I didn’t die, thankfully, because it was not poisonous. I promise, I didn’t know then that an ounce of poison would be enough to kill a person. I plucked the fruit from the (False) Ashoka tree and ate it so cautiously, little by little and I survived. Now I can say that this fruit is edible but not tasty. It had all happened in my school days. We had a very old park behind our school and that was our lunchtime play area. It got place for all the games and we mostly played the run and catch (Tag) game. We took rest on the branches of the Ashoka trees when the catcher is not good at climbing the trees. That was actually unfair but we had no rules to stop it. These old trees got too much of fruits - in bunches like the grape cluster, and we couldn’t resist plucking them and throwing, after all, what else you would do as a kid?
I perfectly remember the old mango tree in one of our schoolmates home. It was great pleasure spending time under that tree. We used play Marble and Top games. Though the bough was too big, the branches, plenty of them, were perfect for climbing, crawling. We had lots of our chats sitting on those branches. And that swing made by us - all we needed was the broken piece of timber used in the building construction site and the rope used to for fetching water in the well. By the way, mango tree branches are very weak when you consider the size of them. They break very easily. But we never broke our hands and legs And there were two annoying things - 1) the diseased looking ants 2) mosquitos for all seasons.
It is forever arguable whether guava tastes better when it is eaten just after the fruit set stage or at the breaking stage or fully ripen. We, the kids, mostly chose the early stage. Because when we had only few trees at home, we didn’t prefer to wait till the “harvesting” time. I believe guava is one of squirrels' favourite fruits and the squirrels are good at marking the one that has started ripening. Guava branches are very strong. Even a stick like thin branch can support our weight. We used to make slingshots using guava branches as they are stronger and one could easily find the small Y shape branches.
I was listening to Ruskin Bond after reading his short story The Cherry Tree. He was asked about what should be done to improve the knowledge about the trees among the school children. That was a disquieting question and it jog my memory back to my school days. My dad used to tell me about trees near our home and school. I knew most of the trees and their names. I don’t think now I can recall many of them. It is been long since I lost the habit of knowing the names of the trees that I see everyday. Still worse, I don’t even see them close enough. There are hundreds of trees on my way to the office. All I know is there are trees! I was drinking coffee with few of my teammates under the tree in the office and I asked, “what is the name of the tree?”. Oh, it is okay, neither they nor I need to know it.
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