Green price for development

During the early years at our ancestral home in Fraser Town, Bengaluru, three coconut palms graced the garden. They swayed majestically on a windy day. My father planted the first palm sapling where an aged guava tree once stood — it was gobbled up by termites and withered away.

I recall somebody telling my father it is inauspicious to plant a lone palm. Although he dismissed it as a myth, the count of coconut saplings increased to three. We nourished them with salt and water and watched them tower over the other green sentinels. The handsome young trees fitted nicely into the environment as the years rolled on. Finally, our efforts paid off as coconuts. Squirrels also nibbled on the tiny nuts and threw them down.

A rustic coconut picker would call on us when the nuts were ready for harvesting — sadly, the age-old vocation of tree climbing is on the verge of extinction. Wearing a coir foot strap, he would clamber up the trunk, pick the nuts and drop them to the ground. We would gather them and house them in a room. Finally, one sibling would dehusk the coconuts the traditional way, using a crowbar planted on the ground. We discovered that scaling the palms required great skill.

We would share the bounty from the garden with neighbours, friends and relatives. They would reciprocate with freebies from their orchards. Dad often ferried coconuts on his bicycle to the homes of near and dear ones. With the neighbourhood blessed with umpteen fruit trees, we seldom bought guavas, mangoes, pomegranates, citrus and jamuns from fruit vendors. Gardening was a favourite pastime in the old days, offering a window to connect with nature.

No effort was spared to safeguard the house and its residents from falling coconuts and dried fronds. We lived in a monkey-top dwelling with a sloping Mangalore-tiled roof, and the area around the tree trunks was secured with sturdy wire nets. As a result, no one ever came to grief.

We enjoyed munching on the sweet kernels or lapping up the chutneys made from them by my mother. But the mouth-watering moments arrived when she made delicious coconut barfis. The coloured sweets, oozing nectar, were a perennial favourite and topped our list of favourite snacks. The naturally dried kernels (copra) were carted to the nearby mill to extract oil.

Our hearts sank when the trees and other green friends in the compound, who witnessed many family milestones, were felled to make way for an apartment complex after my parents’ demise. The last green expanse on the stretch turned into a concrete jungle. But, as often happens, development comes at a price!