Delhi’s Saptaparni-scented October

Delhi’s saptaparni trees perfume October, inspiring tales of spirits before their medicinal, educational and cultural value was recognized.

A city perfumed — that is what two weeks of October smell like now. Delhi has many smells: food, spices, streets, sewers. But in October all smells bow down to the olfactory invasion of the saptaparni — heady, sweet like cardamom, but allergenically heavy on the senses. It is polarising, dense and layered.

The Saptaparni -- planted in most corners of New Delhi -- is a tough tree, resistant to pollution and rich in medicinal properties.

The city is filled with these trees, and most corners of New Delhi will have one. It was heavily planted in the 1940s around the Golf Links area, but originated in a moist Himalayan region. It is a tough tree, resistant to pollution and rich in medicinal properties. But let us go back to the many personalities of this tree and its strange early association with alluring women.

The older the story, the more occult the tree, in the way that a clever woman becomes a witch and an angry one becomes Kali. Slowly the tree is understood, as women eventually are, and it is credited with the medicine it holds in every part, from flower to bark.

The English name, the Devil’s Tree, is the harshest of its names, but the South Asian names carry a more fragrant history. Before saptaparni, it was called yakshi-paalya. Yaksha and yakshi are nature spirits, generally considered benevolent celestial beings who visit Earth, but they also have a darker form, grotesque and terrible, that can appear before people as the most beautiful and enchanting ladies. The metaphor is writing itself.

The first story, most often retold in South India, holds that a yakshi makes her home in the saptaparni. If any male villager gradually loses weight and health, an affair with a yakshi becomes the first suspicion in the minds of the elders.

The story is rather saucy. As it goes, one late afternoon, a Brahmin away from home was caught running late to reach his next destination. The sun at the horizon was setting steeply and he was rushing through a dense forest of saptaparni trees. A lady in white (typical), of ethereal beauty and sweet voice, scared to walk alone, called out to him to accompany her to her house. The Brahmin agreed. By the time they reached her house, it was dark, and she offered her home to him for the night. He did not question why the lady lived alone in a jungle, and stayed. That night became the most memorable of his life. Turning into a lovesick man, he lost all sight of health and time as carnal pleasures overtook his days entirely, slowly reducing himself to bones. Eventually, he died.

The elders who read a lean young man as the victim of a yakshi were reading the scent as much as the man. Kalidasa, in the Raghuvamsa, had already compared the fragrance of this tree to the pheromones of a wild elephant — a smell that is dangerous, desirable and difficult to control. The poet and the village elder had noticed the same thing: that this scent acts on the body before it reaches the mind.

The name saptaparni had long been in use, until Bhavamishra gave it a formal entry in the 16th century. The occult became profound. A tree once suspected of consuming men was now prescribed to cure them, its scent having drawn physicians to the very parts that healed.

Somewhere in Karnataka, a village still performs a ritual with the first moon of July, around the onset of the monsoon, the rains that leave most areas beset with diseases. Customarily, the head of the family approaches a saptaparni tree before dawn, seeks its permission to chop some pieces of bark, then heads home with the bark. The lady of the home makes a decoction of the bark and all the family members drink a few ounces. It has a terrible taste that some say is remembered the entire year. This yearly ritual is believed to be insurance against malaria.

The transformation of the Devil’s Tree into a healing tree soon brought it into common life, and with honours. As scholars realised its value, the tree blessed them with its bark. This marks its transition to its Latin name: Alstonia scholaris.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, school children in India would trace letters on small rectangular slates, the frames of which were made from the wood of the saptaparni, and hence the species name scholaris. Rabindranath Tagore elevated the status of the saptaparni to that of an auspicious plant by setting a tradition at Visva-Bharati University wherein its leaves are awarded to graduates and postgraduates by the chancellor, who receives them from the Prime Minister of India.

The saptaparni was a devil, a lover, a teacher and a cure without ever changing a leaf. The unexplained is first called dangerous and then, once studied, called useful, and women who knew things have been through both verdicts. Delhi’s trees wait on the same judgment, and this one now keeps the city’s time. It flowers between the rains and the smoke, half the street complaining and half drinking it in, and when the haze overtakes the scent, we know the last clean air has gone and the windows are shut, just in time for the taash season and Diwali celebrations.

Anica Mann works on archaeology and contemporary art in Delhi. The views expressed are personal