A missed farewell and death of a tree

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A missed farewell and death of a tree

by

Anuradha Chakraborty

Well ask yourself, if you had something that you didn't need, would you regularly check it or take care of it? Imagine you plant a rose tree, but for what? Are you planting it for nothing, or would you hope that one day you would get roses from that plant? Every tree we plant, we expect to get something out of it. But if you say you actually expect nothing from it, you are either lying or you are an exceptional person. We have been seeing that parents love us selflessly since childhood, they fulfil all our expectations, pay for everything that we needmake us study. But do they really do it selflessly? Don’t they expect anything in return? Well anthropological study of The Gift by Marcell Mauss doesn’t say so. Mauss in his book The Gift shows that gifts are not selfless at all, they include a triple underlying obligations, to give, to receive, to return, often with increment. Coming back to the idea when our age is around 24-25, can we really continue to depend on them? Will they accept it? Rather, we will have our responsibilities of giving back to them, perhaps more than what we got from them. We develop responsibilities towards our family, society and towards ourselves. If we fail to fulfil it, we become a burden on them and become unnecessary to the society. Today I will share one such incident which I have experienced on human-plant relationship.

The Story:

At the centre of this story is a Fresh Pomelo (Batabi Lebu) tree. This is the tree that I have been seeing in front of my house since my childhood. The tree is located right next to our tubewell from where we fetch water. The tree is quite old, almost about 20 years. Yet as I have been told and I have seen, this tree has never given a single piece of fruit ever. The tree was alive. Yearly the tree also got new leaves, shredded the old ones. As my mother is very fond of plants, she took good care of it for the first few years. But she also gave up after seeing that the tree is not yielding any fruit for years. The tree gradually became unnecessary to us. But we never chopped down the tree, we never wanted to destroy its existence.


The time passed by, we kept using our tubewell regularly but didn't pay any extra attention to the tree. All of us are more or less fascinated by the beauty of the sky.

 

Sometimes the sky looks so beautiful that I wanted to capture the moment on camera. It is worth mentioning that there is a huge time gap between the first and second photo in the photo. The first one I took in a cloudy afternoon and the second one is taken on a sunny morning. Somewhat strangely, the tree is present in both the frames, though I concentrated on the sky and missed its omnipresence. Especially after taking the second picture recently, I was surprised. Looking at the picture, I saw that the tree is no longer alive. I felt sad that I couldn’t really bid it a farewell and it just left. Suddenly, the question arose in my mind that was the tree really so unnecessary that we did not notice its disappearance or it is better to say that no attempt was ever made to take care of it, just because it never yielded anything. Even though it was in front of us, and we planted it, and yet never looked after it. Finally found out through a picture that it is no more with us? Isn't that really weird? Or perhaps not! Does it really prove Marcell Mauss was right when he said that our relationships are exchange relationships!


Now that the tree is replaced by a guava tree, the guava tree has started bearing fruit within a year of planting.  Everyone loves the tree in our house. Everyone is waiting for guava flowers to come on the tree. They try to count from the gap of leaves, how many guavas are visible and much more going on about that tree. We always eliminate things that are invisible for us in so far as they do not yield anyting. If something not serving us our needs, we start ignoring or eliminating that thing unconsciously.

Reference:

Mauss, Marcel (2016). The Gift. Jane I. Guyer (Expanded ed.). Chicago. (https://www.worldcat.org/title/951155743) 


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