(with thanks and apologies to Gieve Patel, whose On Killing a Tree (1966) was model, inspiration and organic root-stub from which this poem and post grew!)

I remember reading Gieve Patel’s powerful On Killing a Tree in class 9 or 10. I don’t recall much about our poetry classes (then part of what we used to call English Lit II) except that I didn’t much care for them. The slick-haired, pretentious teacher didn’t help any. Nor did the mostly Lake-District Romantic poems chosen for our ICSE curriculum. (Although I will admit that Wordsworth’s Daffodils did strike a chord with us, even though not one among us had laid eyes on real daffodils or narcissi in the fields). But this poem, Gieve Patel’s poem, was memorable. One of two by Indian poets — other one being Nissim Ezekiel’s Goodbye to Miss Pushpa TS — it reached out and grabbed you then. And re-reading it all these years later, it reaches out and grabs you now.

Patel, writing ironically in the 1960s, might have seen the effects of development projects burgeoning in post-Independence, pro-infrastructure but still largely socialist India.  Now, in a hardened and hardening 21^st C, India’s ‘growth’ policies post liberalization in the 1990s are a very different ball game. With trees and tree policies, things have never been more difficult, nor has the very concept of environmental protection been at greater risk. The planet is burning and warming at an astonishing rate of close to 3 degrees C a year (say the new COP26 People’s Policy figures) – and our greed and dependence on fossil fuels are both rampant and reckless. The agreements hammered out at COP26 have been an abject failure in breaking that cycle and moving to renewables. And as we all know now, (post the protests and peoples’ movements taking to the streets) the world’s governments have failed us, and have especially failed the global south. The suits are killing us. They are killing the trees. And in killing the trees, they sound our death knell many times over. If they go, we go. Its as simple – or complex – as that.

This, then, is the new green development. And in response, this is the new green resistance. For the last two years, we have been trying to save a stretch of 1000+ stately, gorgeous banyan trees (along with 9000 other species) on the Chevella-Bijapur road just outside Hyderabad. They were –correction, they are (for they are still alive) — slated for the axe due to an ill-conceived NHAI road-widening project determined to destroy them in four-laning the old state highway (S4) into the gleaming new NH163. The mature trees lining the road are seen – in this development mindset – as mere obstacles, to be razed to the ground and cast aside. No matter that these extraordinary banyans are keystone species; entire ecosystems in themselves, home to myriad species of birds, bees, slugs, bugs, bats, small mammals, fungi, and more. In our petitions and representations to key stakeholders and those in power, we include a list of the more than 200 faunal species that might be affected if a single tree falls. Talk about the ‘ecological value’ of these irreplaceable banyans! In India today, especially under this dispensation, such wanton environmental destruction seems legion. Roads are more important than trees, even in states that pride themselves on their green policies, their green statuses, and so on. Take, for example, Hyderabad’s new green award from the FAO Council as the only Indian city to be given such an honour. Even as it sharpens its axes and its chainsaws to take down its oldest trees. Even as it puts in place tree protection committees that in reality help the process of plunder in the language of this era’s new greenwash. Even as it defines new ways in which compensatory afforestation – within a state law of water, land and trees (WALTA) that is more regulatory than prohibitive/punitive – can work to facilitate the destruction of mature trees when they get in the way! This is a well-oiled machine, an organized tree-felling system, institutionalized with all the Weberian bureaucratic rational-legal authority of an iron cage. We are all part of these pinjras, some of us outside locking up, some of us trapped inside.

Largely out of frustration, I began to write this poem below on how much easier it seems today to fell a tree rather than keep it. Patel’s classic poem fell out of some neural fold in my cortex, unbidden, like a worn bookmark, as memory and as model. And I felt both relief and satisfaction in calling out the tree-felling system and its functionaries.  

On Felling a Tree, 2021
(With apologies and thanks to Gieve Patel, whose poem was model, inspiration as well as organic root-stub from which this one grew!)

