Treelogy. Garb of protection

It is quite possible that my mother would list making clothes for dolls as one of the most joyous things about having had me as a daughter. With scraps of cloth gathered from Ram-kaku, our neighbourhood tailor, she made clothes for dolls of all shapes and sizes. Since she did not have a sewing machine, she hand-sewed them. Her designs came from a magazine called Soviet Nari ( The Soviet Woman ) — beautiful white women and their daughters lived in these glossy pages, wearing dresses and sweaters that belonged to a half-forgotten and half-imagined era. It wasn’t only dolls and stray animals she gave clothes to — like in many middle-class Indian homes of the time, the radio and the television, the upper body and the hand of the refrigerator, chair-heads, phones, tables, and various other things were given clothes. It’d protect them from the dust, and bring longevity to their lives.

But not a single plant, of course.

Rereading Subodh Ghosh’s short story Cactus earlier this month, these memories returned to me. A retired judge in Kolkata who is now a plant collector, has a big garden full of exotic plants from all over the world. It’s winter, and the judge is scared that a cactus, particularly precious to him because it’s been sourced from Arizona, might die in the unexpectedly chilly nights. So he’s got a blanket to cover around the plant, to protect it from dew and the cold. But protection from the weather alone isn’t enough, and so he’s employed a young Nepali boy from the Darjeeling hills to protect his garden from human thieves. We see this Nepali boy thinking about his poor mother in the village, cold and shivering in her room, waiting for a little extra money from him so that she could buy a blanket. There’s an old woman who steals flowers and stems and leaves from the garden. Both these women are cold, while the judge is in his house, warm, as is the night guard, who’s wearing warm clothes. We watch, with trepidation, how the guard allows the blanket to be stolen — though he doesn’t steal anything, he does not perform his role of catching the thief and protecting the cactus. The moral of the story is implicit in the choice the guard makes — a human’s survival and comfort is more important than a plant’s.

It’s not a new argument, of course — the human must survive at all costs, at the cost of all species (for who isn’t aware of the outrage when lawns and public gardens are watered during the time of water shortage?). But what interests me about the story is how the choice of clothes — a cover; textile — seems superfluous and unnecessary to everyone except the indulgent judge. No one would have pulled a shawl or blanket away from a human’s body without any moral compunction, of course.

What exactly could be the relation between nudity and trees? As I watched the short film Striptease to Save the Trees , about the poet-activist La Tigresa (Dona Nieto, who tried to stop the cutting of redwood forests in Mendocino, California, by reciting a poem, her breasts bare, with a woman playing the harp standing next to her), I thought of how she was using a metaphor unfamiliar to plant life. Nudity is the only way of plants — this even the camera knows. That is perhaps why the ‘naked’ trees are visible to the audience but not so much the woman’s breasts — she has her bare back to us for most of the short film, and her breasts are often a haze of pixels. ‘Naked earth’ is pinned on a tree; “I am more beautiful when naked than when you put me in clothes,” she says to the woodcutters, speaking as Earth, and changing her voice to that of the trees. “Get down on your knees and worship me, I am your mother … grandmother … sister … I am the Earth.” There are two troubling things here: the first is the self-ascription of the Earth as a woman; the second is the role of striptease as a tool of protest.

But what I notice, after these thoughts have settled down, is how there is so little focus or footage of trees in the film. It is this that reminded me of Ghosh’s story — just as we read about the anxiety of keeping the cactus alive, using clothes to protect it, but we almost never see the cactus, in the film we see the semi-naked woman, but the trees that she’s fighting to save don’t seem to exist visually.

The notion of ‘striptease’, a human act, is a kind of tautology for trees, because they’re already naked, with no clothes to shed, only leaves, then bark and leaves, shedding which would bring death.

Sumana Roy

Neither the cactus nor the redwood forests exists independently for the humans trying to protect them — in this also is perhaps a note of caution for us, about how we deny agency to those we want to protect.

Sumana Roy is the author of How I Became A Tree;

@SumanaSiliguri