Pages from A Tree in My Village

That a book itself can be a work of art is proved by Paritosh Sen?s A Tree in My Village, launched recently at Akar Prakar gallery. Published earlier as a portfolio, this is a slim coffee-tabler, a moss green affair presented in a box of the same colour. The title and name of the author emblazoned in gold are handwritten by the artist himself.

This is actually a spiral-bound volume of 17 loose sheets of parchment paper in a soothing shade of cream, each page designed to please the eye. It is written in its entirety by the artist himself, in elegant long hand. Alongside the calligraphy in brown are delightful sketches of natural life in the same colour. The word pictures and the drawings harmonise to create a design whose innovativeness is rarely seen in Indian publishing. The publisher is Popular Prakashan.

Even those who know of this octogenarian artist may not be aware of his talents as a writer. He has penned several volumes in Bengali that could best be described as belles-lettres. Included among these are his travelogues and Jindabahar, a collection of colourful sketches about the village in Bangladesh where Sen spent his childhood.

This book is a condensed version in English of one of the vignettes from the earlier Bengali book.

The protagonist of this story, if it can be called so, is a lofty Arjuna tree that loomed over the village green and whose branches spread out like protective arms, providing shelter to hundreds of winged creatures and animals, and creepies and crawlies as well, each with a place of its own in the rigid hierarchy of birds and beasts.

Keenly observant as he is, Sen captures in vivid detail the dramatic situations in their daily lives as feathers fly, wings flap and a chorus turns into a cacophony. When monkeys raid this haven, the feathered fiends would pounce on them like harpies and drive them away.

Reading the lines, one can see the beauty of nature unfold before the mind?s eye. The descriptions of nature in this English version are evocative enough but the poetic lines on the lush greenery of a Bengal village, with a name for each shade of green, have been left out. The episode in which he described how the waist of a dancer in Dhaka had snapped while contorting like the trunk of a coconut tree in a storm, too, is not included.

However, as in the original, the Arjuna tree emerges as a sentient being, remote, silent and distant. This is a volume that will be cherished by all.