This is a story about a broken branch. Even though it does not begin with a crack or a crunch. This is also a story about the tree that the branch was broken off from. By the end of the story, the branch rejoins the tree. This may therefore also be a story about indeterminate meristem growth, or kindness, or anguish. There is no miracle in this story.
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Most lizards will grow back a new tail if they release their old one under stress or in danger. Certain severed sea slug heads grow new bodies, heart, vessels, and all, in about twenty days after being separated. The axolotl can regenerate most of its body parts too, but never signed up to be a magician’s glamorous assistant. Do fresh thoughts enter our heads in the early hours when we hear the factory siren, the bird call, a splash of water on the street? Or, fathered by Sisyphus, are we wrestling with our old reflections? With one foot eternally over that wet mirror of aluminium and clouds, our thoughts roll back at the threshold of sleep. Is this the question that this story will eventually answer? And there, beyond the trill of the nightjar before it claps its wings, is this then the centre of our drama? In a little patch of disputed land visible from a stamp collector’s window, a woman feeds her tree: powdered fish bones, black banana skin, rotting eggs, fat trimmings, thick maroon marrow from trotters sucked out and spat at the base of the trunk ... The stamp collector watches her each morning as he picks off wet stamps from envelopes with his forceps and lets them dry on the windowsill. Careful. Carefully, the fingers. The earth softens and at the centre, a tree flourishes. It had been abandoned as a drying bonsai on the heated rooftop outside the stamp collector’s door before the woman rescued it and planted it in soil. She had cracked the earthen pot open with a trowel; there had been a summer’s storm that evening, so the everything brown smelled of rain. She stood amongst the bleeding terracotta and greener leaves wondering why lightning never strikes in straight lines. She told the bonsai that it would become a tree. That eventually, everything would be okay. What tree was it? One with seven leaves at each node. Saptaparni. Devil’s Tree. Blackboard Tree. Or perhaps, none of the above.
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The stamp collector lived on the rooftop of a traveller’s lodge. The lodge was in shambles, and therefore, no one cared that the stamp collector had been an occupant of their smallest room – the room on the roof – for over four years now, and that he was not really a traveller. The potted plant had stood outside that very room, neglected and forlorn as only potted plants can be. The room on the roof was a furnace in the summers, but once the monsoons arrived, you could keep the window open after a downpour, and the room turn into an oasis – so cool and breezy, so high above the noisy streets and sirens. His was a not large collection, but a four-year-old gecko would observe the stamp collector admiring his stamps in the album as they expanded and contracted with the seasons, their gummy backs sticking and unsticking to the film, making suctioning sounds because of the humidity. The gecko padding across the ceiling take a closer look. Every five months or so, the stamp collector would pack his brown duffle bag, roll his pin-up calendar, and tucking it under his arm, would quickly climb down the stairs. At the makeshift lobby of the lodge – a table with a register and an oily steel jug – he would pay his dues and hug the errand boy, saying that he was about to embark on a long journey, but everyone knew that he would be back at the lodge by the evening, asking if the room on the roof was still available to rent. And he did. And so, he would go back and sit at the small desk by the window, watching the tree sway in the night breeze, running his finger over the only triangular stamp in his collection with its clutch of creamy almond flowers and information in a language he couldn’t read – and he would tell himself that one day he would be there in that country, underneath a fragrant tree. Those nights, while falling asleep, he would hear the wings of small foreign bees. And the gecko would say tick-tick-tick, trying to grant the traveller’s wish with the might of its hairy feet.
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The woman who rescued the once-a-bonsai-then-a-plant-now-a-proper-tree had creaky knees, and so the stamp collector helped her carry the earthen pot down the flights of stairs. At the end of the stairwell, she noticed that his hands were trembling. Oh, the weight. Of life, of dying light. She told him her plan. The small square patch of land between the lodge and the woman’s house was disputed. Three brothers and a sister had been court-fighting about its ownership for so long that the walls had crumbled and a healthy community of colocasia had taken over. There might be snakes, the stamp collector warned. We mean no harm, she said, then asked him, Have you seen raindrops slide down from those giant leaves? The stamp collector said he usually kept his window shut because of his stamps, but he would look out the next time it rained.
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Where do our bodies really go in the depth of the night where only cats trespass? The wet mirror. Over it, a dilapidated gate. It creaks, spooks the night, like the wind that blows through these perforated vowels and prickles the small hairs at the back of your neck. Thin, glowing orange and trembling in the afternoon haze. Like that abominable fuzz on the legs of restless mosquitoes. But honestly, what is this plot? Is there no conflict? More on that later, but for now: Some of us are exclusively arboreal. Like the tree snails who have learned how to air-breathe while carrying their shells. Gliding over rough bark terrain. Fathered by Sisyphus, mothered by moss.
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Nothing grand is happening in the story yet because we’re looking at the wrong places. Take off your shoes, touch that rusted gate hot from the sun that barely stands. Push and walk into the disputed land. Under the shadow of the traveller’s lodge, crawl on all fours to the base of the tree. At the centre. Look over, seek under. Read the writing on the leaves. Let the sun illuminate the white lacey script of the mealybugs. Here, you are free to roam about, you are free to learn the language of spider eggs on colocasia leaves. Shiny, deliciously green. An umbrella for that giant cat-god of death, and the cheapest, most formidable source of vitamin A; good for the eyes, good for the soul, great for your bowels if you’re low on fibre. This is how we keep deficiency at bay. Keep your ears wide open. Count the took- took-took of the waterhen, relentless since four o’clock. And then, dance with the peacocks screeching about the incoming rains. Here is where the mirror waits. Tries to explain why all land is disputed.
