Do you use the plant emoticons on your phone?

In the parallel universe of emoticons, where there is apparently an icon for every noun and verb – I haven’t found adjectives and adverbs there yet – I have had to search hard to find those that depict plant life in any real way. Yes, I am aware that plants do not send text messages to each other. But animals don’t either. And yet, even in these tiny images, a dog is a dog and not a donkey which, again, is not a horse. That differentiation – a marker of both the ethic and the aesthetic – is essential to both the creator of the emoticon and its recipient. The human face is, of course, the central identifying marker of our times – it gives Facebook its name and it gives emojis their body, not to mention its defining role in the bureaucracy of passports and citizenship documents. For a long time I called all these bodiless emoticons "smileys" – that seemed to be their defining characteristic, their performance, the meandering U-curve of the lips, the most important function of this proxy-human. That wasn’t a surprise – humans are expected to smile in their photographs. Happiness, or at least a show of it, makes man authentically human. No animal laughs like men; there are no records of laughing donkeys. All this is common knowledge. The human voice came to be substituted, in an ad-hoc way, by words on a screen, and that, often, with emoticons. This movement from the auditory to the visual, voice to the optic, ought to have, by natural logic, included the non-human. And so it did, by first bringing in objects of everyday use – from telephones to commodes and bathtubs. (Though I must confess that I’ve never been the recipient of the commode icon as an abbreviated explanation for what the sender had been up to.) This is easy to understand, as are the other nouns and verbs, the sun standing for a hot day and lipstick for, well, lipstick. But the animals? This menagerie inside our phones, with all kinds of animals, pets, and the wild and domesticated? How many of us have used any or most of these animal icons in our text messages? Do zoologists use them when writing texts to each other? What are they doing here, inside our phones? Is it political correctness, a kind of tokenism, that made cell phone manufacturers, in their commitment to represent an inclusive world, put animals in it? I’ve never used any of these animal icons, none except the puppy dog. And that with only one person. In this, the puppy dog is a metaphor, a wordless representative of the love and loyalty and affection that humans traditionally associate with the dog. I’d turn the ‘Hi’ into a ‘Woof’ following the icon of the puppy dog. Unlike the human face turned into happy-sad-angry-scared denominators as in the ‘smileys’, there is only the cute face of the puppy icon. To communicate anything with it, I have either followed it with another icon – human feet, my abbreviated way of showing affection, the puppy dog doing its normal stuff, touching, smelling, licking human feet. Or I’d had to download an image – not an icon, mind you – of a puppy dog, with its tail between its legs, the word ‘Sorry’ written in a thought bubble. Unlike human faces, then, the emoticons of animals are like statues, incapable of communicating emotion. That is also why the category ‘plant emoticon’, both on my phone and in this essay, is a bit of an oxymoron. Plants have no emotions, that being a human preserve, as Western philosophers have repeatedly reminded us. And yet, such is the pretzel-like nature of social life that we use flowers to communicate emotions that we think words might not be able to hold. Roses and rajnigandha, chrysanthemum and hydrangeas, all of these have their social symbolism. To send flowers is one thing, to send a flower or plant icon in a text message is quite another. I don’t quite mean the bouquet of flowers that often accompanies other icons such as stars and hearts in a congratulatory message or one of celebration. In the botanical garden – though on some mornings I tend to think of it as a herbarium – inside my phone is a collection of generic plants and trees. The staircase-like cut-out icon of the Christmas tree; the rose and the tulip; other flowers so generic that even the most committed dendrophile would find it impossible to identify these five-petalled flowers; the sunflower identifiable more for its visual kinship with the sun than its thalamus, and the maize, both bling in their overt yellowness; a children’s drawing-book sapling and a coconut tree, both unchanged in the character of their lines for generations, perhaps centuries; a maple leaf and a stem with young green leaves. Variants of these in phones everywhere, and two I want to name separately: the mushroom and the cactus. Can you think of anyone you’d like to send a cactus icon to? As for the mushroom, given that we live in the age of the CCTV, it might soon be illegal to send a ‘shroom’ emoticon. What are these nearly useless emoticons doing inside our phones then? My closest friend, who is an emoticon virgin for all purposes, and who once sent a heart emoticon not because he wanted to but because his phone translated ‘love’ to that sign, has never sent me an icon related to or representing plant life in spite of his obvious knowledge of my deep affinity for plant life. We have, on various occasions, made jokes about how the human body is available in parts through these emoticons, the heart and the thumb (that all important icon of our times), the face and the feet, but never the neck or liver, for instance. There is no emoticon for tree roots either – it is doomed to remain invisible everywhere. If there was one, I’d have sent it to him right now and waited for a response.

Sumana Roy's first book, How I Became a Tree, a work of non-fiction, has been published in India in February. She lives in Siliguri in India.