It was a tree that grew along with our family. Occupying a corner of the plot on which our house stood, the lean Bulletwood tree or Magizham tree, which yielded brown and sweet-smelling flowers, was still young when we moved in. In those days we remember picking the flowers off the terrace and the ground and threading them to make little garlands for the deities.
Over the years the flowers became fewer. The tree grew bigger, its trunk thicker and it formed a canopy over one part of our house and offered a lot of shade. We got so busy with our lives that we did not realise how much the tree had grown. It found its space by hugging sunshades, squeezing between other projections and leaning comfortably against the low parapet of the terrace.
Recently when we had a plumbing problem in one of the toilets on the first floor we did a thorough inspection of the compound. As we looked skyward we discovered to our horror what the tree had done. “Water dripping through the tree will soon damage the iron rods in the sunshades and corrode them,” the contractor said. We knew right then what this meant. The tree would have to be felled. We were determined to save the tree somehow and launched a hunt for tree experts.
There are simply not enough of them and they are a busy bunch. Sometimes they prefer to do consultations over WhatsApp, so what we were required to do was to send pictures of the tree and the damage it had caused. So, we got on to the terrace and on to sunshades and tried to document the situation in pictures. A friend of mine who is fond of trees said the Bulletwood tree had great therapeutic and medicinal value and suggested we explore the possibility of transplanting the tree. A WhatsApp consultation confirmed our worst fears. The tree would have to go. There was no room to transplant the tree (it was too close to the compound wall) or lop off its branches in order to straighten it.
Cutting a tree is by no means easy emotionally since it is a living being. It is also not cheap. So one Sunday morning the tree cutters took it down. All the shade that we had enjoyed disappeared in a trice. The glare now hit our eyes. The moral of the story—not only does one have to choose the right spot for the right tree, one has to tend to it in its growing years. With space at a premium, in a case of tree versus building we know who wins.