Lalita and the Banyan Tree

Lalita never planned to fall in love with a tree.

The women noticed first. They could not fail to observe Lalita’s glow, skin lit as if she'd swallowed one of her diyas--tiny brass candleholders with ghee-soaked wicks--and the flame illuminated her from within. The women’s faces, however, drooped like sunflowers abandoned by sun as Lalita’s had also once done. They watched and wondered at the tree.

When Lalita finally merged with the tree, she wore the guise of mourning. Her widow's hair flowed as Ganga River, free of knots or braids. No bloodred bindi dotted her forehead—smooth as freshly-churned cream. No mangalsutra bound her throat; no bangles encircled wrists. Her sari, never exposed to the stains of dyes, gleamed white and pure in the sun. Barely eighteen, she flapped near its branches like a broken dove. Touched, the tree realigned her wings.

Lalita became betrothed to a local man at the late age of thirteen though most girls married at five. In this remote village in India's hills, ancient rules reigned and women accepted, resigned. Lalita's father, angry at having no sons, decided to utilize his only daughter. She would serve him, he declared, until she turned thirteen. "But who will want her then?" her mother wailed to the monkeys that chattered on the riverbank.

Monkeys stopped their babble, scratched behind ears, and pulled ticks from hides. Not knowing the answer, they continued to speak in tongues. Lalita, then aged six, saw her mother's hands bleed as she wrung out clothes in the river and beat them dry against a flat rock with only a monkey-chorus and a daughter to watch.

For as long as she could remember, Lalita crawled and ducked away from her father. Once, when she was four, she stood rigid as a stone temple pillar between her parents. She didn't want his chappal to slap her mother's cheek, leaving behind slipper-prints. Her mother made herself a shadow in the corner. She called to Lalita, telling her to run, to not worry. Her father’s foot drew back. Lalita spit on his toes. He glinted like a snake and moved to strike.

With him behind her, Lalita flew through nearby fields swarming with yellow butterflies. Temple bells tolled in the distance. Distracted, unable to see, her father tripped into smears of cow dung as butterflies danced before him. From then on only stealth gained him the prize of kicking his daughter's thighs.

Lalita learned to keep silent, to hide in forests. She learned to listen to the cautioning of monkeys' cries and the darting of lizards' forked tongues. She knew her father was near when the deer flattened their ears and raised limbs, nostrils quivering as they readied for flight. She sniffed for his scent lifted in the breeze and masked her fleeing footsteps behind rumbles of river over rocks. By heeding nature's signs she was able to escape his grip.

Soon another man whom she could not so deftly defy possessed her. When she turned thirteen her father, afraid to disobey divine dictates, fulfilled the kanyaadan--men's sacred duty to marry off daughters. The village men declared her too old, wanted more tender child-brides. Monthly blood, flowing like moon-tugged tides, already polluted her; she was no longer desired. Only an aged ox-cart driver remained to claim his bride. Squinting and almost blind, body bent and exposing an egg-sized lump on the back of his neck, he sidled up to her and, after sizing her up, pinched her upper arm. Licking his lips, he fingered the berry-ripe spot left behind. He agreed to take her off her father's hands with a dowry of their best milk-rich cow.

Quick with the whip that he lashed across the heads and backs of beasts, he rode Lalita as he rode his ox. Each night before straddling her body with head thrown back, he placed his whip on a table near her. She felt it would come alive and coil itself around her neck. In those times she barely let herself breathe.

Lalita, swift enough to avoid his whip during the day, was unable to evade him at night. She couldn't roll free from the weight of his thighs gripping and bruising her sides. She couldn't stay dry when his sweat dripped onto her belly and breasts, or prevent his unwashed, mud-and-animal scent. She learned her only defense.

Ignoring her husband's grunts, her body unresisting as earth, she imagined herself bathed in ripples of moon swaying to the music of God Krishna's flute. Peacocks shimmered and preened in these dreams. Lotus, pink and tantalized, slowly opened in ponds. Jasmine-scented air grew damp with her longing. In her mind, she laughed with mockingbirds, sang with maina birds, koyals and larks.

