It has been three years. She just glances at me through her moving car, but never stops.
She says, “This tree is intriguing”.
She usually loves all the trees. But I know what she thinks about me. She has the same parameters of defining a tree as “lovely”, just as humans have about her gender’s beauty. Ok. I know. It is just not that. She finds Bangalore roads chaotic, sans service lanes. I agree. It is not easy to stop your car and get out to admire a tree.
But then, this spring-summer of 2021, she finds roads empty as Corona has pushed people to “work from home.” She stops, parks her car and approaches me.
My leaves are like an umbrella. She notices it. But she feels these are again arranged in an ‘intriguing’ pattern, not something like Sheesham or Peepal leaves which are so very attractive. She says, “Leaves are arranged just like the Saptparni Leaves. What makes it look like an umbrella? These are not.” I think she lacks imagination.
She looks at my dark red-pink-maroon flowers, which appear like the ‘arms of Octopus’, which gives me my other name – Octopus Tree. She differs. She says these look more like dry sticks in a vase for making flower arrangement.
She gets intrigued. She looks at me through the binocular. My flower-shoots have hundreds of red-maroon flowers. She finds hundreds of golden bees feasting on my very ‘unorthodox’ flowery arms. She pulls out the camera. I think we have progressed to the ‘likes’ stage now.
It is a big tech giant’s office. The guard goes running to her to ask what does she mean by pointing the camera at the building.
She tells the guard about the tree and he lets her photograph it. He is from Bihar. She thanks him and shows all the photographs from afar. He smiles. They chitchat through the corona guidelines’- ‘mask’ and ‘social distancing’.
This was our first meeting. Now we have already met more than ten times at various places in Bangalore. She now finds me “intriguingly appealing”.
