Dear Editor,
I should like to thank you for your article of May 17, 2009, explaining the origin of Conversation Tree. Some time ago I sent a photograph to Stabroek News taken by my brother of the previous tree, along with a short letter saying that the tree looked as though it was dying.
I’m very pleased to learn the history of the tree, which I remember asking my grandfather about as we walked there more than twenty years ago. This is because I’ve spent my life in Bel Air, five minutes’ walk from the tree, as have my father and grandfather, and the rest of my ancestors of my father’s line, going back five generations.
On January 19, 1875, one year to the month before the tree was planted, my grandfather’s great-grandfather, and his wife and three children arrived in British Guiana bound for Plantation Bel Air. And, two years to the month after the birth of Napleton Walter King Jr, for whom the tree was planted, the first of my ancestors to be born in this country, my great-great-grandfather, was born right at Plantation Bel Air.
Much later, about a hundred and twenty years later in fact (if only, for the sake of coincidence, I could have remembered what month it was), as I was passing on a little motorbike, I saved a kitten at the foot of the tree from almost certain death.
So, it is of especial meaning to me to learn that the tree’s existence in Bel Air coincides with our residence and life there, and in Guyana.
Thanks to Stabroek News, I’ll never look at it in the same way again.
Yours faithfully,
Kamal Ramkarran
