14th November this year was not exceptional in any way. As a mother of a 9-year-old boy, I followed my usual winter-morning routine in Bangalore—packing lunch, dropping my son at the bus stop, buying vegetables on the way back, making myself coffee, and settling by my sun-kissed window with the newspaper.

Then a headline stopped me.

A woman who planted 400 banyan trees.
Saalumarada Thimmakka.
114 years old.
Padma Shri awardee.
Passed away on 14 November.

The numbers felt unreal.
400 banyan trees? Really?
She lived 114 years? Really?
No formal education but a Padma Shri? Really?

I googled, asked around, checked Instagram. Everything said she was real. But something in me needed to see for myself.

So I drove 96 km—two and a half hours from Sarjapur—to Hulikalu, a village in Ramanagara district.

Hulikalu, with nearly 2,000 houses and one wonderful bakery, welcomed me with hot masala chai. I asked a man in a lungi if he knew where Thimmakka lived. He smiled and pointed the way. I followed his gestures, deciphered his Kannada, and soon stood before a small green house under a sprawling banyan tree.

A huge, flower-adorned poster of Salumarada Thimmakka stood at the entrance. The gate wasn’t locked. I stepped in and took a picture next to her portrait. No one questioned who I was. “An admirer from the city,” people whispered fondly. The house seemed open to anyone who thought of the earth as home.

They offered me bajji and stories—stories of kindness, calmness, and a woman who became larger than her circumstances. They told me about her husband, a nature lover who carried water cans and saplings to plant along the village road; how she joined him after marriage; how the couple, unable to have children, nurtured banyan saplings instead. After his death, she continued their work alone.

The villagers led me to the famous row of banyan trees. I drove along the 4-km stretch, watching the canopies stitch the sky together. My eyes welled with a strange mix of joy and disbelief. Under those vast branches sat tired commuters—people resting under the shade that Thimmakka had gifted them decades ago.

She was not born into privilege. She worked as an agricultural labourer, spending eight hours in the fields. In the evenings, she told stories about planting to the children who called her Ajji. They proudly showed me mementos from her felicitations and spoke of the saplings she carried to schools, teaching children how to plant and care for them.

Thimmakka built a legacy—one not written in textbooks but rooted in the soil of her village. Environmentalism is not a distant concept there; it lives in the people she inspired.

To some she was Ajji, to many she was Thimmakka, and to the rest of us she is Saalumarada Thimmakka—the woman who turned grief into green, one banyan tree at a time.