One for the books

Jeweller takes plants from pages to plot
Maliekkal Mohammad Koya, a jeweller hailing from the charming village of Arampram in Kozhikode district, is a fan of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer and Kamala Surayya. But it is not in his well-stocked home library that he expresses his adoration of them. Every morning, Koya reaches Unnerikunnu, a picturesque hill in the village where he has nearly eight acres of land, and gives his love and care to the trees there, which are most dear to his favourite authors and find frequent mention in their oeuvre.

As Koya waters a chestnut tree, he inhales the ambience of Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. When he touches a mangosteen, he experiences Basheer, for whom the tree in his backyard was a prominent entity, both in his life and literature. Or as he gazes at the pomegranate, Koya undergoes a Surayya experience.

Koya has grown more than 1,000 trees and plants, belonging to nearly 300 species, all of which find prominence in Indian and world literature –Poinciana is seen in great Malayalam poet Kumaran Asan’s Karuna, and cedars find in place in the Bible. Koya has been planting trees on the plot from the time he bought it six years ago. Though often ridiculed by relatives and villagers for his seemingly unprofitable interest, Koya attends to his trees in the mornings before going about his jewellery business in nearby Koduvally town.

Perhaps, nothing else explains his motivation as poetically and succinctly as these lines of Khalil Gibran inscribed on a plaque on a gulmohar tree: “Trees are poems that earth write upon the sky.” Koya believes that knowing and loving nature deeply is knowing God himself and that it is his duty to provide a charming abode for nature –including trees, plants, birds and small animals –just as God created it in all its resplendence. Says Koya : “For me, each tree is my knowledge of life, search and belief in God.”

(Vinu Abraham –the week . february1, 2009)