In this Anthropocenic 21^st century
It takes much much less time to fell a tree
Customs galore and rituals aplenty
Differ state to state, and mentor to mentee
In, for example, ma Telangana
You don’t even need to hate the trees as bahaana
In fact, if you’re a government employee
You can rely on greenwash bureaucracy
Use loopholes in WALTA’s tree planting rules
To hoodwink residents and appeal to fools
Make tree revenue the new game in town
Call your green policy Telangana ku Haritha Haram
Plant 5 puny saplings for each huge tree that comes down
Then refrain from replanting (‘cos hey, who’s counting).
Give all your contracts to transplanting firms
As that’s where the business is: first felling
Then transplanting stubs in a haze of shh, who’s telling.
After that, its easy – refuse to share any tree survival data
A transplanted tree rarely survives or has betis or betas
When someone questions you, just flex those muscles
And say you – not them – are the real tree-savers.

Meanwhile, apply to make your town the new Green City
Because (at least on paper) that’s what counts
Create a TPC, a tree protection committee
Which, in theory, is neutral but, in practice, packs touts.
And then, prepare! When activists are able to successfully pause
An ill-planned NHAI road-widening project,
Take on NH163 as your pet Deccani cause
Just wait for pandemic lockdowns when everyone’s ill
Start by stealth-burning some trees to test the ground
If nobody checks you, you’re home scot-free.
Acquire land alongside, let real estate skyrocket
Ethics don’t matter; its not coming out of your pocket.
Target the banyans to show that you really don’t care
A fig about species or heritage. Or, for that matter, trees.
You just follow the rules, or (like Watergate’s Deep Throat) you follow the money
So that when the center finally gives you the dough
You plan to greenlight the road; the ending’s not funny
But you’re no sad slouches, you are hard-hearted pros
So one question you ask is – Whose trees are they anyway?
Who cares that they green cover or carbon sequesterate?
Climate change is here already, hello, its the trees that are late!
With banyans, you can take down more than just trees
You can destroy whole ecosystems for birds, slugs and bees
At one fell stroke, kill hordes to drive your point home.
That’ll show them all roads do not lead to Rome.
After all, (in your book), how does such a precious tree universe matter
When NH163’s just trying to get us to Bijapur faster?

In the warm sticky evenings that immediately follow the southwest monsoon, our badminton evenings on the terrace buzzed with new visitors: at any given time, at least a half dozen gorgeous dragonflies and damselflies. They were ethereal; like gauzy clothespins on wings. It had been a long time since I’d seen so many. And we’d watch, dazzled, as they flew around, dodging our twanging rackets as they sliced through the air (full disclosure: one evening we’d seen one get entangled, mangled, in the cross-hairs, so to speak, that could get out only with our help). After that fateful incident, I resolved it would never happen again; these creatures were too enchanting to die stupid meaningless deaths by racquet. And so we placed a mini-moratorium on badminton until the flies called it a season.

I’d seen dragonflies, of course, all through my life growing up in Hyderabad and Rishi Valley. And when I moved to the US for graduate school, I’d compare the bigger ones I saw there to the desi versions. But I don’t really remember seeing the smaller, slighter damselflies in such droves either in DC or in Hyderabad after I returned in 2014 (although, could it be that I hadn’t been able to distinguish one from the other then?!). Imagine my delight and surprise when wildlife cartoonist Rohan Chakravarty (of Green Humour fame) posted this wonderful cartoon on the discovery of four new South Indian damselfly species in South India: http://www.greenhumour.com/2020/10/new-damselflies-from-southern-india.html

Rohan’s post inspired me, in turn, to write something for my new flying friends. And so, without further ado, here’s a poem whose somewhat confused form (sonnet? villanelle? whatever) shouldn’t get in the way of its intended function: a celebration of four new South Indian damselfly species, ca. Autumn/Fall 2020.

