Remembering the gums of India

Hyderabad in December is as hot and dry as Adelaide and requires the same kind of drenching. As I bumped around the city in the back of an autorickshaw, my cotton shirt forming a damp membrane between my skin and the cracked vinyl seat, the white wine on my shopping list became a priority. I came to a roadside bottle shop in Jubilee Hills, where the rich inhabit cool, shaded mansions and liquor is sold from shacks. I stood on a concrete step, peering through a metal grating at the wine selection on the shelves within; my purchase was dusted off, secreted in a black plastic bag and passed over. I moved under a nearby tree to stash my bottle and realised, glancing up, that the trunk belonged to a lonely, lofty gum tree stretching out wide boughs of twisting leaves. I reached up to pluck one, pinched it along the seam and cracked it open with the lizard-quick, agile movements of someone who’s done it all her life. As I inhaled the scent of eucalyptus I recalled Proust’s account of involuntary memory before I was engulfed. I tumbled back through the years, over kilometres of land and ocean, until I found myself in the west of Adelaide, walking to school past similar trees; smelling their oil under the scorch of a similar sun, with the southern light pulsing through the streets. That day, I carried a handful of gum leaves back to my flat, where I left them to turn ash-brown and brittle. My life in Hyderabad continued; I didn’t think of Australia or eucalyptus again, though the scent of the oil lingered on my fingertips until evening.

I was slow to realise the presence of gum trees in south India. Among the reasons why I keep leaving Australia is to shake off aspects of my identity—or, as the daughter of a European migrant father, to draw closer to others. Still, during the time I’ve spent travelling, it has never been to my half-homeland Sweden that I felt a pull; it has never been Sweden that I trust to assuage my nostalgia, in the original Greek sense of the word: an ache connected to home. My state of cultural dispossession first took hold during my years in Bangladesh and now in India, where I have come to wonder, from my point of privilege, whether the pain of nostalgia is associated less with the idea of home than the physical return to it. At the moment of each encounter, discovering Indian gum trees causes me no great ache, perhaps because I’m unsure whether I still call Australia home: certainly I don’t associate eucalyptus with my national identity, or regard it as a symbol of what I am missing. While that tall, solitary Hyderabadi gum tree made me feel less of a tall, solitary traveller, remembering Indian gum trees makes me aware of what is gained or mislaid along the fractured path of migration—whether freely undertaken or forced—and what can come about when we unknot our roots. In recollection, distance and movement are laid to waste, as loss is laid to waste. What seeds do we carry around with us, contained in our memories, to cast over fresh ground?