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| Image Copyright Mustansir Dalvi, 2013 |
It's springtime in Bombay, should you care to notice.
The time when, in the midst of unbearable heat, flowers bloom all over our port city, trees are lush, the foliage at its thickest, and riotous color explodes all over. One tree in the Sir JJ School of Art Campus is currently misbehaving wonderfully, blossoming in all the wrong places and, in near surreal narratives of decoys and smells creating the most ridiculous fruit, perfectly spherical globes that would crack your nut open if it fell on you squarely from its traditional height of eighty feet. Hence the title.
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| Image Copyright Mustansir Dalvi, 2013 |
Although regarded as a tree with medicinal qualities since the times of the Ayurveda, there are not too many surviving examples of the Cannonball Tree (Couroupita Guianensis) in Bombay. There is one in the University campus at Fort, one in the Victoria Gardens (Jijamata Udyan) and yet another in the IIT Campus in Powai, and then there is this one- growing sturdily and quietly behind the canteen in the Sir JJ School of Art Campus. This is a good time to visit the campus, incidentally, gulmohur and bougainvillea are arrayed like Hindi fillum heroinis on the Cannes red carpet.
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| Image Copyright Mustansir Dalvi, 2013 |
Unlike other trees, the Cannonball tree oozes flowers directly from its trunk, hanging out showers of globular buds just like crazed amaltas from gnarly stems. The buds break open into spectacular six petaled flowers, with its anemone like stamens, which instantly get busy attracting pollinators from all around them.
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| Image Copyright Mustansir Dalvi, 2013 |
I did a bit of reading and discovered that these fairly large (cabbage sized) flowers proffer no nectar, but attract bees and bats because of their vibrant display and unusual hood shaped arrangements of stamens (compared to nagas, hence the local names Naagchapha or Kailashpati) and an enticing aroma. The outer more attractive purplish and yellow stamens are sterile decoys and the inner less imposing ones are the real thing. Bees or bats fly into or between them and get coated with pollen. Thus does the selfish gene pass on.
Our campus is particularly suited to this arrangement as we have our share of bats that occupy two trees. These flying foxes have been around since before the site became the School of Art. Their fore-mummies and daddies very likely oversaw young Rudyard making a mess in his aayah's lap, wailing for Uncle Terry. Today, sadly, they are slowly diminishing in number, thanks to the unfavorable environment that metropolitan life creates but they persist nevertheless and we are happy about this.This cannonball tree is but one example of their perennial usefulness.
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| Image Copyright Mustansir Dalvi, 2013 |
The flowers turn into fruit, in the same bunched formations as the buds, slowly browning in the summer heat, and honing their spherical shapes until they are too heavy to sustain and fall with an almighty explosion on the ground, cracking open like dried coconuts and throwing their seeds all around. Although I have not experienced this, the fruit apparently give out the most godawful smell, which,
de gustibus non est disputandum, attract some animals who eat their pulp and move away with the seeds to drop them serendipitously in other places for another tree to begin its eighty foot journey into space.
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| Image Copyright Mustansir Dalvi, 2013 |
These fruit are the eponymous cannonballs, and you can see how perfectly shaped they are. You might want to take a step (or two) back.
Unless, of course you have passed your genes on already.
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| Image Copyright Mustansir Dalvi, 2013 |
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