On the discovery of four new species of South Indian damselflies
(Protosticta myristicaensis, Protosticta sholaei, Protosticta cyanofemora, and Platylestes kirani, October 2020)

How long have you hovered over that well
You beautiful bug-eyed sapphire beast
Half dragon’s tail, half Tinkerbell
Forged equally from sunlight’s East
And water’s darkening pools and ponds.
Your gossamer wings grew after birth
Unfurling like some fiddlehead frond
You announced your arrival upon this earth
With one giant exoskeletal explosion
Cracked like a peanut, dripping wet
You entered the kingdom of the sun.

And even after you were hatched
Your wings outgrew your little face
Their delicacy unmatched
By any Victorian crochet or lace
Though even that comparison’s out of date
Because it turns out your ‘native place’
Is south of the Vindhyas, Western Ghats!
You’re homespun. Desi in so many forms
What you wear is no foreign tulle
But this season’s blue kanjeevarams
And your English surnames don’t have me fooled
Who first called you – medieval word ahoy —
Damsel?! I mean, isn’t chivalry dead
It’s a word that separates ‘girls’ from ‘boys’
Questing knights from passive resting maids
Which couldn’t be further from truth or fact.
You have – all told – reptilian tact
In pouncing on your hapless prey!
Which makes you no timid has-been
But an ancient predatorial queen.
Your insectivarian predatees
Include mosquitoes and fleas
And nothing seems to make your day
Than lopping off their heads at play

And now there’s science, O Odonate
That brings genealogy home through the garden gate
The first rule of taxonomy
Is to find order in suborders, to find the many
In the one (the opposite of E pluribus unum)
So here, then, is a herald’s drum
Or, much better, the mridangam?…

Oye oye oye calling all official registrars!
Your old name damsel reeks of Arthurian myth
And suggests a shy, retiring fly
Often in distress, ready to cry
But this is so very far from true
You’re anything but a meek rescue
To the contrary, you’ve sown your oats
And you have Salem steel under your Ghati petticoats
Like the aquatic nymph you once were, you queened
It up before you crawled on land.

Turns out you damsels aren’t so young
You long preceded us on earth
Much like the dinosaurs your ajjis knew
You once were big; your wingspan two feet wide
A giant insect, iridescent blue
(coloured indigo before the plant arrove on land!)
And as you’ve shrunk and modernized
Part ancient drone, part modern plane
Part dandelion, part helicopter
Evolutionarily, this question remains a whopper:
Are you my mother? You tiny Dr. Seussian crane?

If 2020 taught us anything at all
Its that old viruses need new names
In order to know them better.
So too with you, our four damsel molls
You’re alike, but you’re not the same
As any taxonomist will claim
Its difference that makes the heart grow fonder
Biodiversity spins the earth around
So instead of seeing just one sub-order:
Zygoptera, we looked for species and found four!
The scientists who gave you your IDs
Were South Indian too.
So here without any further ado
Are your new Linnaean names
At their arangetram debuts:
Platylestes kirani, Protosticta myristicaensis
Protosticta sholaei, Protosticta cyanofemora
Latin for Dakshin India’s Fabulous Four!

Inspired by Dr. Seuss’ Ode to the Lorax. Written between May and November 2020 (no, scratch that – started in May, languished for months, and posted just before two critical events, both announced on November 9, that will likely change the course of this virus’ history and itihasa: Biden’s win in the US elections and Pfizer’s announcement of a possible Covid vaccine! Until which … )

1. Virus, n. late Middle English (denoting the venom of a snake): from Latin, literally ‘slimy liquid, poison’. The earlier medical sense, superseded by the current scientific use, was ‘a substance produced in the body as the result of disease, especially one capable of infecting others’
2. Itihasa, n. Sanskrit, Hindi. Literally, इति ह आस (iti ha āsa, “so indeed it was”), from अस्ति (ásti, “he is”).