For five years she lived as a village man's wife. Silent, she bore the weight of water on her head as she carried earthen pots from river to her abode. She grew thirsty from heat, but didn’t take time to drink. As did other girls costumed as women, she bent her back and ruined her knees working hunched over in the rice and sugarcane fields. Her hands cracked and bled. She gathered vegetables that she rid of insects, cut, sliced, and assembled, for her husband's daily meals.

She collected cow dung, soon immune to its smell, spread it to dry, and patted it into patties used for fuel. She wove straw plastered with mud to make thatched-roof huts; she learned to wait until night to scrape out mud caked in her nails with sharp rocks. She molded, teased, and caressed wet clay into kitchen pots, touching clay like she could never touch a person. Like other girls, she twisted cloths into boiled plant-dyes until rainbows discolored her hands. She wrung and patted, shaped and molded, cleaned and washed and cooked and carried, and let him spread her legs, and slowly dissolved within her skin.

Then her husband got sick.

He groaned in his sleep as the world wept monsoon tears. Lalita wandered to the windowsill. As the rakshasi wind wailed her demon-loud howls, Lalita grew restless. Her feet could not stay still and insisted on beating in time with the rain. Her breath heaved along with squalls. She nibbled on wet lips. Her arms, bearing bruises of her husband's handprint, opened to embrace the blackening day. She went outside into the downpour. Her sari melted against her flesh like petals drenched upon darkened boughs.

Drawn to the lurching, drunken river with frothing waves, she didn't waver in her stride. Following the gush of the torrents, Lalita rushed along the river’s side, letting it be her guide. She passed woodland and field-- terrain as identifiable to her as the lines on her hands. Farther and farther she ran, past the village’s edge, until she no longer recognized the river’s twists and turns, and the alien land. Her footsteps slowed to a halt. Weary, she prepared to let the river-mud, like a reclaiming womb, pull and suck her in. She was waist-deep in water when she heard the calling of leaves disturbed. She knew, from the clarity with which she heard this call, this was no mere dream.

Lalita half-swam, half-waded, past an unfamiliar bend. Soon, out of the gloom, a banyan tree materialized. Its roots and branches overflowed the horizon. Within its network of limbs, it captured and held patches of silvery sky. She thought of wrapping those sky-bits around her like a quilt. With its slender fingers and veined, muscular arms, the tree summoned her. She responded. Dragging herself from the river she crawled through the clinging soil. She reached out. The tree felt solid to her touch.

Panting and only half-alive, she draped herself over a dry patch of earth under the banyan's aerial roots. Within its strange caverns of damp, ventilated walls, the wind grew tame. Calmed by its melodies, she stopped weeping and let herself sleep. For two days she slept as her husband, at home, drew his last punishing breaths. For two days the tree bent over her like a lover and kept her cool and safe, free from deadly fevers. Her sighs became less tremulous. Her eyelids stopped fluttering; her lips stilled. Night and day, day and night, she slept.

Some mornings later, a lush covering of dew left her damp with anticipation. She found herself cradled in fissures of sun-soaked earth between hanging roots, brown and tender as her skin. Never had she felt so warm, so moist, like a ripening fruit. High in a shag of leaves, bats flapped in sleep and bee-eaters snacked with whirring wings. Herons, blooming on branches like magnolias, swung elegant necks. Mice scampered in delight. Monkeys flicked tails, sinuous and nimble in the dawn. Hungry, Lalita ate beir, spitting out seeds, shuddering as berry-sweetness exploded on her tongue. She sipped from rain cupped in curved leaves, quenching thirst. The hum and the drone penetrated her silence. Exhausted, satisfied, she felt her body loosen.

