THIRUVANANTHAPURAM:Jalaja spotted it first, on the day of the housewarming ceremony – a tiny banyan sapling peeping out of a crack in the window’s sunshade. Shaju was incensed at this intruder when she pointed it to him. He would have uprooted it right then had it not been for Jalaja’s pleading in its defence. Certain that she was being unduly kind to the cheeky sapling, he let her re-plant it in an empty paint bucket. Their daughter Mamatha had just been born; sensing that mothers anew are full of overflowing tenderness towards all life forms, Shaju gave in to Jalaja’s insistence on sheltering the little banyan.Infectious as love is, the banyan became family in no time. But, where could it run its great roots, spread its great arms and grow into the sprawling enormity every Banyan is invested with? There was just the four cents of land on which the house stood. Convinced that it had come to them by choice, the couple decided the tree will be happy to share the home with the family of three, as a Bonsai living in a cement trough on the roof. “I learned how to grow Bonsai from books and by talking to experienced growers, all for this banyan friend of ours”, Shaju says, touching its leaves affectionately. Recollecting how the diffidence in him about sheltering it had melted away 18 years ago, Shaju, senior technician in ISRO, walks around the enviable Bonsai garden that now adorns the roof of this house at Maruthoor Kadavu. Jalaja Kumari, senior accountant in AG’s Office, gives him company, recounting tales about each member of the miniature orchard of medicinal trees. Over the years, the population has kept growing and the couple now has more than 300 Bonsai trees to take care of. “The usual varieties found in Bonsai gardens are those that grow fast and can serve ornamental purpose,” says Shaju. “On the other hand, our garden has rare trees, most of them medicinal.” Jalaja intervenes with an anecdote - “Once, when she had just started attending school, Mamatha shocked us by asking us to show her the ‘tree that bears rice’. Coming from an agrarian family background, I felt saddened by the little exposure to nature that children get these days. That was an impetus for us to decide on growing species that are native and yet rarely spotted in our surroundings now.”‘Kadambu’, ‘Kanjiram’, ‘Shimshipa (Asoka)’, Red Sandalwood and Rosewood are among the trees in the collection. “Rosewood grows painfully slow and requires a lot of labour to be sized down to a Bonsai. But I was very keen on growing one,’ Shaju says standing near the 12-year-old tree that has a mighty trunk, though scaled down to fit the cement pot. The four species of trees from which the Ayurvedic concoction of ‘Nalparam’ is made – ‘Athi’, ‘Ithi’, ‘Aal’, ‘Arasu’ – were initially kept side by side, remembers Jalaja. “But the ‘Athi’ tree kept wilting away while the others were growing up well. “And then I met an old man during one of my habitual journeys,” Shaju fills in. “He said that if the four trees are grown near to each other, ‘Athi’ would not withstand the energy emanated from their combined vitality. He was right, for when we shifted the battered tree to another spot on the roof, it sprouted leaves and started growing up healthy,” he smiles. ‘Kayam’, Karpooram’, ‘Kunthirikkam’, ‘Vatham Parathi’ (medicine for arthritis), ‘Vembadappatta’ (a creeper that can wear off iron with its stranglehold), ‘Rama nama pacha’ (a shrub that keeps folding its leaves towards each other as if in an endless prayer) and a plethora of other shrubs dot the tree garden. Shaju has also found a way to get round the cost of the pots traditionally used for growing Bonsai. “All you have to do is to make a mould by pouring cement mixture over coconut shells. They will not cost you more than Rs. 30 per piece while the Chinese ones come at a price tag of Rs. 3,000 and above.”When Shaju and Jalaja speak of trees and plants, one might mistake them as references to people. Instead of gender neutral pronouns, they constantly refer to ‘him’ or ‘her’, or ‘this person here’. The ‘Kani konna’ (golden showers), that they planted 12 years ago could not help heeding to the loving prodding of the couple for a bunch of the yellow flowers. “Year before last, he kept saying the Konna would bear flowers, and I think she could not turn a deaf year to him anymore,” Jalaja says with a smile. When a friend happened to see the secret garden on top of their roof, lit up by the brilliant yellow on potted Konna trees, a rush of cameras followed. A front page photograph in one of the leading Malayalam dailies was accompanied by an invitation to the Palace. Shaju is rearing a Kani konna which he intends to gift to the magnanimous head of the royal family, Uthradom Thirunal Marthanda Varma, whose photograph of a thick cloud of golden showers framed by the blue sky adorns Shaju’s drawing room.
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