Way back in the pre-Covidean mists
The viral ancestors of our contemporary pests
Rebels, no doubt, who wanted more
Threw lipid coats over their RNA core
And decided to venture out far from their ’hood
Go forth and multiply, went an adage they knew
So they hitched rides on anything that moved
A furry hide, a flea that flew
A bat that bit, a chimpanzoo too
Until over the years, they found the perfect host to tarry a while:
Those arrogant bipeds who’d taken over the world,
(In other words, us!)
As viral waves reached our human shores
In each successive era
Viruses looked in the mirror
Liked what they saw and said, let’s replicate
Let’s copy ourselves, let’s get more of us made.
These warm human bodies make perfect motels
Let’s skinnydip in their organelles
Let’s unzip our coats, Let’s start to play
And once we get our feet in the door
we can have wild parties:  facsi-melees!
As we know, the viruses proved terrible guests
They overstayed, didn’t clean up their spills
Or mop up their mess as they made their hosts gravely, seriously ill
Never learning that Athithi Devo Bhava also applied to cellular quests.

I first heard the word virus – meaning any virus, all viruses
In Thomas Akka’s sundrenched high-school biology lab
And while I remember so much about those classes
I cannot gloss over a very big gap:
We mostly ignored Virus and Co.
And that may have been quite the lapse
(This was of course before AIDS went pro
making its HIV virus a household name).
Because even way back then, if memory serves, they didn’t seem to fit
In the great Chain of Being, the tall Tree of Life
And even as we learnt about all creatures small and big
From “animalcules” to hammerhead sharks
We traced Darwin’s evolutionary arcs
Through mitosis, meiosis, Lucy, Watson and Crick
Galapagos finches, Mendelian peas
Or how life crawled out of the Jurassic seas,
The missing links archaeopteryx, eohippus
Only proving the point that while the rest of us
From starfish to geese
Evolved from the same genetic stuff
We didn’t know enough/about the lowly virus’ makeup.
If anything, they seemed outliers that had slipped through the cracks.
Betwixt and between, anomalies that couldn’t be seen
Microscopic contradictions in terms
A very very strange kind of germ
Not quite alive, not quite dead
Inert with a nucleic heart, but no other street cred
In Python-speak, they were organisms that weren’t.
Neither Archaea nor Bacteria; neither pro nor eu-karyotic
Truth be told – biologically, they seemed downright idiotic.

But … (sotto voce) had we read them completely wrong?
Could it be that viruses were not in-betweeners at all
But pioneer species, the earth’s proto-critters?
Or anatomical relics like coccyx or appendix
Forgotten remnants of our own double helix?
Its unclear. But as more and more viruses leaped into our genes
We get to 2019 in the Age of the Anthropocene
That great tipping point where human destruction
Of nature, ozone layers, wildlife and wildforests
Created the sets for a new virus to arrive on the scene.
What form did it take? This viral Kalki
Did it inherit the wind, did it resemble a demon?
Turns out it had its own geneology: Seven
corona’d ancestors including common cold and the flu
Crazy aunt Nipah, mad uncle Ebola
Begat and begat, and like a game of tambola
Lo and behold, out tumbled the novel SARS-Cov2
Which straightened its crown and went out for a spin
Leaping from bat to – we think – pangolin
Remembering lessons from illustrious kin:
Balance deadliness with contagion; You want to keep those humans alive
Just isolate them and put them in quarantine
Hitchhike on their trade routes by plane, ships and rail
To make it truly pandemic, a global travail
They can’t see, hear or smell us so hit them through touch
The sense they use to show affection, caress, make love
They’re the only great apes with fully opposable thumbs
So target their tool-making laboring hands
And then, and then, go straight for the lungs, their central command.

