SARVASUGHANDY MY TREE OF BEAUTY

 

More than a decade ago, during a rainy season, I bought a small ‘sarvasughandi’ (Pimenta dioica) plant from a vendor. Before handing over the pot with the plant, the vendor gave me this advice:

"It is not easy to get this Sarvasughandi grown into a tree. You need to give it extreme care until it grows into a plant".

 The good vendor further gave me some tips on how to tend it as it grows into a tree. I carefully followed his instructions, and in three years, it grew taller than me. I tried to convince my wife about the ayurvedic properties of the leaves of Sarvasungandhi, but she paid no attention to them. But I used to collect a few dry leaves of the plant and store them in the kitchen wardrobe. The moment I remembered that the leaves were in the cupboard, I would take one and add it to the hot water for tea. It really smelled spicy!

 I lost the habit gradually, and the sarvasugandhi was nearly forgotten for a decade. I will water it during the summer and look at its dark green, oily leaves and murmur:

 "You look beautiful and smell beautiful. Ayurveda says you are a medicinal plant, but here you stand just as an ornamental plant".

 One day last month, my wife asked me to get some dry leaves of the sarvasungandhi. I looked at her in total surprise and asked:

 "Sarvasugandhy leaves?!   I have been telling you about its ayurvedic properties all these years, and you haven’t asked even once to test it—just to please me at least!"

 "I will tell you later. Now please go and collect some leaves." She urged me.  

 While I was walking towards the tree, she called out: "Dilip. Thank you for taking the pains to have grown such a valuable medicinal plant."

 This compliment was another shock for me! "Valuable medicinal plant"! I cannot believe her words. There must be some reason for her to address my tree of beauty in this way.

 While I was sipping a tea specially brewed by my wife with the aroma of rich ‘organic’ spices, Uma disclosed her sudden passion for sarvasungandhi.   She showed me a WhatsApp message on her phone. The message was like this:

 "The dry leaves of Sarvasungandhi contain an elixir that can prevent and even cure various heart diseases, high blood sugar, and high cholesterol; (the list was exhaustive). If you add one dry leaf of sarvasughandi while brewing your tea or any drink, it is very much like acquiring a passport to good health".  I am sure the person who first started the message must have read the web page: https://www.rxlist.com/allspice/supplements.htm

 This can be partly true, but not wholly. My ten years of work have at least been recognised by my wife, who had maintained the view that I was only planting useless trees.

 Days passed like this, with almost all our hot drinks smelling of sarvasungnadhi. You cannot keep a Whatsapp message a secret for ages, and some of our neighbours found out that we at our home were consuming a heavenly elixir every day.   I am sure they also might have received the same 1,000 times forwarded message as I did, and my neighbours soon found out that the "Tree of Life" was actually standing in our backyard! I readily gave express permission to all of them who requested that I just collect the fallen, dry leaves. 

 My neighbours have competitively started collecting the sarvasugandhi dry leaves so early in the morning that the latecomers do not get a single blade of leaf. So, the latecomers swipe all the dry leaves in my backyard, carry them home, and separate the Sarvasugandhi leaves. Usually I will have to sweep clean, dry leaves in my backyard every week. Now I don’t do it because my neighbours do it for me!