grounding

Perhaps my first memory of magic was with the tree.

There seems to be very little in my memory, my etiology, my diary entries to suggest otherwise. I imagine that I knew the syntax of trees before I knew I could speak words. But I grew up in Singapore, of all places. Our world was harvested on the destruction of our trees, skyscrapers and government buildings growing from mangrove and frangipani. Perhaps it was illogical for me to speak to trees. Perhaps it was illogical for me to believe in magic.

In the past year—after our dog died—my mother has begun a new choreography. There is less time for her to instruct two boys, in the genesis of their adulthood, now that the peach fuzz has turned to stubble. She has made more days for herself now, raising a garden on the veranda. Horticulture was never a skill she thought she’d pick up, but she’s there now. In the evenings, she digs her fingers in the soil of the infant garden, massaging their pores, limbs and temples. The plants sit pretty in their terracotta pots, awaiting the presence of their adopted mother. Her palms have found a delicacy as she pours over the plants: fern, croton, succulent and white lily. Water spills out of the plastic jugs like arteries, blood of her own. Her fingers are city-born and raised, brought up from the smothering of glass, metal pen and computer keys, but they have found a home in the secret grotto of dirt. Her cuticles have been manicured by her teeth all her life, but now, they are dirtier, decorated with soil. At the back of her head she is smiling as she witnesses a saturnalia she did not know before.

My mother had forgotten this genealogy of horticulture since moving to Singapore. There’s not land here like there is in India; there isn’t the freedom either. How defiant would it be to hug a tree? Talk to one? Care for it?

When I was young, I used to believe that the only way I could get close to magic was to talk to trees. They had, after all, been the centers of life, birth, death and reincarnation in the comic-book myths I had read; they were painted on the covers of fantasy novels; they watched me silently as I sat in my classroom. So I decided to go on an expedition to look for magic.

During quarantine (and post quarantine), I felt like I needed to look for magic again, so I made a compendium of the world around me. Attached are the sights and sounds.

This evening, I ventured to Gano St Park with Ambika and Victoria and got to relive a magic that seemed like a vestige of some inaccessible past for me. As I mentioned in class, our generation feels like the last group that got to experience our childhoods free of the smartphone and social media. It’s like our has been so irrevocably segmented—a pre-temporal and a post-temporal world—one that existed within a mythos of our imagination, our family lineages, our topographies and one that exists through a lens of the state, the corporation, the invisible.

I’m also not in the “all social media is bad” camp; social media has offered a post-geographical discursive space for liberation for voices that have traditionally been silenced. I have enveloped myself in online communities of people that I feel genuine warmth and love from, despite not knowing what they look like, where their from, or even their names. I think about how I find magic here, too.

I couldn’t help an aching nostalgia when I was forced to confront the land I was on. It is a land that has been stolen, a land that I am occupying by proxy of being at this university. What does it mean for me to attempt to connect to a soil that wasn’t even meant for me in the first place?

I think about my own land, forever in a process of forgetting, and think about a time where things once were, however brief, perennial.