Oh the lungs! Oh the lungs! those dense green arbors (and arbiters) of life
That hang in our ribcage like two giant beehives
Its funny how old bio classes leave us with vivid images
That stay in a brain even as it dimmages
Of all the visuals seared into my aging cortex
Thomas akka gave us this: a picture beyond text
The lungs, she said, when completely unraveled
Look less like bellows and more like a well-traveled
Tennis net. Spongy and grey, like wet cauliflower
Dipped in cement or caught in rain showers
And – she’d continue with dramatic pause
When you disentangle a single human’s lungs on a board
Trachea, bronchi, alveoli and their pulmonary gauze
The area covered would be a whole tennis court!
That’s 78 by 36 feet for anyone counting,
Just to keep one human respirating.

A tennis court of lung! Strewn like exploded balloon!
This is what happens when we try to lasso the moon.
In Covid-ean times, could there be a more vivid metaphor
Of how human hot air was brought to its knees by
A game! Serve and matchpoint, the winner takes all
Survival of the fittest in a high stakes play-ball?
Through volley after volley of the fevered nightmare
The virus gains inch by microbial inch
Until its global domination is a cinch
As it slits us wide open – the whole goddamn species – and lays our lungs bare
Its easy to see how Homo sapiens’ breath becomes air.

After the deluge – the cyclones, the locusts — the pandemic’s first round
Could such a pulmonary court offer a reckoning for trial?
The prosecution might bring as witness our first and last gasps
A baby’s first squawl, an old woman’s rasps
A meditator’s om, a migrant’s tired ‘saans’
Piped oxygen tanks, ventilators when we are under distress
Breath, inhaled air, is what makes the world’ s animals soar
And what’s at stake when we can’t breathe anymore
As the novel coronavirus devours our lungs
Its cold-hearted Descartian mantra: I exist, therefore I expunge.
While the criminal charge is murder most foul
The defendant covSARS2 stands in the docket and crows:
You forget, the death tolls could have been much much more!
Its time for you to shift your lens, from telephoto to wideangle
And then you’ll see that Darwin may have erred a bit
What matters is not survival of the fittest but the fit
Between our ACR receptors and the seat of your souls.
Evolution’s great leaps
Are not what happens to you at the top of the heap
But among the masses that throng the bottom floor
So if you ask us, in evolutionary terms
The crown for best fit with diverse habitats
Belongs not to you, but to us
And we have the coronas to prove that.

We don’t want to kill you, what good would that do us?
Just periodically infect you, like our Grandpa ‘Flu does
In fact our seasonal affair could lead to a beautiful marriage
We would bring our own babies (and of course horse and carriage)
You wouldn’t have to do a thing other
Than meet, touch and kiss one another
We’d do the rest and not even charge you the tariff.
The fact that Covid cracked open your society’s faultlines and dark holes
Your ugly class divides, your castes, your races
Your lack of compassion for the poor and the proles
Your neglect of the migrants who broke their soles
Your tendency to war, your constant skirmishes
Isn’t our fault, its yours!
When its crystal clear to us all that you can’t take care of your own.

If you truly love this blue twirling planet, our third rock from the sun
Do us all a favour and cut emissions by mega-tons
Your capitalistic greed, your oil rigs, your factory farms
Have kept you from seeing the incalculable harms
You are doing to forests, icecaps and seas
Its as elementary, Watson, as the birds and bees
Your tinpot dictators have made crises of calamities
And everywhere people have taken to the streets
Suggesting that Covid is not as bad as other pandemics
Plaguing your lands like race, class and religious fanatics.
Which makes us not the murderers you charge, but harbingers of change
So pay close attention: We’re not the bugs you undermine
We are just the proverbial canaries in coalmines
Warning of danger.

Our message is this: It’s the bloody apolocalypse!
So if you want a new normal, try understanding
That you have to completely transform your relationship with our earth
Stop, just cease and desist, from your constant plunder, loot, corporate branding
Your deforestation and fracking, your wet markets, your logging,
Give Nature time to recover, and come out to dance
Again. And then maybe, just maybe, you’ll have a slim second chance.

