Chennai’s Perch find Basheer’s world has more than one place to nest, says Bryan Richard.
There are, broadly speaking, two ways to know a tree. As it may well be with knowing a person. You can hear a story. Or you can live with one. Of course one may frequently find those two circles of knowing intersect to create a third space – a room where we live with stories. That is where theatre director Rajiv Krishnan got to know Vaikom Muhammed Basheer, the beloved Malayalam fiction writer and his mangosteen tree.
“Simple yet subtle, filled with amazing characters with wonderful idiosyncrasies, a witty comment always lurking somewhere on the humour and absurdity of life, strikingly progressive and relevant despite being set in the 1940s,” he said of that enchanting place.
Some trees are for stories. The Coast Redwoods and Giant Sequoia’s of California have raked sky and scudding cloud for two or three thousand years. At one-tenth of a kilometre tall, they tower over a man and his days like he might over an ant. Just a few decades ago, in Cambodia, we now learn the Khmer Rouge slung children against Chankiri or Killing tree trunks like unwieldy, screaming whips. The Big Baobab tree in Limpopo, South Africa is 49 feet in diameter at its waist with branches like roots. It could swallow a full-grown African tusker and not show a bulge. An Arabic legend claims the devil pulled baobabs out and planted them upside down.
Basheer’s home in Beypore, just outside Kozhikode, had a mangosteen tree in his garden. Here he spent the last 30-some years of his life. Writing. The tree and he shared an unspoken pact. All those years, it never reneged on its duty of casting shadows large and cool enough for him to prop a chair, curl over a pen, and let the stories fight their way into ink. His gramophone was never too far… or too quiet.
The idea that a certain tree might be meant to do more in the grand scheme of the cosmos than just be a tree, trails back to the most ancient myths. That its roots – dark and hidden-might probe the mysteries of the earth’s very heart, and its branches, rising up like a thousand hoary hands into the heavens may dabble with the secrets of the gods. Sacred wood that holds up the skies and keeps the ground from falling apart. The axis mundi. Trees of life, some called them... others, world trees. Similar, give or take a lot else.
Basheer didn’t think that of his mangosteen tree. He liked the shade. He relished the fruit. He loved the tree like a kind old friend. All his readers heard about the tree he loved. Krishnan married two of Basheer’s well-loved love stories (The Love Letter and The Card Sharper’s Daughter) into 2004’s Moonshine and Skytoffee. And last year, he and Perch, a Chennai-based collective of performance artists, celebrated Basheer’s birth centenary (he died in 1994, leaving behind a wife, two kids and the tree) with a festival on the man and his world. They called it Under the Mangosteen tree. Among other things, they decided to yoke seven of his short stories into a non-linear narrative for stage called Sangathi Arinhya! (Have you heard). “We needed a mix of stories to show his range and versatility. The connecting thread here is the character of Basheer himself who narrates the stories, witnesses them or is an active participant,” said Krishnan.
Who can quite understand the repose that a trusted tree might provide a formerly peripatetic man, so extraordinarily storied as to have been at various points a loom fitter, fortune teller, cook, newspaper seller, fruit seller, sports goods agent, accountant, watchman, shepherd, hotel manager, Gandhian jailbird, unlucky lover, wandering Sufi mystic, and twice-institutionalised madman?
“He wrote from lived experience. It gave him a deep insight into people, from their common foibles to their highest aspirations,” said Krishnan. “He was a mystic who was able to withdraw from the humdrum of everyday life, but at the same time enter into it with great innocence and the curiosity of a child and discover within it moments of great beauty and fantasy.”
On stage, Krishnan artfully fastens several umbrellas together to depict Basheer’s perennial woody plant friend. But happily scarred from living with his feet deeply entrenched in the everyday humour, pathos and longing of his fellows, and his stories straining to rise into the ether of some hard-fought earthy transcendence, Basheer may well be the truer tree. A tree of life even, give and take a lot, of course.
Source : Time Out Bengaluru ISSUE 1 Friday, July 23, 2010
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