Cities and Canopies Read online

  Given its many uses, it is no surprise that the jamun is so widespread across India. It is an ideal tree to plant in commons and public land, as it grows easily, thrives even in dry soil and requires little watering after the initial months. It is incredibly long-living with one tree capable of providing fruits to multiple generations. The wood is somewhat hard and difficult to carve, but is sought-after in villages to make agricultural implements, carts and rudimentary furniture. It is also used in building wells as the wood is water-resistant. In the wild, the tree can grow up to 90 feet in height. Though shorter in cities, it can still grow to massive heights. The shelter of the jamun tree is particularly coveted in the summer. The evergreen tree, covered in leaves all through the year, usually has a large canopy that acts like a massive umbrella.

  It is common to find jamuns on the road and in roadside fields and maidans under which a cluster of street vendors, picnickers and children congregate in the summer months. Many sacred locations across India are also shaded by a heritage jamun tree, such as the southern temple city of Srirangam, contributing to the characteristic atmosphere of calm and peace. The gorgeous, rich purple colour of the fruit is equated to the skin colour of Rama and Krishna, which is why it is common to find a jamun tree in temples dedicated to them.

  Bees feast on the nectar produced by the greenish-white, club-shaped, feathery blossoms of the tree. Jamun honey, which these bees produce, has a bitter taste and a characteristic aroma that reminds you of the berries. This honey is much sought-after by diabetics and those with liver disorders. The fruits, when they emerge, are green and oval-shaped. Once they ripen, they turn a beautiful glossy pinkish-purple. The fruit is high in vitamin C, iron and a number of other minerals. Unlike most other fruits, it is also low in sugar and hence is recommended for older people and diabetics. The fruit holds a special place in the memory of all those who have grown up in its surroundings. Unlike Babur, the ripe fruit is very popular with most Indians. They are in fact harvested by street vendors and sold on the roadside with black salt, staining faces, hands and lips with the characteristic purple.

  Birds, fruit bats, monkeys and jackals gorge on the fruit, leaving the pavements along many a concrete road purple. Children vie for the ripened fruits, and it is common to see them nimbly shimmy up the tree, cloth bag in hand, to pluck the ripe fruits. Often you may also spot four people, each holding the corner of a large bedsheet, standing eagerly under the branches, while a fifth, perched on the jamun tree above, shakes its branches so that the ripe fruit falls on to the sheet. The fruits bruise easily, so they need to be collected with care. Also, it is difficult to ripen the fruits once they are off the tree. They are mostly plucked when ripe, which also means they need to be consumed relatively fast. Fortunately, all fruits on the tree do not ripen at the same time and a single tree can reliably provide ripe fruits at regular intervals for several weeks during the summer.

  From Bengaluru to New Delhi, street vendors sell jamun fruits in purple heaps and happy customers take them home to feast on. As children, it was a favourite pastime of ours to eat jamuns and then stick out our purple-stained tongues and leer at each other, exposing our purple lips and bared teeth. The fruit, however, is the despair of parents who have to deal with the unwelcome task of removing the indelible stains from clothes. In New Delhi, the jamun trees that line both sides of Rajpath all the way to India Gate are believed to supply 500 tonnes of fruit each year. In a practice begun in the times of the British Raj, the fruit is ‘owned’ by the city administration, which sells licences to families of itinerant fruit pickers who come into the city during summer from the villages around. They sleep under the trees at night and sit under them during the day, guarding the fruit from bats, parakeets, monkeys and other competitors.

  Interestingly, different sizes of jamun fruit can be seen on sale. There are a number of local varieties of trees across the country, growing wild in jungles and planted in farms and on common land. The smaller fruits must be eaten with salt, which helps counter the astringent aftertaste and prevents your throat from seizing up. Larger-sized glossy fruits come from a different variety of trees. These are often especially grown in farms and brought to wholesale markets. From there they are taken to street corners for sale to picky urban folk obsessed with size and shape. These modified varieties are usually sweeter and, mixed with sugar, can be used to make juices, smoothies and sorbets. The Goans even make a delicious wine with it, but local wisdom has it that the large-sized fruits are not as good for health as the native smaller berries. They lack the astringent taste because they have less tannins, but this also reduces their medicinal properties.

