The trees were many—ten perhaps, or more. Numbers dissolve in the fog of recollection, as easily as branches dissolve in the fog of morning. And there was that pomegranate tree, the elder at the far end, too weary to converse, too withdrawn to join in the gossip of guava leaves. I never heard its voice. It must have had one. Everything speaks when one is a child. Yet it was always the guavas that murmured, admiring me, flattering me, perhaps inventing me. For it was then, in the fog, in their whispering, that I first received—without knowing what it was—the secret of closeness, which has since insisted itself into every page I write, like the pulse hidden beneath the wrist.
But this was a morning different from other mornings, or perhaps all mornings are different when seen from the slope of age. Fog everywhere, not fog as a thing but fog as a being, soft and heavy, descending like a sky too tired of distance, resting against the earth. I remember running—though “running” is already a betrayal, for what I recall is not the speed but the trembling of dew on rice stalks, bowing when I arrived, bowing because I believed they bowed. I was a king in their humility, but was the kingdom theirs or mine? Even now, when I close my eyes, I can smell that mud, the way it exhaled underfoot, as if holding secrets more ancient than my own breath.
And the house—fifty meters, perhaps less, perhaps more, distance is never faithful in memory. The two stories of mud-brick, the silent eyes of parents and brother at the window. Silence not as emptiness, no, but as a swelling fullness, a silence that pressed against me the way fog presses against skin. Was I walking? Was I enthroned? The rice heads brushed my hands as I passed, golden, near harvest, bending in submission or perhaps in fatigue, but to a child both look the same. I thought them polite, and politeness is already philosophy, is it not?
Now—now when fog no longer belongs to fields but to cities, when fog is exhaust, smoke, an urban disguise—now I think of that morning as love. Not loss, though middle age is a series of losses rehearsed daily, but love: the love of fog’s miserable beauty, the love of rice’s bowed humility, the love of my own absurd arrogance in mistaking myself for monarch of an invisible empire. That morning was my initiation into transience: that beauty does not remain precisely because it is beautiful.
Somewhere then, a bird called, tentative, as if sound itself doubted its right to be. The bird-call is my mother’s call, though how can memory permit such a transfiguration? I hear her voice now, fragile as wings, telling me to come for tea. The field loosened its hold; the earth spongy underfoot, forgiving, carrying not only my weight but the hidden laughter of past play, of childhood knees bruised, of shrieks lost in sky. Even now I walk the path back, though the path now is concrete, and the shrieks are silent.
The courtyard, Aangan, smelled of cow-dung plaster—an odor at once pungent and sanctified, claiming the house for the day. I see her, bent towards the sun, water offering glistening in her hand, a ritual so ordinary and so infinite. “Your tea is over the Phalaicha,” she said—the village’s thinking perch, or so I have baptized it in memory, a place where old men measured the day and grandmothers folded themselves into rest.
The guava trees glittered then, trembling with droplets that applauded my tiny coronation, and I drank my tea with the solemnity of one anointed. But why, now, coffee in a patio, why does it taste not of coronation but of exile?
Later I tried to reconstruct—what happened after? But memory does not permit sequence. It grants fragments. I remember only that birds arrived from the south that year, and their arrival was not in the sky but in my mouth, on my tongue. I sang something sacred, or imagined I sang it. And then silence. Silence again. Middle age is an illness of silence, where the sacred remains remembered but unsung.
