She was strikingly good-looking with her hair cascading in thick strands down her back to below her knee, combed a hundred strokes each morning and evening with a narrow-toothed wooden comb. The ritual was an essential part of her day. By day it was locked into a bun tightly wrapped behind her head, so that to the casual observer she had a head full of hair: neat, prim, proper. Only in the evening did she let it down and allow it to breathe. Her head would shake from time to time to push errant strands back into line. Arvind loved that shake of the head and often waited in anticipation, tickled when it happened.
It was Sita’s eyes, though, that were mesmerising: liquid, warm, loving. Arvind could gaze all day into them and lose himself to the world.
Sita sat on the verandah braiding her hair. It was a cumbersome exercise, there was so much of it, but practice had made her perfect: she could do it mechanically now, her eyes roving the street below. Their flat overlooked the main road, tree-lined, with a sidewalk and a drain.
Arvind sat on a chair diagonally opposite, reading the newspaper. “What a shame,” he said. “It seems the authorities have ordered the cutting down of 142 trees to widen a road.”
He read from the article. The widening of the eleven-kilometre city road from four lanes to six, with pedestrian walkways, cycle tracks, green cover and drainage, was an election promise now being fulfilled. Over six hundred trees would be transplanted, the article said, but these 142 could not be: they were an indigenous species that would die the moment they were uprooted.
“That’s a crying shame,” Arvind said. His sharp eye caught a photograph tucked into the corner of the same page, small, hazy, grainy, phone-shot but sharp enough to see that it was of a couple praying to a tree marked 142.
Sita had been listening in an absent-minded sort of way. She knew Arvind’s fondness for nature, his passion against cutting trees. She supported it, but had never found it in herself to feel outraged by it. She looked at the photograph now and felt something she could not immediately place. It was not the trees. It was the couple’s hands, folded, at the base of something that was about to be taken from them.
“We should join the protest,” she said.
Arvind looked up, surprised. He knew she supported him, but never so plainly, and never this fast.
He looked at the photograph again, trying to see what she had seen. At first it did not give up its secret. Then he saw it: a child in the foreground, half hidden, playing on the bough.
The phone rang. It was Sita’s friend. “Are you watching the news?”
They were not. They turned on the television and found the same couple, the same child, a growing crowd behind them. Someone was asking if they came every day to worship the tree. They said yes.
Sita set down the hairbrush she had been turning over in her hands and did not pick it up again that night. “When can we go,” she asked, not quite a question.
By the following evening, Sita and Arvind were standing at the site themselves, moving through a crowd already thick with speeches and sloganeering, demands that the felling stop. A commotion broke out at one end of it, a scuffle between two groups, and in the confusion they found themselves close to the couple and the child for the first time.
Arvind sensed the mood turning. He guided them all, the couple, the child, Sita, to a quieter spot just beyond the tree, on its far side. It was like stepping out of a noise chamber.
They stayed. One evening became a week, then two. A tent went up under a neighbouring tree, then a row of tents, until the protest stopped being something they visited and became something they belonged to.
A routine took shape without anyone deciding on it. Sita began bringing extra rice in the evenings, enough for four, then five, then whoever else turned up hungry. Arvind learned to fold a tent properly, badly at first, and Subramaniam, without being asked, took to checking the guy ropes each night before he slept. Kaveri worked out that if she sat cross-legged between Sita and Meenakshi during the speeches, someone was bound to braid her hair before it got too dark to see.
The couple’s names were Meenakshi and Subramaniam. The child was Kaveri, after the river, though everyone at the site called her Kutty. She was five. It was Meenakshi who eventually told Sita the rest, in the flat, unhurried voice of someone who has told a story often enough that the grief in it has been worn smooth. Kaveri’s father had died young, suddenly. Her mother had followed less than two years later, in an accident on the very road that was now to be widened. The tree, Meenakshi said, was the one her son had planted the year Kaveri was born, a sapling no taller than the child herself at the time. Every birthday since, Subramaniam had marked her height against the bark with a line of chalk, and the old marks were still there under the new ones, faint white rungs climbing the trunk. They came to the tree the way other people went to temple.
