The passengers who happened to be looking out of the window might have sworn they saw a monkey man leaping in the orchard, causing the leaves to jump and quiver. But they were tired from selling their milk all morning and rubbed their eyes before they looked again so as not to be deceived. By then the bus had left Sampath’s tree far behind and everything was its normal self again.
The tree Sampath had climbed was a guava tree. A guava tree larger and more magnificent than any he had ever seen before. It grew in the orchard that had been owned by the old District Judge of Shahkot, before the government declared the land to be part of an area reserved for national forest.
Concealed in the branches of the tree he had climbed, Sampath felt his breathing slow and a wave of peace and contentment overtook him. All about him the orchard was spangled with the sunshine of a November afternoon, webbed by the reflections of the shifting foliage and filled with a liquid intricacy of sun and shadow. The warmth nuzzled against his cheek like the muzzle of an animal and, as his heartbeat grew quiet, he could hear the soft popping and rustling of plants being warmed to their different scents all about him. How beautiful it was here, how exactly as it should be. This orchard matched something he had imagined all his life: myriad green-skinned globes growing sweet-sour and marvellous upon a hillside with enough trees to fill the eye and enough fruit to scent the air. The leaves of these trees were just a shade darker than the fruit and the bark was a peeling away of tan over a milky paleness so delicate and so smooth that his fingers thrilled to its touch. And these trees were not so big, or so thick with leaves, or so crowded together, as to obscure the sky, which showed clean through the branches. Before his eyes, flitting and darting all about him, was a flock of parrots, a vivid jewel-green, chattering and shrieking in the highest of spirits. This scene filled his whole mind and he wondered if he could ever get enough of it. This was the way of riches and this was a king’s life, he thought … and he ached to swallow it whole, in one glorious mouthful that could become part of him for ever. Oh, if he could exchange his life for this luxury of stillness, to be able to stay with his face held towards the afternoon like a sunflower and to learn all there was to know in this orchard: each small insect crawling by; the smell of the earth thick beneath the grass; the bristling of leaves; his way easy through the foliage; his tongue around every name. And then, as the afternoons grew quick and smoky and the fruit green-gold and ripe, he’d pick a guava … He’d hold it against his cheek and roll it in his palms so as to feel its knobbly surface with a star at its base, its scars that were rough and brown from wind and rain and the sharp beak of some careless bird. And when he finally tasted it, the fruit would not let him down; it would be the most wonderful, the most tasty guava he could ever have eaten …
Yes, he was in the right place at last. Tiredness rolled over him like a wave and, closing his eyes, he fell into a deep slumber, lodged in a fork in the guava tree.
7
The day their son moved into a tree, the Chawla family, worried and full of distress, took up residence outside the local police station. They sat on the bench beneath the station’s prize yellow rose creeper and waited for news of his whereabouts. That is, the three women sat on the bench while Mr Chawla walked around and around the building, making the policemen dizzy by shouting through every window he passed during his circuits. If he were the Superintendent of Police, he said, Sampath would, right this minute, be back in his usual vegetable-like stupor between them.
The town made the most of the drama. Neighbours came by regularly for news and everyone shouted out their support on their way to and from the market. In some places there are people of quiet disposition and few words, but around Shahkot they were a very rare exception. People visited their friends a great deal, and when they visited their friends, they talked the whole time, and in this way a great deal of information was passed back and forth, from even the most remote and isolated of places.
So although for one awful day it seemed as if Sampath had vanished for ever, the next afternoon the watchman of the university research forest bicycled into town to bring his married sister some curd. Along with the curd, he also brought the news that, in the old orchard outside Shahkot, someone had climbed a tree and had not yet come back down. Nobody could tell why. The man, he said, would answer no questions.
‘If someone in this country is crazy enough to climb up a tree, you can be sure it is Sampath,’ said Mr Chawla. ‘There is no doubting the matter. Thank goodness the property no longer belongs to that judge or he would have Sampath clapped in jail for making a disturbance in his trees. We must just get him down without delay.’
Holding hands, the family ran together to the bus stop, their rubber slippers slapping against their heels. They caught the same bus Sampath had taken on his journey out of Shahkot and got off close to where he had leapt from the window to run up the hillside, and here, far beyond the edge of the town, they made their way down the crisscross of little paths that led into an old orchard that had once borne enough fruit for it to be shipped to and sold in New Delhi. But it had been abandoned for many years now, the fruit acquiring the tang of the wilderness, the branches growing into each other, and these days was used only by an occasional goatherd grazing his flock. The orchard trees stretched almost all the way up the hillside, bordering, at its edge, the university research forest.
With determination and purpose, the Chawla family clacked about, shouting up into the leaves. At last, at the far corner of the farthest guava grove, right near the crumbling wall that bordered the forest, they discovered Sampath sitting in his tree eating a guava, his legs dangling beneath him. He had been watching their efforts with some alarm.
What on earth was he to say? He imagined himself declaring: ‘I am happy over here.’ Or asking in a surprised fashion: ‘But why have you come to visit me?’ He could answer their accusations with a defiant: ‘But for some people it is normal to sit in trees.’ Or, serene with new-found dignity, he could say: ‘I am adopting a simple way of life. From now on I have no relatives.’ However, he did not wish to hurt anyone’s feelings. Perhaps he could leave out the last line and add instead that everybody was his relative. He could hold on to the branches and shout: ‘Pull at me all you want, but you’ll have to break my arms before I’ll let go.’ He could scream: ‘Try to move a mountain before you try to move me.’
In the end, as it happened, he said nothing at all.
‘What are you doing up there?’ shouted Mr Chawla. ‘Get down at once.’
Sampath looked sturdily into the leafy world about him, trying to steady his wildly fluttering heart. He concentrated on the way the breeze ran over the foliage, like a hand runs over an animal’s dark fur to expose a silvery underside.
Pinky felt a sudden surge of embarrassment for her brother. ‘Get out of the tree — the whole family is being shamed,’ she said bitterly.
‘Oh, come down, Sampath, please,’ his grandmother exclaimed. ‘You are going to fall sick up there. Look at your thin yellow face! We had better take you to the doctor straight away.’
Still, he was silent.
Looking at her son, Kulfi felt the past come rushing back to her, engulfing her in the memory of a time when she was young, when her mind was full of dark corners, when her thoughts grew deep and underground and could not be easily uttered aloud. She remembered the light of a far star in her eyes, an unrecognizable look that had made her a stranger to herself when she stared into the mirror. She remembered the desperation she had sometimes felt, that rose about her as if she were being surrounded and enclosed by an enormous wall. She looked at her son sitting up in the tree and felt her emotions shift, like a vast movement of the spheres, and then she said: ‘Let him be.’