Salman Rashid’s archetypal Amaltas

I don’t know which trees Joyce Kilmer had in mind when he published his collection Trees and other Poems in 1914. But since he was an American (journalist and poet), I suspect he would have been taking of elms, oaks and yews that he was acquainted with. The first stanza of his ode Trees is remarkable: I think that I shall never see/ A poem lovely as a tree.

The poem, all twelve lines of it, is a beautiful, heart-warming appreciation of trees that one can scarcely go any better. But have you ever stopped to put your face against the smooth bark of the peepul or the rough one of a tahli or neem and imagined you can hear the sap coursing through its veins? The sap that carries the songs of several decades and, in the case of some fine old banyans, even of centuries. I have, and I have heard songs and tales and have seen events unfolding as the tree saw them. But then I suppose I am a sentimental old dreamer.

We don’t do these things. Because now as Lahore expands unplanned and uncontrolled the ancient trees are being destroyed to be replaced only by shrubbery and fast growing species like rubber plant, asoka and, lately, conocarpus. As we are in too unholy a haste to get nowhere, similarly we are in greater haste to see these grow, trees that do not belong on this good land.

My gripe apart, this is the season to sing the amaltas (Cassia fistula), the tree of the smooth pale-coloured bark that in full summer has a dense leafy crown much favoured by collared doves, bulbuls, little brown doves of the somnolent coos and, if it is a big tree, by the kuk-kuk-kuk bird – the beautiful green, blue and red coppersmith or chukki rah of Punjabi.

Unlike the tahli, neem or the peepul that shed in midwinter and come back into leaf by April, the amaltas sheds in early May. Then for about three weeks it stands bare, its skeletal branches, smooth and almost white, pointing fingers at the sky which in this season is always a quarter tone of blue. I have so many times stood under a bare amaltas this time of year and imagined it is shaming the sky for losing its azure to the dust and filth we humans have pumped into the sky.

Sometime in mid-May, tiny green buds break out on pendent new shoots. But instead of unfurling into leaves, these buds grow fatter by the day until they burst into yellow blossoms. Every day they grow in numbers until the tree, still without its green drape, becomes a very cascade of fragrant gold. It is a flower fall (if we can have waterfalls why not a flower fall) of gold, gold, gold.

And the fragrance, oh, the fragrance! I don’t think even Kilmer could have described it. It is as mellow and subdued as can be. Not the overpowering exuberance of Raat ki Rani but no less straight out of some similar mythical paradise. Whereas the Raat ki Rani drowns you so that you do not wish to rise again, the fragrance of the amaltas is only just discernible as it rides the breeze in undulating waves; it uplifts. It is a lilt in the air, a melody and a dance that rolls like the waltz – always smooth, always without a twitch, as if it has oiled the very breeze that carries it.

This is the time when the tree also breaks out its new foliage. Not its parrot green of high summer, but a pale brick-red turning to olive, just so to set the gold to blazing advantage. It is the shade of the crown on the tailor bird’s head. Is it the colour then that invites the tailor bird to nest in this heavenly tree when its leaves mature in June?

Every morning shortly after sunrise, I stand under the amaltas in my yard and look up through its cascade of gold and brick-red amid the white branches to a sky that is not yet burned to a half-tone by the blistering sun. I stand there for minutes on end until the doves and the bulbuls become nervous with my stare which they assume is aimed at them.

With the sun low in the east, the gold of the blossoms catches the slanting rays to shimmer and glint as if it were liquid against the solid blue of the sky. I don’t think there is a prettier sight in Lahore in May through mid-June. And then then there are those ripples of fragrance to uplift. Every morning, I have but one regret: why must the amaltas only favour us for, at most, six weeks a year? Why cannot we have it in blossom the year round?

But that is the way of Nature. So before it is too late, shake a leg, go out and make friends with an amaltas. You will not regret it [Images by Rahat Dar of The News].