Your tree...

I am still not sure if the tree that you planted is a Rudraksha or not – since I have been told that it is mostly found in the cold Himalayan terrain and is difficult to grow in a desert state.

Not that it matters anyway.

It must be nearly four years old — and I have forgotten its planting date, since I never knew that it would remain as a memoir — and has started bearing fruit. The flowers it bore for the first two years after you left it here were few, when your memories were very strong. The tree blossomed in all its greenery. While I took little notice of its growth, your images were still very fresh in my mind. I could see the back of your palm and the nerves lining it, your feet, then small and shriveled with age and illness, your hair and stooping back. I clearly remembered the way you spoke too. I had my complaints against you but nobody would listen. At the same time, I used to look at the tree and wonder if it is going to survive the onslaught of the changing seasons. It did.

It gradually grew stronger, so much so that its shade would give people time off to rest in their vehicles parked underneath. But it still bore only flowers. The leaves it shed in the garden irked mom. Such a pile of junk, she said, and still does. A pair of crows is perched on its branches everyday and sometimes I hear a cuckoo from there. Many birds, the kind that you marveled at, visit the tree. Squirrels run all over it and nibble on breadcrumbs sitting on the branches, imagining nobody is looking at them. I wonder if they are the same ones that circled around your chair when you used to eat in the garden on sunny winter days. They surely must have been fed by your hand; they seem so sure of themselves.

The memories are fading now, but I think about the way you treated me… as a friend, confidante, critic… sometimes even becoming my pupil. I remember, though, the way you brows used to be knit when you were angry and how tears streamed down your cheek when you laughed so hard.

I pay a little more attention to the tree, since its seed captures my sight each day. It looks like a whole entity, and I am surprised at the way it has transformed itself. Sometimes people point out and ask, ‘Is that a Rudraksha growing there? When it falls, we could have one too, maybe.’ I wonder why is it only on the topmost branches… does it want to be completely out of reach, just like you?