Roopa Pai’s fascination for trees was first kindled at a tree walk she went on about two decades ago. “My father would tell me the names of flowering trees like jacaranda and gulmohar when I was little, so I knew some things. But true appreciation only came when I was much older after living in other cities and countries,” says Pai, the co-founder of Bangalore Walks, a history and heritage walks and tours company.
In 2005, a little after she and her husband, Arun, started Bangalore Walks, she met the late Vijay Thiruvady, dendrophile, raconteur and chronicler of the city’s green heritage. He took her for a walk in Lal Bagh, remembers Pai, who went along, not expecting anything particularly life-changing. “History and heritage have been a passion, but I somehow never thought of trees as heritage,” she says. “Art, handicraft, dance, textiles…all that, yes. But not trees.”
But the passion with which Thiruvady spoke about trees changed something in her. “He spoke about them as if they were truly sentient beings, as if they were alive and spoke to him,” she recalls. “And he knew them intimately because he had walked the same paths in Lal Bagh every day, every morning, for years and years.”
Let’s Talk About Trees book cover. | Photo Credit: SPECIAL ARRAGEMENT
After this walk she began looking at trees differently. “It brought a different dimension to the whole thing,” says Pai, the author of Let’s Talk About Trees, recently released by Juggernaut Books, part of the Indian Pitta Kids imprint published in partnership with WWF-India. “As you drive around the city, you notice something special about these trees, and they truly become your friends,” she says.
Roopa Pai | Photo Credit: SPECIAL ARRAGEMENT
Ode to trees
Let’s Talk About Trees, a charming book beautifully illustrated by Canada-based artist Barkha Lohia delves into multiple aspects of what Pai calls “the amazing, extraordinary Treeverse (the universe of trees).”
Pai starts the book by taking the reader into the primordial world in which the first tree-like plants burst onto the scene — they’ve been around for over 300 million years, pre-dating and outliving dinosaurs, she writes — before discussing the reasons why it is important to know about them.
“It is only when you know something that you can begin to love it,” she writes, adding that once you love a tree, it will stop being something that simply exists and becomes something that lives not only outside of you but inside you. “You will feel deeply for every tree and want to celebrate each one’s awesomeness. And that is a win, for you will never be lonely—or bored—as long as you have trees you love around you.”
She began researching the book in September 2022, turning to Google to garner information about the different aspects of trees and making notes on what she wanted to cover. | Photo Credit: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
Writing for children
May, 2022. Pai remembers being in Europe when she got an email from the WWF- India team asking if she would be open to writing a book about trees. “I would never have done it myself if someone hadn’t asked,” she says, admitting that though she loves trees and even leads children on walks through Lal Bagh, she doesn’t think of herself as a tree expert. “My first instinct was to say that I don’t know much about trees. But then I thought it was also a great opportunity to educate myself and write that book because it is WWF, and they will bring it out nicely,” says Pai.
In fact, not being an expert may even offer some advantages, she feels. “Over my writing career, I’ve realised that—because I know very little about a subject, to begin with —I bring something, a layperson’s gaze, that puts me level with the reader… (something) that maybe an expert cannot bring,” says Pai, who believes that one doesn’t need to be a specialist to grasp the wonder of something and pass that on. Also, as someone who has been writing for children for over 30 years, she was confident that she could get through to her target audience, she says. “Whether I am writing for adults or children, I write the kinds of books that give you a lot of information while keeping it conversational,” says Pai, whose books also tend to straddle multiple disciplines because “that has been my way of understanding the world. Everything is connected, and that kind of learning stays with you for much longer, is deeper,” says Pai.
She began researching the book in September 2022, turning to Google to garner information about the different aspects of trees and making notes on what she wanted to cover. “I also went to experts like Vijay and Karthik (Karthikeyan Srinivasan, Chief Naturalist, Jungle Lodges and Resorts),” says Pai, who chose to structure the book partly in a question-and-answer format, drawing inspiration from the How and Why Wonder Books, a series of American illustrated books published in the 1960s and 1970s that were designed to teach science and history to young people.
“The question-answer approach allows you to write about something without needing to be comprehensive about anything. You pick what interests you, ask those questions and write,” says Pai, who says that while her book is not an exhaustive account of trees, by the end of it, a young reader will have some understanding of trees and, more importantly, feel more connected to them. “Children learn about trees anyway in their science classes, but it is done in a very clinical way,” she says. “Here, it is just about adding a little emotion to what they already know.”
Not only has Pai gone into the basic biology of trees, in general, but she has also offered detailed descriptions of 12 indigenous tree species, including teak, banyan, neem, palash and deodar. | Photo Credit: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
Journey into the world of trees
Did you know that tree rings aren’t always the best way of telling the age of a tree? Or that the jackfruit tree is as local as it gets, having been cultivated in the subcontinent for nearly 6,000 years? And that the Mahabodhi tree in Bodh Gaya, Bihar, found within the ancient Mahabodhi Temple built by Emperor Ashoka, is believed to be the direct descendant of the actual Bodhi tree under which the Buddha meditated 2,500 years ago?
Let’s Talk About Trees is full of such lovely little nuggets of information, interspersing various scientific aspects of trees with poetry, observation exercises, pop quizzes and more. Not only has Pai gone into the basic biology of trees, in general, but she has also offered detailed descriptions of 12 indigenous tree species, including teak, banyan, neem, palash and deodar. She has also highlighted some iconic migrants such as tabebuia, gulmohar and jacaranda, all of which have flourished in Bengaluru and are now seen as intrinsic to the city’s green heritage.
“It was something Vijay used to talk about a lot, and this was a revelation for me. I didn’t realise that they have travelled here,” says Pai, who sees the flourishing of these foreign species as a metaphor for Bengaluru itself. Like its many human inhabitants who have migrated to the city for various reasons and flourished, the trees, too, are visitors who have become natives, she says. “Bangalore has been this welcoming ecosystem for them,” says Pai, who firmly believes that introducing children to trees early opens their minds to a “laboratory of wonder.”
Patience and immersion
According to her, in this age of cell phones and frequent car travel, we walk and observe less, but our brains are continuously stimulated. “Looking at a tree requires some patience and some immersion. That is a great way to calm the mind…it is like meditation,” she says. Additionally, tree watching offers an appreciation of the world we live in, “the web of life…how one thing sustains another... the very fragile but powerful connections between different things,” says Pai, pointing out that trees are easily accessible in the city and cost nothing to watch. She hopes that young people who read this book will discover exactly what she did two decades ago on that walk with Thiruvady. “I just want them to open their inner eye and start looking at trees.”
Let’s Talk About Trees costs ₹499 and is available on Amazon and at all major bookstores.
Published - September 06, 2024 09:00 am IST
