'See the tree, how big it's grown...'

This young tree, with cars supplicating in front of it at most times, is growing by a natural mound in the park just outside my mother’s flat. It was planted sometime last year, and for several months the park maali had it covered with a cylindrical wire mesh to keep animals from destroying the leaves while they were still within reach. During that time the plant was quite inconspicuous, it was easy to pass it without really registering its presence – which is what Foxie and I routinely did on our daily walks. So we were both taken aback when we saw it the first day after the mesh was removed and the tree stood revealed as a strapping, six-foot-tall thing with a personality of its own, a distinct new presence in the terrain we knew so well.

In her last two years, after her chronic medical problems began, Fox was ravenous all day long and the only thing she was interested in doing when we went down was keeping her nose to the ground, searching greedily for scraps of bread or roti or other food. (Our walks had become a little stressful by this point: I had to monitor her every move closely, pull her away when she headed for things she wasn’t supposed to gulp down, and I badly missed the old days when we spent all our downstairs time playing ball.) But this was one of those very rare times where she showed real interest – for more than a few seconds – in something that wasn’t self-evidently connected to food. She circled the tree lightly, first in one direction and then, without breaking step, in the other. She got up on her weak hind legs for a closer look. She opened and closed her mouth repeatedly in that goldfish-like way that always seemed to us like she was muttering to herself. And she took the end of her leash in her mouth like she often did when she was nervous or shy around something or someone new. Finally, after a few soft growls she decided the tree could be permitted to stay, and shifted her attention elsewhere.

Just two or three weeks after this, she was gone herself.

At the Sai Ashram, where she is buried, we have planted a peepal sapling just behind the gravestone: it seemed to be doing well when I last visited a few days ago, though it isn’t tall enough yet for the protective mesh to be removed. I only see that plant every couple of weeks or so, but I see the one outside my mother’s house every day. It’s strange to think that in another year or two it will be a full-grown tree with a thick trunk and a life of several decades ahead of it. And it may one day be comforting - in a vague, pointlessly sentimental sort of way - to know that its long life intersected briefly with my Foxishka’s very short one.

P.S. here are two pictures from the pre-tree days. The little bench you can see in these photos – at the top of the 1st one and near the centre of the 2nd one – is where the tree now grows.