From My Window

Priyanka Sacheti

From my first floor apartment window, this is what I see: living quarters and trees. The living quarters are part of an army compound adjoining our apartment building: six upright rectangles of windows in a fawn-hued stone building. The trees also happen to be living quarters: the raintree, tamarind, and peepul being home to many creatures. 

During sunny mornings, the raintree canopy, silhouetted like a green lace against the sky, provides home to lost paper kites, eagles, crows, and other birds whose names I do not know. Squirrels leapfrog from one branch to another like veteran trapeze artists. An owl couple had taken residence in the tamarind tree for years; after starting a family, they now reside in a hollow in a stump of the raintree. Sometimes, though, the parents leave their offspring in the hollow to resume their positions on the tamarind tree, returning to where it all began. And as for the peepul, I see a flock of bright green parakeets fly around and around it in concentric circles, as if they were orbiting planets, before noisily settling down en masse on its summit. From the window, they appear like animated leaves, shimmering in the sunlight.

For much of the pandemic, these trees have been my companions. As someone who loves photographing and writing about trees, I have been immeasurably glad for their company as they alleviated my isolation from the world beyond. When ambulance sirens or the forced and therefore, alien silence of a city in lockdown pierced the air, the softly rustling leaves would sound like gently falling water, tricking me into thinking it was raining. This rustling became a protective wall, insulating me from the fears and sadness afflicting the world. During the months of fall, the raintree leaves literally did rain down, dancing blurs of gold-green: a welcome, enchanting sight in days bereft of magic. When the sun begins to bid adieu for the day, it  marshals its last rays to make the leaves glow – a hope-affirming green. That green has often been my energy-reservoir during the most difficult of pandemic days when it seemed that one could no longer endure the new normal that these extraordinary circumstances had imposed upon us.

I imagine gazing out at a barren landscape or one solely populated by many-eyed apartment buildings and feel more relieved than ever for the trees’ presence. 

I wonder if the trees give a similar recompense to those inhabiting the army living quarters. I only see their illuminated rooms, early in the morning or late at night. I know the colours of their walls – lavender and mint – but  I do not know of those who gaze at them day after day. I hear music drifting out to me from those rooms though, like a bottled message floating on ocean waves: the radio playing 90s Bollywood songs or someone blowing a conch shell in the mornings while performing their puja.  I occasionally see the women emerging from the quarters to dump the garbage: it’s always the women performing this task, walking across the overgrown monsoon-fed grass in their faded nighties with a dupatta draped across their chest. I see children playing with a pink ball or cycling in groups. Last year, there was a vegetable garden in front of the quarters but after fifteen months of the pandemic, the garden no longer appears to exist. The gardeners are tired and so perhaps is the soil.

It is the peepul tree that particularly dominates my window view and imagination, though. Standing near the army living quarters, it’s a massive, venerable presence which appears to have lived there for decades, long before the army compound sprung up around it. I’ve gazed at the tree trunk for so long now that I imagine I can feel the texture of its trunk beneath my fingertips; this intense familiarity with the tree has transformed my eyes into binoculars, allowing me to clearly conjure up its branches and leaves. I sometimes wonder if the peepul tree can feel my constant, intimate gaze from the distance, whether it will recognise me if I were to ever visit it in person.

Before the pandemic, someone placed a diya at the peepul tree’s feet every evening, worshipping it as a shrine and deity. I haven’t seen the diya too often during the pandemic but I am grateful whenever I glimpse it. It has become an enduring symbol of hope and strength during these dark, often hope-starved days. It is the temple that I cannot visit, it provides me the darshan that I cannot otherwise avail of. During the stormiest of monsoon evenings, when lightning rips the sky apart and thunder sounds like a nameless doom, I often think that the diya will eventually flicker out, and yet, it remains lit for hours no matter how fierce or intense the rain is. On those stormy nights, I can feel its heat and smell the blue flame from the window.

This view from my window is now the world I know most intimately, in exile as I am from the coordinates of the life once lived and worlds formerly inhabited. One day, I will return to the normal, or normal as it can be after fifteen months of a life-altering event. I will gingerly step back into that life, like a foal learning to navigate its sea legs. But I will always carry within me the memory of that world, which initially seemed so reduced and yet, contained multitudes I earlier had never been able to see. 

Priyanka Sacheti is a writer and poet based in Bangalore, India. She grew up in the Sultanate of Oman and  was educated at Universities of Warwick and Oxford, United Kingdom. Her literary work has appeared in numerous literary journals such as Barren,The Common, Parentheses Art, Popshot, Lunchticket, and Jaggery Lit and various anthologies. She’s working on a poetry and short story collection. She can be found as @atlasofallthatisee on Instagram and @priyankasacheti on Twitter.