When Its Leaves Fell

People perish. In the immediate aftermath of a death, it is despair and desolation that usually haunt others. But there are exceptions; exceptions that offer no explanation or reason.

I had a neighbor. He was unlike the typical Indian neighbor who has a great knack for bellowing at small kids or confiscating cricket balls. He was good, with a soul as gentle as morning sunlight. As a man closing to his 60s, he had a reliable government pension to survive on. His wife had died long back, and he had no one to call as his children. Naturally, his fondness for kids was immense. Among all the kids in my moderately vast neighborhood, I was his most beloved. It was almost everyday that he would hand me a ten rupee note to feast on a chocolate or two. But he possessed the greatest affection for someone else, someone devoid of hearts and heads: a peepal tree, rooted in his scanty backyard, a location visible only from my room.

He shared an inexplicable bond with that old tree. For the rational being in me, it was unfathomable. It mystified me; the times when he would sit beside the tree, gently caressing its hazel, rugged bark. Sometimes, a smile would adorn the ends of his lips. But most of the time, it was a deep, inexplicable sense of satisfaction that would glow on his dusky, wrinkled face. Watching him during those times through the tainted window, suspicion, puzzlement and fear would terrorize me.

But it is not this memory that perplexes and haunts me so mercilessly. One fateful Friday, in the crack of dawn, my neighbor passed away. But it was noon,  when a disturbing piece of news reached me; the cause of his death couldn't be determined. No failures or breakdowns or injuries. A dark, cold chill ran up my spine. I lay in my room, trying to make sense of the news, when a sudden, unrevealed impulse forced me to look outside. Through the window, I looked at the peepal tree. It appeared different. Gathering all the courage that I could, I went to his backyard. Piles of dead insects lay underneath the cold shade of the tree. Some crows, unmoving and lifeless, lay amidst those piles of insects. Its leaves, now devoid of greenery, lay in heaps over them, forming a blanket as if laying them to sleep. Deep cracks appeared on its much caressed bark. Its branches drooped, as if it was tired of holding them up for ages. 

It was at that moment that I realized, to my ghastly horror, that the peepal tree, like its owner, was dead.

Author's Note

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