Seeds of Surprise!

A Peepul tree leaf growing on a Gulmohar tree!

It was a leaf fluttering. A single torn leaf, at the edge of the twig. I saw it when I limped across my terrace trying to discipline my broken foot back to ‘normality’. Then it hit. This was pretty much a miracle! Any leaf was a miracle but this one challenged biology almost. It was a Peepul-tree leaf growing out a Gulmohar(?) tree. First, I thought I was mistaken, or may be it had been carried by the winds and got caught. But no, it was growing and there was no Peepul tree in the vicinity where I live in Pondicherry. Come to think of it I haven’t seen any Peepul tree in Pondicherry so far! I have this special connection with Peepul trees, they affect me like the moon does – my mind shifts to a blankness and I can’t think of anything else – like the effect some film stars have on some people! I don’t quite know why – I don’t care to know either…

So, I was foxed. It’s like a mango growing on an apple tree! Rarity is surprising, it captures your mind and brings your entire energies to that particular point or event. In this case, an unexpected leaf. It immediately brought back Thoreau’s Walden to my mind, even though I’d read it some twenty years ago. He mentions how an insect sudden flew out of the wood of a table in someone’s kitchen. The larvae must have been embedded in the wood and with the appropriate temperature, the moisture, the suitable environment, it grew and found its wings. Imagine a table producing a winged insect! So, this leaf, this single leaf, that I now noticed after most of the leaves of the gulmohar tree had shed, leaving a bare grey-ness, was a jolter. Some crow or squirrel must have carried a seed… (or whatever!) and it becomes entwined with another tree and gave rises to another species on its body. Wow! I was lucky to notice it because it was at that terrace level height, you couldn’t have seen it from the ground… yes, wow again!

This business of seed-potential is fascinating. If it can happen with leaves and insects… can it happen with us humans? Are there seeds in us? The talent-seeds embedded in the genetic make-up we’ve inherited from our ancestors. The seeds of divinity that are often spoken of by men and women who have perceived a different reality? Of madness? Of terror? What seeds lie in us, unknown to us? Are there wings in us making us wish of the sky? If there is thirst, there must be water somewhere…

 I walk on, more conscious of possibilities around us… engulfed by a deep reverence and awe when I consider of what could be there in the air and in ourselves. There are surprises in and around us…

-Harvinder