was the hazardous boyhood quest all over. Ignoring the presence of half the population of the village, chopping off and clearing the fallen branches, I penetrated the layers of foliage that hindered me from reaching out to my nutmeg tree. I found the nutmeg tree leaning over our new building, its massive branches blocking the road; the tree had given in, after a calm resistance to the forces of the air.

I felt proud when I realized that the twister hadn't uprooted the nutmeg tree. Having failed to do so, the twister toppled a guava and all the banana trees in its path, and then it fled west.

I stood there, quiet, still thinking that I was on time for a big parting moment. I heard many in the crowd say that it would be so awful to look at the sky and not see our nutmeg tree. I looked down. All around me I found thousands of whole nutmeg fruits and broken rinds and nuts and arils that lay scattered, remnants.