A Seed

Manasi here, writing from the Folly in the Garden.

I was puttering around in the old Nabob’s hidden summer room, downstairs in the Folly, when I remembered that I ought to wash the dust from my face and hands, and go over to the greenhouse to choose some seeds. Just then, what did I come across down there, but an old seed packet! It was so fortuitous that it seemed almost spooky. But could the seeds it contained possibly germinate, after so many years? I carried the packet upstairs, into the light, to examine it.

The packet – its paper browned and faded, thin and very fragile – had been supplied by Bannerji & Nephew, Park Street, Calcutta. I opened it as gently as I could, and found that it contained a single banyan seed.


I was intrigued, but at the same time I wondered: what had the Nabob been thinking? Banyans need the tropics; they can never grow in a cold place. I thought that perhaps the Nabob himself had felt something like the banyan – after a lifetime in the Indies he had returned to a cold home which had become foreign to him. In the end, he had not taken the risk; he had left the banyan seed sealed, dormant in its paper wrapping.

Imagining all these things, I resolved that I would take the challenge. I will plant the banyan seed in a pot, and keep it indoors in a pool of sunlight. When the time comes for me to leave Riversleigh, I will carry the pot with me, and plant it where it can spread and grow.

A banyan grows slowly into a mighty tree, which expands to cover as much space as you allow it. It shelters many creatures in its branches. I hope that it will inspire me to expand in imagination and art; and shelter me in its cool shade.

Recently, in my other home, in Chennai, I went to visit a banyan tree. This is what I wrote about it:

… I went to draw the banyan tree. A big, minimally-shaped chunk of granite had been erected in front of it. As I stood sketching, a yellow-green chameleon ran down the trunk and squatted on the stone's highest point, staring at me. Two crows perched silently in the branches above it. The tree, the lives that sheltered in it, and the stone formed a small perfection.