“Have you ever tried this?” says 40-year-old Chandan Tiwary, plucking a berry off a shrub and popping it in his mouth. We are in Sunder Nursery, Delhi’s arboretum, hours before the Sunday morning organic market has opened, before the sun can direct its 45°C glare at the city. But already, there is sweat streaming down his temples; his faded light blue kurta has found some of its old colour in patches of perspiration.
The berry, he says, is Gangeti (Grewia Tenax), a small, orange coloured fruit whose tartness is balanced when you bite into its woody, prominent seed. A few minutes pass, and he walks by a tree, heavy with little fruit. “Lasoda,” he says, tearing one to reveal its gluey insides. “Its pickle is amazing!”
I ask how he knows what to pick without breaking out in a rash, considering he’s only been hanging out with trees for six months; he cackles loudly. Chandan remembers attending a walk by environmentalist Pradip Krishen a few years ago, but found a knowledge vacuum since. It was only late last year that he stumbled upon the #50trees challenge on Twitter. Through this, users would discover flora of their city and document their fiinds on social media.
“Why only 50? Delhi can do more!” thought Chandan, the man who once ran away from home, to explore the world and everything he’d read about it. For as long as he can remember, he was consumed by the idea of knowing everything about everything. In December 2018, he started an Instagram account called @DelhiTrees, before getting onto Twitter in April this year. The account reveals no human name or face. “Delhitrees is an attempt to learn and share the knowledge of greens in and around Delhi,” reads the bio. The display photo is a close-up image of a Himchampa (Magnolia grandiflora) that he found at Lodhi Garden.
A world of its own
By day, Chandan is a deputy manager of law at the Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited, a government telecom provider. The moment he gets off work, the resident of New Friends Colony rides the metro train back — but only until Nehru Place. Here, he gets off, choosing to walk the rest of the way, about 4-5 kilometres through Astha Kunj, a large patch of green cover not too far away from the stop.
He moved to Delhi in 2006 for work, after a bachelor’s degree in commerce, and another in law from the Banaras Hindu University. Now, he can’t really think of living elsewhere — given just the sheer diversity of trees in the capital.
“Have you seen: the road to the Supreme Court is lined with Kadamba,” he says as he plucks a mini tennis-ball-like flower that the god Krishna is supposed to have worn as headgear. This shorter variety of the Kadamba tree, with its round ochre-ish flowers and their pungently sweet smell, is the ‘original’. The taller Kadamba has brighter yellow flowers, he says. “How else would Krishna have climbed it ?!”
A Palash tree in bloom, with its leaves in threes
Just as he is familiar with the gods and their relationship with the trees of India, Chandan rattles off popular tree-related idioms in Hindi. When he encounters a Palasha (Butea monosperma, also known as Flame of the Forest or Dhaak), he says: “Dhaak ke teen paat,” pausing to explain the saying’s allusion to the obvious fate of something — just like how leaves on the dhaak always grow in threes. He knows the more contemporary, fun ones too. “Balam kheera bana dega aapke pet ko heera,” he says with another cackle when he spots an African Kigelia (Kigelia africana) tree with its blood red-flowers. Its sausage-shaped fruit-pods, when ground to fine powder and ingested, are supposed to cure a bad tummy.
Of Delhi’s ecological history and future
Chandan is also acutely aware of the more sombre tales of the tree-world. As he crushes a few Eucalyptus leaves to breathe in their fresh-yet-blamy fragrance, he mentions the British, as well as later, in the 1970s, the Indian Government’s social forestry programme that had foreign trees spread through the city. Of these, it is the Kikar (Prosopis julifloara) that really get his goat: he doesn’t hesitate to call ugly.
“Kikar was a lazy idea,” he says referring how the planters were unmindful of how the species might adapt to terrior change. “We have churail papdi (Holoptelea integrifolia), desi babool (Vachellia nilotica), tamarind, fig, and mango that can easily replace them.” An activity already started by the Delhi Government in 2017, replacing Kikar and restoring Delhi-native trees has seen some success in the Yamuna Biodiversity Park and Aravalli Biodiversity Park.
These two projects, as well as the likes of Sanjay Van are the way forward for Delhi, he says. “Lodhi Garden, Nehru Park, Shalimar Bagh...I’ve walked through all these places. Parks are great, but what we really need is to rebuild our forests and make them self-sustaining.” That’s how this city’s abundant greenery can stay on.
Chandan can’t have Delhi any other way. After all, it is the trees here that taught him to appreciate slowing down — their many families and variations eased him into accepting that it wasn’t necessary to know everything about the world afterall. But more importantly, it is Delhi’s trees that got Chandan to break the ice in an arranged marriage he reluctantly agreed to two years ago. Now, Mrs. Tiwary, fascinated by her husband’s bond with trees, will take long walks with him, often punctuating her steps with ‘What’s this one called?”
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