Rootless but Green are the Boulevard Trees - Essay

Rootless but Green Are the Boulevard Trees

Uma Parameswaran’s three-act play Rootless but Green Are the Boulevard Trees (first published 1987) stands as a landmark work in Indo-Canadian diasporic drama. Set in Winnipeg’s Fort Richmond neighbourhood in March–April 1979, the play offers an intimate, realistic portrait of two interconnected Indian immigrant families navigating the complex terrain of cultural displacement, intergenerational tension, identity, and belonging. Through everyday domestic conversations, arguments, and quiet revelations, Parameswaran examines the immigrant condition with honesty and compassion. The central metaphor of the title—boulevard trees that remain green and beautiful even without deep traditional roots—encapsulates the play’s affirmative yet clear-eyed vision of diasporic life.

The action unfolds almost entirely within the Bhave family home, a domestic space that becomes a microcosm of the larger immigrant experience. The play opens with nineteen-year-old Jayant packing a sports bag and suitcase in the recreation room, preparing for a driving trip to Montreal with his friends. This simple act of packing immediately signals restlessness and the desire for temporary escape. Jayant is the eldest son of Sharad and Savitri Bhave. Sharad, once an atomic-energy scientist at Trombay in India, now works as a real-estate broker in Winnipeg—a professional demotion that fuels his nostalgia and sense of loss. Savitri, a schoolteacher, remains the emotional centre of the household. More traditional than her husband in daily practice, she changes into a saree at home, wears kumkum, prepares Indian food, and quietly mediates family tensions while carrying the dual burden of professional and domestic labour.

Their children represent different degrees of cultural hybridity. Jayant, frustrated by his father’s constant references to “our people” and “our country,” challenges Sharad’s nostalgia. In one of the play’s key exchanges he declares:

“Our people, our old country. Dad there’s no our people and no old country for anyone in the world anymore. Least of all for us. This is our land and here we shall stay.”

Jayant’s sister Jyoti (sometimes spelled Jyothi), about twenty, is involved with Andre, a white Canadian boyfriend. Their relationship highlights the personal and cultural negotiations of cross-cultural romance. Jyoti experiences the pull between parental expectations and her own desires, while also sharing nostalgic memories of childhood in India with her brother. The youngest Bhave child, Krish (around twelve), belongs more fully to the Canadian-born generation; he is exposed mainly to residual Indian culture through food, language, and stories rather than lived memory of the homeland.

The extended family includes Sharad’s sister Veejala Moghe, a talented but frustrated astronomer and assistant professor at the university, her husband Anant (or Anand), and their children Vithal (around twenty-one) and Priti (around ten). Veejala embodies the particular struggles of the professional immigrant woman. She feels stifled by academic politics, lower recognition, and subtle racial prejudice. In a pivotal decision that shocks the family, she announces her intention to leave her husband and children and return to India in search of professional fulfilment and self-actualization. Anant, understanding her quest, does not oppose her. Sharad is deeply disturbed by his sister’s choice, while Savitri remains empathetic yet neutral, recognising the unresolved questions that haunt immigrant lives. Young Priti, like Krish, represents the third generation, largely Canadian in orientation, with friends such as Laura.

Surrounding the two families is a circle of young Indian students and friends—Arun, Dilip, Rajan, and Sridhar—who frequent the Bhave home. Their conversations range from longing for Indian food and cultural ambience to heated debates about assimilation, racism, and political strategy. Vithal, idealistic and community-minded, voices a more separatist stance:

“Assimilate my ass. They don’t want us to assimilate. They want us out. We’ll be squashed like bugs soon… We have to stay separate from them and stay together within and we’ve got to show them that we have as much right to be here as the pissed-off whites…”

These discussions reveal the spectrum of responses among the second generation: some lean toward pragmatic assimilation, others toward cultural solidarity and assertion of rights.

Sharad’s alienation is among the most poignant expressions of first-generation displacement. He admits:

“It upsets me profoundly to find myself in a crowd. All those alien faces staring at or through you… Makes me ask myself, What am I doing here? Who are these faceless people among whom my life is oozing away? Each so self-contained, so complete, looking at me as though I shouldn’t be there.”

He repeatedly returns to the image of failed transplantation, asking whether an Ontario poplar can survive in Manitoba soil and what chance immigrants therefore have. In contrast, Jayant and his peers point to the boulevard trees and newly planted evergreens around apartment blocks—trees set up overnight that appear green and flourishing. Jayant argues passionately:

“What does it matter how long it stands? The point is that it is there, beautiful and green for the length of its life. A day, a hundred thousand days, it is a question of what we do and are, during that time. This evergreen doesn’t have one Christly use—it isn’t even good as firewood—but it is there and it is green, it is beautiful.”

And later: “Yeah, rootless. Let’s face it… no one has roots anywhere because that’s the way things are in 1979 A.D. But we can stand tall… and live each day for all it’s goddamned worth.”

These exchanges crystallise the play’s central themes. Rootlessness and belonging form the core concern: the tension between nostalgia for the homeland and the necessity of making a life in the adopted country. Intergenerational conflict is sharply drawn—parents who migrated as adults carry vivid memories and cultural authority, while their children, partially or fully raised in Canada, claim the new land as home. Cultural hybridity and the possibility of a “third space” emerge as the younger generation seeks to plant “mangoes on maple trees.” Alienation, subtle racism, and professional displacement affect both men (Sharad’s loss of scientific status) and women (Veejala’s academic frustration). Gender and self-actualization receive particular attention through Savitri’s quiet endurance and Veejala’s radical choice. Finally, the theme of redefinition of home and family runs throughout: survival requires accepting changed identities and putting down new, if shallower, roots.

The title itself is the play’s governing symbol. The boulevard trees—evergreen, decorative, without deep ancestral roots or practical utility—stand for the immigrants who can nevertheless live fully, beautifully, and “green” for the span of their lives. Unlike the plantain tree of Indian memory that leaves a sapling behind, or the oak with its mile-wide roots, these trees affirm a different mode of existence: present-oriented, resilient, and sufficient in itself.

By the play’s end, crises remain unresolved in neat fashion—Jayant’s trip is aborted, Veejala’s departure looms—but a tentative acceptance emerges. Characters begin to recognise that belonging is not an all-or-nothing condition. One can retain elements of the past while engaging the present, and one can be rootless yet green. Parameswaran, herself an early immigrant to Canada, offers neither romanticised nostalgia nor forced assimilation. Instead she presents a humane, realistic vision of diasporic life in which dignity lies in living purposefully, accepting hybridity, and finding beauty in the transplanted condition.  Through the fully realised lives of Sharad, Savitri, Jayant, Jyoti, Krish, Veejala, Anant, Vithal, Priti, and their circle of friends, the play gives dramatic form to the enduring questions of migration: Who am I when the soil under my feet has changed? Can one thrive without the deep roots of the homeland? And is it possible, after all, to stand tall and green in a new landscape?

Rootless but Green Are the Boulevard Trees thus remains a significant contribution to Canadian and postcolonial drama.