Annamma (Anna) Spudich still remembers the Pala tree she would walk past on her way to school as a six-year-old. She would be accompanied by her cousin, then in her teens, remembers Dr. Spudich, who holds a Ph.D. in Cell and Molecular Biology at Stanford University and was a research scientist at Stanford for 25 years. “The tree would produce white flowers at a certain time of the year,” she says, recalling how it fell twirling to the ground, because of the way the petals were positioned.
When she passed the tree in full bloom, however, her cousin would tell her to run, she says. “We were told that when the tree bloomed, you should not walk under it because there was a yakshi in residence,” says Dr. Spudich, who left her career in basic science in 2000 to explore the medical-botanical traditions of Southwest India.