After hours of languishing in shade and dozing in sun, she meandered from inside the banyan tree and leaned over a nearby pool to wash her face. The tree leaned over her shoulder, ringing her watery form with its emerald leaves. She touched the sparkling waves of her face, surrounded by precious leaf-gems. She turned to the tree and, bold now, threw her body against its trunk. She rubbed her palms over its knots and bumps, its ancient lines that held within them the passing of time. Pressing her mouth into bark, she breathed, her sigh fragrant as raatkirani, the night-blooming flower-queen. The tree shook. With its winding, powerful limbs it held her close. Lalita fell in love.

The women swear it happened during the Festival of Lights. When prayers were chanted at dawn as orange rays ruptured clouds, when hundreds of diyas lit doorways and paths, windows and yards, when patakas crackled and burst and village girls whirled in flaring, celebration-skirts, Lalita blazed with a secret. At first they thought it might just be the flicker of lamps that shone against her skin. The festival lights could not compare to Lalita, sun-radiant and smiling as she left the town behind. The women plotted to figure out why. They couldn't know that the sparks were ignited weeks before, while her husband, condemned by a fever consuming him like rage, tossed and ranted on his deathbed.

When Lalita left the Diwali celebration, the women followed. Earlier, they'd gathered after men had burned Lalita's husband, whom a wandering boy found dead in his bed, on the funeral pyre. The women crept, silent as vines, along the banks of the river as Lalita glowed ahead--a white shimmer against black, enchanting in moonlight. With her sari blowing behind her, Lalita flew over jagged rocks and broken twigs, desire spurring her feet. The women stumbled, not used to running in the night. Ankles swollen from bearing the weight of children, bodies bluish from years of work, they grumbled but continued, past the village’s edge. They saw Lalita, encased in a banyan tree, her back pressed against bark. Mumbling amongst themselves, they returned to their homes. That night, as their husbands lumbered clumsy upon them, the women thought of Lalita--her head cradled by vegetation and feathers from birds, her body cushioned in soft, giving dirt.

The next week, as husbands snoozed in midday heat and children played, the women sneaked out to watch Lalita clearing rotting debris from the tree-rooms, cool and green beneath aerial roots. Her hips swung and rocked to a song. The women leaned closer. They never knew she could sing. Her tune followed them home. Later, as they worked in the sugarcane, they practiced indulging. Husbands complained; children yelled. Their throats quickly went hoarse.

Lalita's body healed. Her sari lay out to dry upon a rock; she wore only blouse and petticoat. No hints of beatings remained. She sat, a golden bronze-like statue, on a branch, and rubbed oils collected from plants and herbs into her hair and body. She glistened, slick as leaves after rain. Light reflecting off the bougainvilleas tucked above her ears created dappled patterns upon her black hair.

The observing women compared Lalita to their split, bleeding lips and straw-brittle skin. Wrinkles changed their faces, sorrows dark like berries stained circles beneath dulled eyes. Cheeks sagged into hollows. Stretch marks tracked bellies and crisscrossed over breasts. Like the banyan's figs, their bruised flesh slipped into purple. Disappointments hung from them like bats on the banyan's boughs. That evening, as they bathed their children in the river, they caressed their babies' fresh flesh and dreamed of Lalita.

Lalita fully moved in to the tree. In quiet, whispering rooms, she made herself a home. A dugout space in the ground served as her oven. By its side, she lined collected fruits and vegetables. Crushed herbs neatly sorted on leaf-piles gave her spice; sugarcane sweetened meals. She drank milk from her dowry cow that nestled in an adjacent tree-space. Freed from lashings, the ecstatic cow gifted Lalita its thickest, frothiest milk. The tree expanded with the joy of Lalita's scents, laugh, movements. The women went home to meals they cooked for indifferent husbands and unruly children with only the worst parts left over for them.

They began to imagine how the banyan felt when touched by Lalita; how Lalita felt when touched by the banyan. Compared to the tree's might, their husbands looked weak. Compared to its muscled trunks, their husbands' limbs sagged. The color of its bark made their husbands appear pallid as decaying fish. The lushness of its crown reminded them of their husbands' scalps, dry and bald as waterless riverbeds. Compared to the sweet sounds of its birds, their husbands' words seemed embittered, and compared to the tree's fragrance their husbands emitted breath stale as air entombed in caves. They went back and forth from the tree to their village until the women decided to quit. Ignored by husbands, left alone to face the elements, like Lalita, they chose the tree.

