Aparna Nori’s deeply personal document of her distanced relationship with her son captures the fraught experience of coming-of-age
It’s appropriate that this artist book’s boards are covered in the plain off-white calico cloth used to make India Post’s mailbags; the national postal service played an integral part in enabling the correspondence that forms the core of this book – between Bangalore- and Singapore-based artist Aparna Nori and her son Ved, while the latter was at the Rishi Valley School, a boarding school in Madanapalle, Andhra Pradesh. Their deeply personal relationship comes across through epistolary exchanges during time spent apart and photographs taken by Nori during intermittent moments of geographical closeness. No digital devices are permitted at the school (unless in emergencies or during visits by parents), and students are kept occupied with nearby forestry activities.
Every Monday Nori would send Ved a letter and every Friday she would receive his response. Nori fills the ‘absences’ between sending or receiving correspondence with photographs of Ved at home and school during their occasional in-person visits, with watercolour and pencil drawings, and her interpretations of anecdotes sent by Ved. His voice is amplified by her voice in this effort of collaboration. For example, Ved’s notes about a kingfisher feather, which marks his first step on the path to developing interests in birdwatching and feather collecting, are accompanied by Nori’s photograph of the sky with an unfocused image of a feather.
In the main, How To Climb A Tree attempts a linear narrative. Each visual, textual and empty layer (see below) communicates the passage of time, but also ensures that the reader retains a sense that what is happening is connected to what has happened, meaning that you often flip back to a previous page to engage better with the current page. For example, on one page the reader encounters a black-and-white photograph of a toy train set. That photograph spills over to the next page, where it becomes a drawing – the whole representing the three-hour train ride from Madanapalle to Bangalore that Nori and her husband undertook every few weeks to see Ved.
Subtle yet deliberate visual and textual hints in and between pages map a chronology of Nori’s and Ved’s relationship over a decade. It begins with an image of the sunrise amid greenery, which could be interpreted as Ved’s search for a rootedness in nature at his boarding school. A few months into their exchange, Ved becomes lazy and probably preoccupied with his studies and opts to draw quick sketches, rather than writing his letters. Nori captures this laziness in a photograph of him lying on a fallen tree branch and another of him wearing a Spiderman mask. The title How To Climb A Tree is taken from an initial note Nori had sent Ved during his first few months at the school with step-by-step instructions on how to climb a tree. After ten years of epistolary exchange, by making their personal narrative public, Nori accepts that her son can now ‘climb a tree’ and is ready for adulthood. A portrait of Ved with unruly hair and a serious expression ends the photobook – signalling to the reader that he is now ‘a young man full of empathy, sense of independence and humour that is uniquely [his] own’, as Nori puts it in her final letter to him.
As this narrative unfolds, any stereotypical expectations of the power dynamics of mother–son relationships slowly wither away. In her final letter to Ved, Nori also writes, ‘We struggled with the decision to send our fiercely independent 10-year-old boy to live away from us. What we hoped for you is a gentler, slower childhood amidst nature and more importantly to have the freedom and courage to think, explore and understand who you are.’
Despite the wealth of material it contains, the book has empty pages that allow the reader to pause, reflect and imagine the happenings of a gap in time not captured by Nori’s images or her son’s letters. These are absences on top of absences, which also indicate that memories have been lost over time in spite of deliberate attempts to capture them. This is another reason why the book is worth picking up – to tune into one’s own emotions and relationships while having the chance to escape into Nori and Ved’s story, and to be inspired to record one’s own memories before they too are lost.
How to Climb A Tree by Aparna Nori. Editions JOJO, ₹4,500 / sgd 80 (softcover)