  The jamun is truly a miracle tree. It may not be at the centre of the world in modern cosmology, but it certainly holds importance in India’s cities and in our taste buds.

  Jamun (Syzygium cumini)

  Description: Tall tree with a dense shady canopy. Light grey, rough bark, especially the lower part of the trunk.

  Flowers: Small, greenish-white flowers that grow in clusters and have a faint fragrance.

  Fruits: Oblong-shaped with a single seed. Green when unripe and changes hue as it ripens from pink to purplish-black. Edible fleshy pulp with a tart taste.

  Leaves: Smooth, leathery and shining with pointed tips. When crushed, the leaves give out an aroma.

  Seasonality: Evergreen, but sheds some leaves in dry climate—leaves normally fall between January and March. Flowers usually between March and May, and fruits ripen from June to August.

  Family: Myrtaceae. Leaves and stems of this family have aromatic oil glands.

  Origin and distribution: Native to India. Found across the Indian subcontinent and especially abundant in south India, but not so much in the arid regions.

  Jamun Kala-Khatta

  This popular summer drink is a refreshing antidote for heat strokes. Very easy to make, it is also a great way to benefit from the medicinal properties of jamun, especially for those who find the fruit difficult to consume because of its astringent aftertaste. Though you can opt for the kala-khatta available on the street, you can easily make it at home too. It can be had as a gola with shaved ice, as a post-fasting nutritious iftar sherbet during Ramadan, or frozen into cubes and then whipped into a sorbet, slushy or frosty. It is definitely tastier and far more nutritious than the processed stuff you get in high-end stores. You can also experiment with other recipes to make jamun vinegar, jam and wine too.

  Recipe:

  1 cup jamun (cut and deseeded)

  1 cup water, or soda if you prefer

  2 tablespoons sugar (or more, to taste)

  1 pinch salt

  ¼–½ teaspoon black salt

  ½ teaspoon roasted cumin powder

  Freshly squeezed lime or orange juice (optional, to cut the astringency)

  Blend and strain using a coarse tea strainer. Yes, it’s that simple. Now the base is ready and can be turned into a number of different cooling, slushy drinks and desserts.

  To make a refreshing sherbet, add ice and pour into a tall glass. You can garnish it with mint leaves. (If you want to get fancy, dip the rim of the glass in a mix of rock salt and black salt before you fill it and serve.) To make a gola, fill a shot glass with shaved ice. Pack it around an ice cream stick (or just use a spoon if you are feeling lazy), carefully pour the juice around the edges of the glass and let it soak into the ice.

  For a sorbet, heat the juice for a few minutes (this is optional as this step helps reduce the astringent taste) and then cool or take the raw juice and freeze for an hour. After this, blend in a mixer or food processor. Freeze again and repeat blending after an hour. Pour into a bowl or a wide-mouthed glass and garnish with fresh mint. For a slush, pour the juice mix (cooked and cooled if you prefer) into an ice-cube tray. Take out the jamun ice cubes and process in a mixer or food processor. If you prefer a frosty, blend the jamun ice cubes with some vanilla ice cream. Use your imagination to create other alternatives.

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  CREATURES

  GREAT AND SMALL

  If we look out of the window of an aeroplane as it descends into a city, we see the blurry landscape transform into more comprehensible features. Vehicles and people, which appear to be the size of tiny ants scuttling about, progressively begin to take recognizable shape. The same is the case with biodiversity in cities. A perfunctory glance at trees while we travel in a bus or a car, on cycle or on foot, does not reveal the host of activities hidden in the branches, leaves and canopies. But fauna of different kinds go on with their lives, dodging the perils of city life just as we humans dodge traffic. What biodiversity do the trees in our city harbour and where can we find them?