Two months after Diwali, by the dawn's glow, the women snaked over now-familiar terrain toward Lalita and the banyan tree, leaving their sleeping men. They bore infants on hips, toddlers in tow. They approached and surrounded Lalita. She smiled and invited them inside. From dawn until dark, with Lalita’s help, the women settled in.

Among the banyan's spacious roots the women nestled and bloomed, each in her private room. As mothers rocked babies the tree rocked mothers. Some sang, some slept, some wept, some sucked on figs. They rested on mounds of soil, their arms and legs entwined with tree limbs. They bathed naked in the river, with sun dotting their skin. They feasted on jackfruit and mangoes gathered from the woods and let the juice dribble unchecked down their chins. They leaned their breasts upon low branches and let the tree take the weight from them. Like Lord Krishna with his beloved gopis, the tree multiplied.

That morning, the men of the village awoke late. Confused, they rubbed fingers caked with fertilizer into their eyes. The sting blinded them. No food waited ready to warm them; no wives knelt by their sides. They paced and called, they cursed and swore, to no avail. An empty pot rolled along the village path, trapping the echoing wind. For nearly two hours they hunted in vain for their wives. Tired from tilling the land, sore from sowing the seeds, they ached for their women, for their healing hands to knead away pain. Reality beset them. With whom would they celebrate the harvest? Who would help them gather the wheat? Who would help store it, bind it and prepare it for sale? With whom would they pray to the Gods of sun and rain? How could a village stay alive without any wives? The men, who trumpeted like elephants when they called out their wares in the village fairs, had no voices to acknowledge loss.

Then one of the men remembered a young woman with the sheen of morning upon her skin, with the clothes of mourning draped over her supple silhouette. He shared his memory and the men grew excited, recalling how their wives had whispered a name that rustled through their homes like wheat in gusts of wind. Lalita. The young woman once used like an ox by a husband more brute than man. The men had not liked her husband, had not liked the intensity of his abuse, but they had never thought to interfere. A man could do as he liked, after all, with his own wife. But what had happened to Lalita after the death of that man? Was that what their wives had gone to find out?

The men went to Lalita’s house on the village outskirts, and finding it bare, continued their search, hoping to spot their wives. They followed the river as it wound ahead; they stopped often to look around.

One man, who lived near the edge of the village, peered out of his sagging doorway upon hearing the commotion. Lalita’s father, feeble now with curved back and walking cane, hadn’t heard such noise in a year. Since the death of Lalita’s mother-- a death by drowning in the river that he termed an accident--his body and house had fallen into disrepair. Rain flowed through his roof, soaked the floor, and made his bed feel perpetually damp. The mice he failed to catch and kill left droppings in his path. Two birds, defiant, built a nest near a hole in the roof and roused him to cursing with chirping each dawn and dusk. He barely ate, living on leftover rice, vegetable peels and overripe fruit left out behind villagers’ homes that he pilfered as they slept. Without a wife to slap or a daughter to kick, his muscles hung weak and unused from his aging frame.

When he heard the men--men from the village who'd forgotten him--he came out and struggled to track them as they raced ahead on their quest.

The men’s quest led them out of the village’s realm and into a different land. For the first time they observed the landscape—the wild formations of silver-gray rock jutting from patches of dirt, the depth and greenness of forest and fields, the sudden stillness of birds, and the deer watching with one leg delicate and raised. In seeking clues to their missing wives, the men, and behind them, Lalita’s father, discovered the world around them. They trailed the river until they passed a bend.

Then the men halted and witnessed their wives. Their wives' midnight hair streamed loose down their backs. Their smooth sandalwood skin, their sinuous limbs, their lotus-shaped eyes: the men had never seen such a sight.

When he arrived, Lalita’s father found Lalita high up on a branch.

