Leafy talk

Brooming away

Previous post on the topic

Most Sunday’s I wake up to the sounds of cleaning, of brooms pushing leaves. A sound that makes my hair stand on end! Men, most of them in the second halves of their lives, brooming away with an energy that they seldom display otherwise. They consider leaves as trash akin to plastic disposables and are happy to burn both plastic and leaves together. For some of them, each day is a Sunday.

What does one do? Label this as brahminical and sound woke? Question that rare ‘house-work’ which men take up with rigour and earn the wrath of women? Wish that these men took up some other activity? Meditate? Assume that the activity is meditative for the ‘broomer’ – this is difficult given that, most if not all, ‘broomers’ carry that ‘venting out frustration’ and the ‘do not mess with me’ look!

My neighbourhood is not an exception. Once, at the sprawling campus of an NGO I had asked why were leaves being removed? Were they not a part of the ground, grass and trees that they lay amidst? The boss does not like the place untidy I was told. Leaves make a place untidy! At Allahabad too I saw people brooming away leaves of the Akshay Vat; a tree which they consider holy! The tree is worshipped but its leaves are trashed! We want the trees, but the leaves make our spaces, including those outdoors, unclean? Have ‘education’ and ‘development’ taken us so far away from ‘nature’ and ‘aesthetics’ that we are even discussing this?

Many moons ago a senior environment educator, pained at the leaves being taken from around the trees and burnt, had mentioned that nature was giving us gifts each day, in form of leaves, and we could not be less bothered. Today some of us have taken up mulching and composting but the numbers are small. And, leaves are about much more. To quote Toni Morrison, Birth, life, and death - each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.

Leaves provide a sensory experience like none other. Each is an endearing experience - touching them, listening to them crackle under our feet as they tickle our feet, watching the birds move about flipping and turning them over in their quest for food, observing them change colours and texture as they lie nonchalantly and of course getting awed with their carefreeness as they sway with the wind. Shira Tamir put this better, Anyone who thinks fallen leaves are dead has never watched them dancing on a windy day.

A conversation, long ago, with an old uncle, over tea, somewhere in the forested scapes of central India, stays with me. How splendidly and gloriously the trees grow in these forests, do you think anyone goes to manure these trees? It is the leaves he had said. The leaves.