  For many nature enthusiasts, the first introduction to nature is through birdwatching, often beginning in the cities in which they live. British naturalists E.H. Aitken (or Eha), David Douglas Cunningham and Douglas Dewar have written about birds in Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai. The field guides to birds of India written by Salim Ali, the famous Indian naturalist and ornithologist, are indispensable companions for many birdwatchers. Another famous naturalist, photographer and a prolific writer, M. Krishnan, wrote evocative descriptions of his encounters with biodiversity. Interspersed with his characteristic wit, these remain as absorbing as when they were first published. Krishnan held that ‘it is a mistake to think that cities hold few birds’, and describes his encounters with different birds in Madras, as the city he lived in for much of his life was then known. Krishnan wrote with equal flair about uncommon birds such as the visiting golden-back woodpeckers pecking at the coconut trunks around his house and the common crow that preferred more open parts of the city with less tree growth.

  Krishnan’s writings provide interesting insights into bird behaviour such as feeding, mating and nesting habits. The coppersmith, he says, ‘like all barbets, is strictly arboreal’, and is ‘fond of the shady sanctuary of fig trees’. It is ‘justly called the voice of summer’ because it calls in the ‘blistering heat of Madras April afternoon’. In just a few words, he tells us so much about the bird. While Krishnan bemoaned the lack of trees in cities, he also hoped that municipalities would plant trees with good foliage in parks and along avenues, so that the trees could attract ‘charming and inoffensive’ birds such as orioles and flycatchers.

  Madras has now become Chennai and many of the tree-lined neighbourhoods that Krishnan wrote about have been transformed by the city’s growth. But birdwatching continues to be a popular activity in Chennai and other cities even today. Bird counts held at regular intervals provide an opportunity for enthusiasts to document birds that can still be found in cities. The India Bird Races, started in 2005 in Mumbai, have become immensely popular and are now held across thirteen cities. A typical bird race begins at dawn and ends at dusk. Teams head out in different directions, aiming to record the maximum number of bird species in and around the city. While making a checklist, they also get to network, observe bird behaviour and exchange information about birds.

  But we don’t really need a race to appreciate our winged friends. We can always indulge in birdwatching by taking a stroll down the closest avenue, around a lake, in a park or even in our own backyards. We can immerse ourselves in trying to spot the now elusive coppersmiths and shikras, or observing the shenanigans of common birds such as crows, black kites and mynas.

  Eha makes the crow appear fascinating. Rather ungraciously, he says of the crow that it is a ‘fungus of city life, a corollary to man and sin’, without a ‘shred of grace’. According to Eha, the crow ‘affects to be respectable and entirely ignores public opinion, dresses like a gentleman, carries itself jauntily, and examines everything with one eye’. Along with pigeons, crows are the most common of birds in cities. Observing them can be an immense source of entertainment. Crows can be found hopping sideways on the branches of a rain tree or trying to get a firm grip on the swaying fronds of a coconut tree. We may not pay much attention to this very common bird, but urban crows display a range of interesting behaviours while perched on branches such as rousing, feaking and preening. Rousing is when a bird shakes and fluffs its feathers out. This is often done during or after the rains so that the feathers trap air and keep the bird warm, though it also leaves the bird looking rather ridiculous. Feaking is when a crow rubs its beak against the branch—somewhat akin to us brushing our teeth. Preening involves cleaning and adjusting of feathers.

  Trees also provide nesting sites for crows, and they often build nests in the unlikeliest of places—we have seen a crow’s nest on a jamun tree at a crowded railway platform. Crows are attracted by garbage and can become very aggressive, chasing and mobbing other birds, even much larger birds of prey.

  Alongside the raucous call of the crows, the common mynas add their chatter at shared roosting sites in tree foliage as dusk falls. The racket made by these birds settling down for the night can even be heard over the honking of cars. Of mynas, Ranjit Lal says, ‘City life suits Indian mynas just fine and they will eat almost anything they can find. But they are also very important pollinators (yes, VIPs) of plants like fig, mulberry and sandal, and are responsible for scattering seeds far and wide.’ The fig trees we see growing out of walls, sidewalks and buildings owe their existence to these mynas and other birds.

