I suddenly started photographing trees well over a decade ago. For years, I had been oblivious to trees and their presence all this time - and yet, once I started registering them in my midst, I could not stop looking at or taking pictures of them. The more I photographed trees, the more I looked, really looked, at each tree I encountered, I realised that no tree is the same and that each possesses an unique character and personality.

Research over the years has consistently demonstrated that spending time in the presence of trees has numerous mental and physical health benefits. I also derive joy from what I would describe as a tree-version of cloud-spotting, seeing trees and visualising them as characters. A rose pink tabebuia tree becomes an astrologer, their branches revealing rivers of fates, a sprawling, looming banyan tree is a many-armed goddess, and centuries old white silk cotton tree is an emperor surveying his kingdom. And in becoming these characters, trees in a park or a forest or banking the sidewalks of a flowing road also become part of a visual novel. Their presence, their dialogue with the surroundings and fellow trees, and the stories encoded within the grains of their wood and roosting inside their leaves and branches merge together to form a lively, ever-changing narrative.

We are walking by a novel, we are in a novel.

I always think that each time someone decides to cut down a tree, they are contributing to the destruction of both an ecological microcosm and erasure of a story that deserved to be heard and read. A character vanishes along with the many nested inside it, like Russian dolls. A story-impoverished world baldly stares back at you in lieu of this chopped tree. Years later, a faceless building will grow in its stead and no one will ever know that the tree or its stories ever existed there in the first place.

I am grateful for all the trees that I have encountered in course of the years but I also fear for the ones I will never get to meet and whose stories I will be deprived of.

In memory of both the living and gone trees, I would like to share a portrait gallery of the incredible trees I have had the honor of photographing over the years - and the stories they have sung to me. Perhaps, one day, I will create a literal, tangible novel out of these tree stories and characters and consequently preserve them in some kind of posterity. But for now, these chapters from a novel in progress.