A Spring In The Step

 It is quiet and warm in the afternoon, as we tread on fallen leaves inside the forest, a dry deciduous belt of green, now turning colour with the change in season.  The morning mist is lighter and has given way to warmer mornings and the forest has taken note.  We – my old friend Ananda and I – see the solitary, yet astonishing orange of the flame of the forest, the odd wine-reds of the flowers of the silk cotton tree and russets of the terminalias.
 
Our walk though has a purpose, so we stop but briefly.  Ananda has spent all his life in this forest, so he knows the trees, small rock formations (‘this is kebballamma bande’, he informs me, as we stand on an outcrop of stone that is four billion years old, and counting), and bushes and grasses that I would easily miss.  Walking with him isn’t a trek, it is an education and he is a skilled, if sometimes dismissive, teacher. 
We have a purpose today. 
 
Every year, a few days before Shivratri, a magical event unfolds in our forest. Trees of a single species– Shorea roxburghii - are always always grouped together in stands and for much of the year they are non-descript (I wonder what they think of me.  On second thoughts, I’d rather not know).  Around this time of year, the stands of Jalaari mara – as the Shorea rox. is called in our parts - shakes off its collective somnolence and blooms, a word that cannot possibly do justice to an utterly fantastical panoply: each tree, hosting many thousand flowers of a delicate cream with the stand of a few dozen trees glistening from afar in the warmth of the midday sun. 
 

When we get there, the fragrance is over-powering, a million outpourings of scent that is delicate, bewitching and, once inhaled, never forgotten.  I am hesitant to pluck a bunch but Ananda has done it in a jiffy, so I sit with them around me, breathing in the fragrance and listening to the drone of a thousand bees. Pick a flower: it is science-meets-beauty-meets elegance, for the petals-and-stamen are intricately designed for the bees to reach the nectar and for you to paint with abandon on mind’s canvas, for your fingers to touch and caress.  This isn’t just botany and evolution, it is extraordinary magic at work, evolutionary caprice - a contradiction, if there ever was one – and a microcosm of enchantment. 

If you have read The Hidden Life of Trees, a brilliant, enlightening book of science, you will know that the Shorea cannot survive as a single tree, separated from its kind.  You will know from the book that these trees communicate with each other and with other species as well, exchange resources and work with collective altruism.   And knowing that they are sentient, alive in every conscious way like we are and, in so many ways, superior (ok, do you produce oxygen?), only increases the wonder.
 
A herd of elephants passed this way at night and they may have ruminated here too; in a deeper way, we are brethren, stopping by the Jalaari stand for those moments when even that great traveller – Time - sits still.
 
A fortnight later, as we will stroll under the stand, stepping on a million now-dried flowers that will nourish the soil, that afternoon will be a memory. 
Memories sit still too.