  Another bird that is commonly seen in cities is the black kite. Like the crow, it is a scavenger of the city’s garbage dumps. Black kites prefer to perch on the tallest trees they can find, such as silver oak or eucalyptus, keeping a sharp lookout. Any sign of prey and the kite can be seen launching itself—a plunging dive with its wings wide open, followed by an ascent with the measured beating of its wings. The black kite was once known as the pariah kite. The term ‘pariah’ was used denigratingly, to denote a person from the lower caste treated as a social outcaste. Our nasty social prejudices seem to have extended to the naming of biological species too. While the black kite was made the pariah, the Brahminy kite with its white streaked forehead got its name from the word ‘brahmin’, alluding to a higher caste status. In Indian mythology, the Brahminy kite is associated with Garuda, the vahana (vehicle) of Vishnu. Many traditional communities, even in the heart of a city like Bengaluru, feed the kites with mutton or fish on Saturdays, an act they believe will confer merit on them. Black kite and Brahminy kite nests can be found on trees near waterbodies such as lakes.

  There are several other species of birds that bustle about in city trees. We can witness rose-ringed parakeets engaged in courtship displays on African tulips, glimpse red-vented bulbuls flitting in the Indian mast tree, or hear the shrill call of the cuckoo from a neem tree along the road. A mango pecked and dropped by a parakeet is believed to be the tastiest and sought-after by children who swear by the bird’s capability to identify the best fruit.

  The silk cotton in folklore is termed as a ‘parrot’s despair’. Folk tales mention parrots eagerly pecking at the tasty looking seed pods and being disappointed to find they contain mostly inedible cotton. But semal flowers provide a feast for birds, who flock in large numbers to the fruiting trees. In larger city parks, spotted and white mottled owls make their home in the hollow of trees, screeching at dusk and glaring indignantly if walkers get too close. With the garbage in cities inviting more rodents, kite and owl populations have also begun to hang about these areas, keeping the rodents in check. Sadly, many of the tall trees in which owls and other birds roost are being destroyed.

  But sometimes we are lucky to see rare birds. Recently, a pair of Indian grey hornbills were seen on a peepul tree next to a busy road in Bengaluru, delighting nature lovers in the city. Once commonly found in many Indian cities, the grey hornbills have reduced in numbers as the green spaces in cities have shrunk. Their return to Bengaluru is believed to be because of protected sacred groves and restored lakes. For many years, the Indian Institute of Science campus in Bengaluru was host to a rare breeding pair of Egyptian vultures. There is now a breeding pair in the heart of the city’s commercial and shopping
district, which is fed chicken by staff from a local restaurant. In Patiala too, the campus of the Punjabi University now boasts of a breeding pair.

  Many other birds come to India from different parts of the world. Wintering waterfowl congregate in waterbodies in cities where they nest in scattered trees. In Indian folklore, the pied cuckoo is said to be the harbinger of the monsoon in India. A recent analysis of data from MigrantWatch and eBird, popular citizen science databases used by birdwatchers in India and across the world, shows that the pied cuckoo does seem to arrive in different parts of India before the monsoon. In northern Indian cities sweltering in the summer heat, birdwatchers wait eagerly for the arrival of this bird from Africa. While there is a resident population in south India, in other parts of the country the pied cuckoo is a much-awaited migrant whose metallic calls from treetops are soon followed by rain that progresses along with the bird’s flight northwards over the subcontinent.

  Wetland birds can also be found in patches in Indian cities. A nature park just outside Kolkata has a large colony of Asian openbills, one of the common but smallest storks found in Asia. These birds have clear preferences when it comes to nesting, favouring trees such as peepul, shisham, copper pod, gulmohar and shirish. Other trees such as neem, cluster fig, tamarind, silk cotton, jamun and Indian beech do not seem to be as preferred. In the coastal town of Kannur in Kerala, heronries can be found on trees situated along roads and next to trees in residential and non-residential areas. Heronry birds such as egrets and herons appear like powder puffs on trees from a distance. They prefer to nest on large canopies of trees such as copper pod, mango, jackfruit and banyan. They also seek out the rain tree whose large branches enable them to build safe nests, and to source dry twigs from the tree for their nests. However, with cities expanding, there are concerns about the continued presence of both the trees and the heronries. The wetlands that the birds accessed are being lost to real estate. The disturbance from construction activity has also resulted in many birds abandoning the nesting sites that they frequented in the past. Urban birds have to be tough and adaptable to find places to perch, nest and roost. Some are able to adapt and find new spaces, but for several others, the loss of trees could mean their very survival being imperilled.