Chennai’s old trees

Image: Chennai in the 19th Century, by the photographers E. F. H. Wiele and Theodore Klein, official photographers to the Governor of Madras (renamed as the state of Tamil Nadu, in 1969, after the fall of the British Raj). The pictures were rescued by Harry Miller in the 1970s, Director of Photography of The Indian Express, with the help of Eric Stracey, Inspector General of Police. Desikan Krishnan, of The Hindu newspaper, named them “Vintage Vignettes” as a collection.

Chennai’s old trees

Ana Paula Arendt

Streets with high green roofs,

trees bending toward each other,

an embrace of old friends

never tired of being together,

closing upon one another…

Depth of green shadow opened

through endless processions of trees,

a tunnel transporting to my homeland.

A tree looks at the other

–almost a mirror

and the land becomes a home

made of familiar depth,

of overlapping canopies.

One tree screens the other

in search of their truth.

Trees, givers of a scent of forest,

surrounding paths and concrete blocks,

seeping and effusing sunlight,

reminiscing beyond the time of

a car, a boy, a story.

Silent beings.

The streets of Chennai,

in the past Mowbray, today Mylapore

draw the frame of a beautiful walk:

leaning trees almost resting their weight on the ground

–a relief from summer.

The eye wanders in layered distances of foliage

around those vast columns of living wood,

their enormous bodies twisting above the road,

their trunks swollen with age and rain.

The soft sifted light.

Delicate leaves full of intention in aerial bushes

are planted in large plots of branches,

flowering a detailed yellow weaving

that our eyes promptly accept.

Copperpods*, gymnasts

between ground and heaven.

I’m gazing at these green brocades,

a more detailed painting than Pichwai**,

reality of a dream, Madhuban*** passing by,

the heavenly vision of Panai Marams**** and tamarind trees…

Layers of a green kingdom receding into the distance,

Trees upon trees, craving softly remoter planes

– a rest for the travelling body.

Suddenly, one giant tree

cathedral of immense stillness,

voicing the silence of all trees,

summons its faraway kin,

monumental utterance

of the same generous trees

that grow in my birthplace…

Colossal herald of a fellowship

among the highest trees across continents,

answering the distant brethren

that sheltered my childhood.

The panorama of Mount Saint Thomas

sprinkles briars in a soil of tawny dust,

dust, that brother of the fawn.

Yonder, the melody of Jerusalem,

a whisper of the Nilgiris

–the long blue mountains.

By the time of Madras,

variegated cloths and sundry branches of light

blessed the chariots on the road of Mowbray.

The two rows of aged trees embracing each other.

They moved, planted from place to place,

faster than the human eye could fix upon them,

to Ramakrishna Mutt Road,

and perhaps one day they will find

the same immense girth of the trees

from which they were born.

The trees of Chennai tell about

their single origin,

thousands of castes,

and blessed destiny…

The city is their constitution,

the law of a silent civilization inside them.

Beyond one street of green tunnels,

another one waits in softened light.

While the world disparages,

trees keep embracing and

growing toward each other

in Tamil streets.

The landscape goes on breathing

beyond the reach of our eyes,

and it feels that the world

never ends completely.

Every day those ancient trees

grow silently toward one another,

widening the world beyond its endings.

Slow desire, quiet inclination.

Silent passion—

rooted and enduring upon the earth,

a way of standing in the world

forever in search of the other.

* Peltophorum pterocarpum, a tropical tree with lace-like foliage and delicate yellow blossoms, reminiscent of the Brazilian sibipiruna, commonly found along the old tree-lined avenues of South India.

** Pichwai: intricate, traditional cloth paintings from Nathdwara, Rajasthan, rich in details of nature, held inside the temples of Krishna.

*** Madhuban: “honey forest”, 🌳 in Sanskrit.

**** The beautiful palmyra palm, Borassus flabellifer, the official state tree of Tamil Nadu.

Special thanks to dear friends Murlee, Pradeep and Amirtha for the pictures in Chennai.