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A tree.
At the centre of the story.
Flourishing.
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Something happens one night. Under the apologetic stars, scratching. Darkening some bark. In the morning, a great, green limb of the beloved lies in ruin, broken off from the body, weeping thick gum. Forlorn amongst plastic human items: an empty shampoo bottle, four aaa batteries, two used condoms. The anguish won’t stop. What unkind times are these, the woman asks.
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The branch is submerged in a bucket of water. Time is of the essence. Mud is scooped out from the surroundings, kneaded with water into a sticky heap. The branch is lifted from water, placed onto the decapitated branch end, and propped back at the juncture. Mud is plastered all around, slapped into a hive-like shape. At this point, this is not mud, this is life this is earth a living medicine this is malleable kindness you can slather on because you have such a magician’s fingers. Physics and phalanges, all that. A strip of cotton salvaged from an old blue sari is bandaged around the wound. A thick layer of turmeric paste is smeared over the cloth. This is how we prevent infection. This is the part about meristems. This shift in the story is too plain or too didactic, but here, now, as long as the cells divide, we don’t care at all about the scholar who will never underline these lines. One could say that seasons turn in less cliched ways, but our duty remains: to prevent rot, to preserve. The woman starts to preserve the water that is left in the bucket after cutting and washing fish. The pink water, with globules of decaying gills floating, is poured over the soil around the tree at night. Teacup by teacup.
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Dilapidated, the structure of this story. And yet, we wait. Two days later, the stamp collector runs into the woman and tells her what really happened: the neighbourhood dog, an abandoned Labrador with matted fur and a wise-sad jaw had been thirsty that night, and he went to drink from the puddle that had formed next to the tree. Being so unloved for so long, he was confused on seeing the open arms of the tree. He ran into the embrace so excitedly that he accidentally broke the branch. Ugh, the woman says with distaste.
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The story sags as the Loo blows over the tropical plains, through the no-longer-white bedsheets hung up to dry on the rooftop of the traveller’s lodge; the story is too plain. Tips of new leaves crinkle and burn black. No more summer rains. In case you’re perturbed by the plainness, know this: beneath that very tree, only a couple of weeks ago, the love of the woman’s life, a stray cat with a bushy tail and endless phlegm around his nose, was mauled to death. By a dog. A different dog, white and slim with a pink-pink nose. No eating after the killing. No reason for the mauling. When the dog trotted outside the scene, a kite swooped down and made clean with the heart within little kitty’s ribs.
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Five months later, after some rain, you see the flowers blooming. Each petal singular, designed with your fingerprint. Heavy or heady, those October nights. And that old branch? Greener nodes, new leaves; is no longer broken.
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And today, a mongoose overjoyed with the winter sun swings from the branch. Brown on brown. Firm, resilient. Like a baby monkey, wide-eyed, learning the mechanics of brachiation with its clingy mongoose paws. The sunshine on its fur so new, so without-a-past. What a foolish thing to say, like spending sleepless nights trying to decipher the shape of morning light. How many corners? Sunshine has no past, it is absorbed, it is reflected, it changes into a thing.
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The stamp collector does have a past. Of it, he does not say a word to the woman who invites him to lunch one day. He refuses the meat, relishes burnt mustard over fish skin after ages. But know this: the stamp collector’s father was mauled to death for transporting meat from an abattoir to a meat- shop. An old man beaten, stomped over by a mob of angry young men. Organized religious hate. The woman asks the stamp collector if he would take two sweaters she was knitting for her husband. He’s gone, she said. I’ll take them, the stamp collector says, they will keep me warm under the almond trees.
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We pluck a browning flower from the stalk, make room for new blooms, and call it fallen. Not the brightness of unshed blood, but how to remove stains. Photosynthesis makes the world go round. That was the last straw you were clutching at when you started building your hospital for plants. Tucked away in a corner, no longer oppressed by the people whom you had to work for. Hydrangean, your brain. Resembling inflorescence. You leave her you leave him you leave your shell behind, muttering how it will never be enough. Enough for whom? She wants to ask you now but can’t. In her dreams, she is often punching. There are holes in the curtains. She spoons out each day. Turmeric for trees. Turmeric from trees. The glass bottles on the kitchen shelf first emptying, then filling up. Outside, a tree without an address. Stomata sparkling like salt. One day, we will be alone, dreaming of these chlorophyll-stained days. No longer able to bear witness to the cruelties we inflict upon others, upon ourselves, the trees will leave this only world one day. The forest will be a lonely word.
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First published: The London Magazine, 2023
Sohini Basak’s first book We Live in the Newness of Small Differences (2018) won the inaugural International Beverly Manuscript Prize. Other honours include a Malcolm Bradbury Grant for Poetry, a Toto Funds the Arts award, a Sangam House fellowship and a Speculative Literature Foundation grant. She is currently the poetry editor at Words Without Borders.