I am back in Banaras after a trip to Tibet, but my mind is still there, trying to relive the moments, the smells, the colours, the sounds. There is one image that comes to mind often these days, the moment we were about to reach Nyalam (a Tibetan village near the Nepalese border). From the endless plains of the rocky desert plateau, the road descended into a deep gorge with a river at the bottom. And the dry air of the Tibetan highlands suddenly gave way to the humid air of the Indian subcontinent.
And then I saw a tree, a sight that had been completely absent for days, and it brought tears to my eyes. And then there were many more trees. I was overwhelmed with joy, as if I had arrived home after a long journey. I was touched as I remembered the boy in Eric Valli’s Himalayan film, the little chieftain-to-be, seeing the first tree in his life. Many thoughts rushed through my mind, about trees I had seen before, the sacred trees of India, banyan and pipal trees, trees of worship. Then I thought I should capture this moment, I should be able to explain or describe in words or pictures what that first tree near Nyalam meant to me when I looked at it, but I could not put this overwhelming feeling into words. And today in Benares, sitting in my room reading, I found a piece of poetry by William Blake: ‘The tree that moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way.Some see in nature all mockery and deformity… and some hardly see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. (Photos of the landscape before and after Nyalam)