The Spell of the Rain Tree

299.00

Author: Geetha Ravichandran
Published Date: 01/08/2023
ISBN: 978-93-92494-45-1
Pages: 72

Longlisted for The Wise Owl Literary Awards (Poetry) 2024

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Description

Geetha Ravichandran’s The Spell of the Rain Tree is a gentle meditation on the passage of time as it continually re-calibrates our lives, our memories, our relationship with our surroundings. These poems elude the calendar’s relentless momentum and resist the pervasive forms of social media through which we filter our experience today. Ravichandran evokes the flute-seller’s melody, never to be reduced to an Instagram post; she traverses the urban labyrinth of Mylapore, which will never submit to Google Maps. She retrieves intimate heirlooms, visceral talismans: the koels’ songs that have melted into her grandmother’s mango pickles, the courage to cross a precarious rope-bridge, the consolations of a home that is a magic lantern composed from changing light, shifting shadow. These poems remind us to cherish the exquisite, replenishing details that arm our imagination against the numbing blandishments of speed and scale. The Spell of the Rain Tree is a tender education in attentiveness; in looking for the magical, redeeming intervals in time’s flux; in chronicling the ephemeral as the best guarantee of eternity: “The wave has tucked itself/ into the folds of the ocean.” — Ranjit Hoskote

Author’s Note

A rainbow fell from the sky… and became a rain tree.

So, I imagine.

Just outside the house where we once lived, there was a huge tree with a spreading canopy. Most times it looked so ordinary, as if it were a mere prop in the background.

It was so ordinary that its leaves went to sleep in the evening. It was the thoongu moonji maram, the sleepy-headed tree, as we say tartly in Tamil. But come summer, the pink feathery flowers spiked into view. And very soon the monkey-pods appeared, rattling in the wind.

I have a special fondness for this tree. While coaxing and cajoling my sons, Vasu and Adi, to get ready for school, I would point out to them that even the tree had shaken off its sleep. Most days two pesky parakeets, squawking up a riot would come to my aid.

If only we would listen to the stories that trees could tell. Or stay quiet to be transfixed by their austere beauty, when they are bereft of foliage. I would like to think that when leaves fall, there is an underlying epiphany — flowing like music, that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

GEETHA RAVICHANDRAN is a bureaucrat originally from Chennai. While she has been writing consistently for several years, she has only published intermittently. The pandemic revived her interest in poetry. This is her second collection of poems. Her first, Arjavam, was also published by Red River.