Towering above all of them stood a banyan tree that had multiplied its trunks, its free-hanging roots, its multitude of emerald leaves.

The men stared up and to each side, stunned by the size of the tree and by the way its roots cradled the women. The generosity of the tree, which could both contain and fulfill, made them feel small. And so they shrank themselves. With knees bent and arms crossed over legs, they squatted not far from the base of its roots and prepared to watch.

What they saw: women holding hands, leaning their heads close. Had they ever looked so into their wives' eyes? The men admitted not. One woman, with healing tree leaves, wiped at salt streaks on another's cheek. Had their wives cried? The men never thought to ask. Another wife rubbed her bare arm against a smooth branch; back and forth, back and forth she massaged, until they, hypnotized, wished she would rub so against them. Had they touched their wives like that? Had their wives ever really touched them? The men wondered why not. They watched as women, with bodies yielding and pliable as moss, hung over the tree's handsome limbs. Had they ever let their women so loosen themselves? The men remembered their own voices sharp with endless demands.

Hungry from the lack of home cooked meals, and lonesome in homes where their words bounced off walls, returning to them, the men decided to get their wives back.

"But what must we do?" asked each man to the other, stumbling over the never-before spoken requests. Not finding an answer, not able to approach their transfigured wives, they had no choice but to wait. They listened, quiet and still, until finally hearing the tree’s gentle reply. While Lalita sang from her lofty perch, the tree joined her in verse, and in so doing, responded to the men’s request.

It was then the men heard the tree's sounds: calming wind tunes, tapping of twigs, beating of wings, humming of life. Before they'd heard only the noises emitted by themselves: rustling of their clothes, grumbling in their throats, their own blood rushing in circles within their own heads. The men discovered how to perceive the world. They remained rooted to the ground. Except for Lalita’s father.

After listening to the duet of daughter and tree, Lalita’s father stepped from the tree’s network of shadows, moved past the trembling dowry cow. He dropped his cane, stood up straight, and walked over roots with feet lifted high. Glancing at Lalita, he turned away, embarrassed at how little he he'd known, at how much she'd grown. When he reached the branches, he pulled himself up, scratching legs and bruising arms, until he panted on a thin limb not far from his daughter. He rubbed his cheek against the tree’s bark and felt its answering vibrations. Wet streaks from his withered cheek stained the banyan’s bark.

Lalita’s father stared at his radiant daughter. Startled at his bold look, Lalita drew away. But, on seeing his awe, she relaxed and stretched out her hand. With a moan that startled birds and scattered mice, he bowed his head and touched the hem of his daughter’s white sari.

“Hai Bhagavan!” he murmured, then shouted, as he thanked God for the sight of this daughter, transformed into a goddess by a deity-tree that held her like a consort.

Lalita joined in his bhajan, his worship-song, her pitch matching his. When they first saw Lalita’s father, the women didn’t speak, but now they joined in the bhajan. The men, who'd shaken their heads and prepared to spit at the sight of an old man climbing towards his once-beaten daughter, also sang. Soon the air rang with their chants.

When the men’s lungs ached with song and their mouths felt too dry to continue, they went to their wives with open arms. They bent their heads to the tree’s roots, as they would do to the feet of a god. Only a god could humble them.

As if a temple, the tree gave them shelter. Drops fallen from leaves purified the men like holy water. Fruits growing near the tree became their prasad. The wives, who saw their men’s actions, delighted in such devotion. Banyan-blessed and wife-caressed, the men felt soothed and calm.

Years later, after Lalita and her father began to converse while sitting in banyan branches, after the men understood how to listen to the wisdom of a tree, after they petted and wheedled their wives, begging them back to their homes, after the village rang with temple chimes, the legend of Lalita and the Banyan Tree continued to be recited like a prayer-chant. Lalita, who learned how to find herself, taught the people the way to look. The tree, which willingly spread itself, taught them how to expand. Roots freely sprang from mother trunks and turned into trees that let out more roots. The banyan tree stretched across the world.