Sita said nothing. She reached over and held Meenakshi’s hand, and Meenakshi let her.
Kaveri took to Sita first, then to Arvind. She liked the smell of Sita’s hair oil, and the way Arvind let her ride his shoulders to see over the crowd. One evening, without warning, she asked if she could call them Amma and Appa. Neither of them answered right away. Sita picked her up instead and held her close enough that the child could not see her face.
Later that night, once Kaveri was asleep, Sita raised it with Arvind in a low voice, unsure whether they had any right to it. He had no answer either. The next morning, before either of them could decide anything alone, she went to Meenakshi and asked if it caused her pain, hearing another woman’s name spoken in her son’s place, however small. Meenakshi was quiet for a long moment. Then she said that grief did not work by subtraction, that a child could hold two mothers the way a tree held two seasons, one folded into the other, and that she would rather Kaveri have more people to run to than fewer. It was not quite permission and not quite absolution, but Sita understood it as both.
The nights were when the crowd turned unpredictable. Word went around that the contractors meant to move in before dawn under police escort, and the site filled with people who had no attachment to the tree at all, only to the fight. It was on one such night that Meenakshi and Subramaniam were swept one way in the crush and Kaveri another, her hand pulled from her grandfather’s by the sheer weight of bodies.
Arvind heard her before he saw her. He went in low, shoulder first, a movement his body remembered from somewhere it did not explain, and came out the other side of the crowd with Kaveri against his chest, surprised at how easily his body had found the motion.
Sita found them by the tea stall. Kaveri had stopped crying by the time Meenakshi reached them. It was Meenakshi who was crying now, and Sita who held her.
Later, still catching his breath, Arvind told Sita it was something he used to do as a young man, volunteering at temple festivals thick with crowds twice this size, though he had not thought of it in twenty years until his body did the thinking for him.
That night Sita could not sleep. She sat alone on the verandah long after Arvind had gone to bed, the street below empty, the drain running its usual quiet course. She thought of the chalk marks climbing the bark, a father’s height for his daughter, and understood that everything she might offer this child, her house, her time, even the word Amma, already belonged to someone else first, a man who was dead, a tree that was not hers to save. Only one thing had ever been entirely her own to give. She undid her braid and combed it out by habit, a hundred strokes, though there was no one awake to see the shake of her head when it came. Halfway through she stopped, the brush still in her hand, and sat with the hair loose around her for a long time before she went in.
Two mornings later, in front of the tent, Sita shaved her head.
She did it quietly, without announcement, the wooden brush and its narrow teeth set on the ground beside her, unused for the first time in years. A barber from the crowd did the cutting, his hands unsteady, unsure whether this was a service or a trespass. Sita sat very still and did not shake her head once. When it was done, the strands lay in the dust the way the hair itself had once lain down her back: thick, dark, entirely still.
Someone had filmed it on a phone, the way the first photograph had been taken on a phone. It found its way to the same people who had shared the first one: a couple and a tree, and now a woman and a tree, the two images passed along together more often than either was passed alone. More people began to arrive, people who had never walked that road or seen that tree.
Within the month a committee was constituted to review the road-widening order. The felling was stayed, for now. Nobody could say for how long. The tents began to come down, one by one, the way they had gone up.
Meenakshi and Subramaniam stayed on in a flat two streets from Sita and Arvind’s, close enough that Kaveri could walk to either home. She still called them Amma and Appa. Nobody corrected her, and by now nobody tried.
A friend came to visit one quiet Sunday, months later. They sat on the verandah, the same tree-lined road below, the same drain running its usual course. The friend noticed it before either of them said anything.
“It’s growing back,” she said.
Sita touched the back of her neck, where the hair had started to come in soft and short, uneven, following no pattern yet.
“It is,” she said, and did not say anything more.
Down on the road, Kaveri was standing at the foot of the tree with her palms pressed together, the way she had seen her grandparents stand every morning of her life. The tree marked 142 threw its shade the length of the sidewalk and over the drain and almost to the gate, and she stood inside it a while before running back up.