A magnificent tree in Pune

An unexpected sight appeared this week amid the pictures that stream electronically into the ODT from an international photo agency. It was a tree in a city in the west of India, and I had seen it once before.

The tree, under which I had stood as it flowered in April 2005, looks like a cross between a tall kowhai and a runner bean.

Its flowers are bright orange, its leguminous pods a brittle brown, and its leaves are the sort of soft fronds that would tickle your cheek if you got near enough and then you'd blush and say, "Tee hee hee."

I do not know to which species it belongs, and I doubt it's historic or protected, because in the grand scheme of Indian trees it is an ordinary one.

Some things I've seen in faraway places, famous-landmark type things, I expect them to appear occasionally in the ODT picture browser. This tree is not such a thing.

But it struck me back then as magnificent, and I pointed a camera up and took a photograph.

My two travelling companions were amused by this, because I had all but shunned the camera until that point; something about not wanting to be tethered to a device, something about cultural caution where photographing people was concerned; I forget my exact reasons now.

The picture of that tree remained one of few I took in 11 days spent in India.

So when I saw it again this week I thought, "There you are."

It appeared in the photo stream because it was beside a bakery that had come briefly to the world's attention.

I remember the bakery, too; the German Bakery. I met an Indian man in there who was wearing the standard-issue maroon shirt of the nearby Osho Meditation Resort, or ashram.

He was reading a book. I think I was eating something involving custard. We had a little cultural exchange.

He found it comical when I mentioned that in New Zealand, drivers mostly stopped at red lights, and went at green ones. Indian traffic has worked out its own perfect system, but the traffic lights are ornamental to that.

I had read that one meditative practice at the ashram was to spend a week laughing for three hours each day, then a week crying for three hours each day, and then a week in silence for three hours each day.

I asked the man what the idea was behind this. He said the idea was "to reconnect with one's inner child", since children laugh and cry all the time but adults have stopped.

I agreed much of adulthood was about being constricted in that way, and that was a shame.

Long wooden benches in the dining area encouraged such casual conversations between strangers, locals and foreigners alike. The air smelt of sawdust; there may have been sawdust or similar on the floor: it was a relaxed, hippie sort of place, the German Bakery in Pune.

Afterwards, I stepped outside and beheld that magnificent tree.

And then last weekend the bakery was blown up; 11 people killed, nearly 60 wounded. Humans are foul to each other.

In the photo browser I sought the comfort of the tree. I found it, a bystander in one of the pictures taken after the blast which had probably ruffled its fronds a bit, but nothing more.