PS: A CODA (written in October 2020)

And now, five months since those lines were first written
Here at last is a belated postscript
We’ve all been stung, we’ve all been bitten
By the virus and morbid tales from the crypt
So in response to Pitta, my pesky persistent friend
Here’s a start to a beginning to this poem’s end.

That second chance above? Was never seized
Corona continued to play while nations sneezed.
Bear in mind those words were written way back in June
But everyone’s STILL singing the very same tune.
No one’s made the pudding, no one’s pulled out the plum.
No vaccine, no immunity; no data, no errata
Everyone’s at risk, and nobody’s won.
Fatigue and cabin fever are ruling the course
Fear and rising infections are making it worse
Meanwhile, many world ‘leaders’ have caught the bug
They’ll recover, while others cannot be so smug.

Police brutality still reigns, caste violence is real
Democracy hangs by a thread, a political deal
The economy has tanked, like some great viral prank.
Contagion, it seems, is deadly twice over
If you’re ill (or you’re not) but then pass on the fever.
And yet maskless Covidiots think they’re over the hump
Don’t they get that they’re acting like Donald J Trump?

As to saving the environment, that’s out of tune
With the new mountains of plastic, the viral PPE runes
Now taking their revenge and rising from seas
While the media confuses forests for trees.
From the green perspective, the ecological view
That’s enough to make us all feel deep blue
To be sure, eco-warriors continue to show us the harm
Done to our planet; they keep sounding alarms
David’s made a new film, Greta’s still on board
But hello! we’ve not met a single one of the Paris accords.
If their predictions are accurate, and surely they are
We humans are doomed and guess what?
SARS-CoV2 is nature’s new star.
First wave, second wave, it keeps coming back to our shores
In fact, its here to stay on earth; Naysayers, karo mat bore!
Much as Thomas akka hinted at so long ago
Evolutionary predators come in all sizes and shapes
For all of us who’ve descended from great apes
This tiniest of bugs could be our mightiest foe.

— Sita Reddy

Acknowledgements and shukriyas: Thanks to Kavitha Buggana, Rebecca Mathai, Usha Raman, B.V.Tejah, Sadhana Ramachander, Malini Waghray for a close reading in writing group. And also to Venkata Kumar Sattapalli, Lakshmi Menon, Pearl Mistry, Gayatri Rajan, Murali Mohan, Shyamala Mani, Uma Magal, Gowri Reddy, Suchitra Reddy, Archana Atri, Mitali Sen for enthusiastically supporting the ‘josh’ of the first telling way back in May/June, and the second one as things dragged on before I posted. This is an incomplete history, of course, as we are bang in the middle of this pandemic. But since the virus isn’t going anywhere and is the protaganist, perhaps this is a tale that needs telling while its history is still being lived, as it appears to us (hence, itihasa). I write this as we go through another peak in India, the worrying surge in the US, new lockdowns in the UK and Europe. Should this be a virus murdabad, not an ode? I think so. Nothing to celebrate with this one.

My Thanksgiving this year turned south and Sufi.  As always on Turkey Day, my thoughts flew to feasts (I confess an unhealthy obsession with pecan pie), family, and colonial encounters (good bad ugly). Which are hardly unique topics; such seasonal preoccupations are universal on T-day.  But because this year it coincided with my time in Hyderabad during Heritage Week – a series of organized walks to tombs, gardens, monuments in the city – I’ve also been thinking about accidents.

Accidents of history, accidental journeys, accidental heritage – what we leave and what we take away, what we call new and what we call old, what’s serendipitous and of our choosing.  And the fact that Thanksgiving owes itself to one of navigation history’s major accidents. Some four hundred years ago, a Genovese explorer in search of spice routes landed in the Bahamas thinking it was India – proceeding to massacre both the lands he mistakenly named, and its ‘Indian’ peoples! No Thanks there, Columbus. Continue reading →