Shortly before my daughter arrived in the world in April two and a half years ago, the park below my Bangalore apartment turned into a watercolour study: the pink trumpet tree’s rose quartz froth, jacaranda’s soft mauves, copper-pod’s bright yellow confetti, and the crimson royal poinciana blooms polka-dotting the green canopy. Given that it was now uncomfortably warm in the city and I   had little energy to wander outside, I would gaze at the flowering trees for hours from my balcony, their colours merging into a comfortingly soft blur in the heat. As I anxiously tried to process what lay ahead of me, the much longed-for dream of a baby turning into reality and the daunting road ahead of birth, post-partum, and motherhood (a word that I still could scarcely believe would be a part of my emotional lexicon), glimpsing those trees and their spring plumage greatly soothed me. For now, at least, I had this.

A few hours before my daughter was born, I stood in front of the window in my hospital room, a blooming royal poinciana next door gently embracing the glass, the abundance of crimson flowers now overwhelming the green. It was the last thing I saw before I entered the operation theatre; it was the first thing I saw when I returned, a slumbering baby in the bassinet now next to me. A baby, I told myself, quite unable to believe she was finally here and in my arms. Her eyes were still closed, and even when they opened for the very first time a few hours later, she would not have registered the crimson flowers just yet.

But I saw them for her.

**

In the last decade, especially, trees have held, nurtured, healed, and inspired me in countless ways, wherever I have lived and journeyed. They have become an integral piece of the jigsaw puzzle that is me, a piece that, if missing for too long, throws my world off axis.

During those initial delirious postpartum months, inhabiting a land of acute sleeplessness, bewilderment, and chaos, my body and mind recalibrating themselves in my new role as a mother, I would yearn to go and sit beneath a tree, to soak in the quietude and solace trees have always offered me. If it were summer, I would gaze up into a latticed green ceiling, basking in the komorebi; during spring, the flowers would gently fall upon my head, like floral snow. These were my lodestones of calm, subduing the maelstrom of my thoughts perpetually threatening to suck me into their midst.

 A month after my daughter started making herself at home in her new world, my husband and I went out for our first baby-free coffee. It was the first time I had left my daughter’s side, and even though she was with capable hands, I suddenly felt adrift, as if I had stepped on another planet. Driving through familiar streets, I felt like I was seeing everything as if for the first time, rendered in an entirely new light.

After our coffee, we stopped by a small, white-washed temple; I had never been to this temple before, and the priest told us that it was as old as the city. In the temple courtyard, I saw a cannonball tree in bloom, its flowers generously enveloping the ground below, the thick, waxy coral-hued petals appearing like displaced shells from a distant seashore. A South American import, devotees of the Hindu god of destruction, Shiva, associated the flower’s structure with the god’s symbols, and it was considered a sacred tree by many Hindus. I had first seen the tree in one of Bangalore’s oldest temples and would subsequently spot it in many other temples as well as adorning the city’s avenues and streets.

It was the first time I was paying such minute attention to a tree after my daughter’s birth. My relationship with faith is a complicated affair nowadays, I nevertheless still sought refuge in physical shrines, deriving peace from the sacred spaces. However, that day, it occurred to me that I did not necessarily always need to visit the shrines to find my peace: I realised I had been finding it in trees all along, in their blooms, leaves, and their roots spreading like a dome below my feet.  

I breathed in the cannonball tree flowers’ scent, wondering when my daughter would be old enough to come and breathe it in with me.

**

 When we took our daughter for her first pram walk, I found myself peering into her eyes. Already seeing the world anew, I felt I was additionally re-seeing it through her eyes, a doubled wondering of what it meant to see everything for the first time. During that walk, we stood below the entangled, all-encompassing embrace of a raintree canopy. It was one of my favourite trees, which I had also encountered for the first time in Bangalore. I had photographed its canopy numerous times, always likening it to tributaries, one river flowing into another.

I looked down to see the tree canopy reflected in my daughter’s virtually brand-new eyes; how I longed to know what she made of it. Perhaps, she made nothing of it all, just like the countless new sights, sounds, and smells she was experiencing every day. And yet, I found myself asking, thrilled that she was participating in a world so dear to me, impatient that it would take time for me to know what she thought.

Why was it so important to know anyway, I asked myself? I recalled an instance a few years ago, having accidentally left my phone behind at home and compelled to sit below this very tree with only my thoughts for company, an increasingly rare occurrence in our device-saturated times. I had gazed upwards, my eyes tracing the lines of the canopy, wondering where it all ended, where it all began. I was literally lost in life at that point in time, and yet, in the canopy’s safe, reassuring embrace, it did not matter if I was so. For the moment, I was protected from all those bewildering questions of life that I had no immediate answers to.

Standing below this tree now, I found that life had answered some of those questions which had once troubled me so. When I now looked up the canopy and again at my daughter, I whispered to her, ‘This is a tree.’ Several months later, when I asked her where the tree was, she gestured upwards and said ‘tree’. My heart stopped: I could not ask for more.

**

 Seasons become more distinct than ever once you become a mother, and the concept of time holds a more tender, sweeter, and deeper resonance. One moment, your baby was kicking you inside; the next moment, she gently kicks you while sleeping next to you on the bed. Her features change all the time: she looks like a new person with each passing day. You marvel again and again at how she was inside you one day, and now she’s walking and running, her little shoe-clad feet kicking a ball. If she hasn’t seen you around for a while, she toddles into the room, whispering ‘Mum-mee.’ Time stops: you fist it, unwilling to let it pass.

You inhabit a parallel timeline of seasons: you become so immersed in this new season of motherhood that you find yourself suddenly glancing out of the window and wondering, when did the royal poinciana trees stop blooming? When did I stop finding red dreams below my feet? When did the trees of the city exchange their multicoloured spring robes for the monsoon’s viridian ones? Where was I all this time?

All through my life, I have struggled to inhabit the moment fully. I have always been obsessively aware of time, whether reliving the past or dreading the future, always imagining it to be a site of anxiety. Over the years, trees have taught me that no time ever remains the same; seasons will come and go, bringing the advent of change with them. Change is occurring as we breathe, even if it may take months for it to manifest. The leafless branches contain the promise of all the leaves yet to leaf; the flowers that are blooming and falling upon the earth are simply nourishing the soil for new ones to bloom next year.

In this season of motherhood, I find it a little easier to hold onto the moment and truly live it. Like the spreading branches of the raintree, whose embrace has nurtured and nourished me many a time, I find motherhood enveloping me like a protective cloak, insulating me from time. I am lost once more, but in a different way; I will be found, and I hold that truth close to me, like a winter tree does, dreaming of spring.