Tendu

The riven trunk of the old fig tree marks the start and the end of Tendu. Tedious summer heat, heavy air. The green of fresh rice paddy, gold of standing corn and red of children’s paintings on little caves, scantily scatter the area. In the shadows of the night, the fig tree echoes harsh hoots beneath the talons of the old white barn owl, bearing wisdom and perception as a gift that unravels with time. Where the vision of the old owl still reaches, lies the town, the romance and the brawl, nasty potholes and overflowing trash, big sidewalks and tiny feet, stench of stale food and cheap perfumes, crusty walls and doma stained teeth.

However, Tendu holds a special gift. Time moves differently here. It can be stopped, intercepted and re-lived through the vivid words that paint the events so brightly that the stories come to life. Much like a reflection of the city’s physical shape, and the cylinders of its old counsel’s eyes, the lives in this place are lived running in circles-in the telling and retelling of stories. History persists in this place.

By the slender stems of a budding fig tree that dances next to an old cave, almost a 100 years ago, a man collapses in his journey to escape the sight of his blood stained hands that now tremble at the unease of having killed his wife. He becomes a sandcastle at the shore of his own doings, with an inability to do anything but wait for his impending collapse because of the waves of his own guilt. He crumbles a few feet from the cave when his body basks in the filth of a journey weeks deep into the untamed jungle. He collapses, and the weight of his emotions slowly kills him, slicing off all of his heartstrings one at a time, until his heart falls into his stomach and he cools to a corpse. Death. A week later, the wife’s brother dashes through the forest to the little cave in rage, eyes blood red at the loss of his little sister, when he sees the man lying face down by the cave. With no hesitation, he flips the man over and is greeted by the sight of maggots-plump and pink, feasting on the man’s body like theirs was created for the sole purpose of doing it.

The sight leaves the brother so disturbed that he walks further down the jungle where he finds himself in a sunken circle of a depressed land, noticeably lower than the mountain ranges that surround him. In what remains a desolate patch deep within the Himalayan forests, he is greeted by the sight of a time that remains beyond his . He sees vast areas with sharp edges of mud layered houses surrounded by the golden tips of flourishing crops. He sees little kids frolicking about with delight painted on their faces, chattering women in good distance walking with lotas of water carefully nestled underneath their bosoms and sun tanned men in gray undershirts peering over their wood carved benches with hand rolled beris pressed between their calloused fingers. However, as abruptly as the vision greets him, it leaves. He returns with the knowledge of a magical land that he recognizes will become the founding ground of his tribe. He decides to call it ‘Tendu’; the coven of transformative happenings.

Over the next few decades, when the tiny fig has grown to be a handsome young wood housing a pristine white owl and his family, the cave near it leaks of notoriety. The young owls curiously peek over the hollows of their nest during dusk to watch men of liquor dipped breaths flaunter their pillages that reek of disdain and fear. These middle-aged men, having been abandoned by their business of cardamom trading with their bartering partners due to the uncomfortable deep jungles they reside in, have turned to a hedonistic approach to life. Fearless and practically lawless in the deep labyrinth of the mountains, they feed off the havoc they invoke on the others that live in Tendu. With trading situations becoming worse with no proper regimen to modulate, more men turn heads, lapping like hungry dogs at the prospect of living consequence free and in his state of nature in disorder and dishonesty.

Some decades later, the same cave echoes of valour and audacity. A group of young men all armed in skillfully sharpened machetes convene around the whispers of the cave in an attempt to overthrow the guns of the British that threatens to steal the land’s magic. These men discuss in fear laden voices about the ascendency of blood they owe to their children and more generations to come. In the next year, the same men busy their teeth over the plump flesh of goat and chicken in feast and in celebration. Humans have once again displayed an arbitrary gift to recognize, reconcile and protect what they hold dear to their being.

Occasionally after, the baby owls now more sensitive with age, cry when the air becomes laced with the grief that leaks the mothers that lower the tiny bodies of their children into the deep heavy soil, having lost them to disease. They remain victims to time that carries unpredictability as its greatest edge. Other times, the owls perform happy little celebratory dances at the tunes of festival and laughter that spills from houses nearby and reaches their hearings during the nocturnal hours. Tendu today remains a land of eyes that brims with excitement at the fresh layers of tar that branch over the tract of the land.

A lot changes in a hundred years. Loss makes blood transitory, war displaces blood, and blood replaces blood.

In Tendu, you are stationary and time passes through you. Time envelops you in the grief it has felt, pride it has conjured, the momentary contentment it once felt a spark of, and the dreadful anticipation it detests but cannot dessert. It remains a little coven of all happenings, sometimes forgotten but always reminisced with an influx of uncategorized nostalgia. Each man that has traveled by Tendu has lived the entirety of its history and each man, in his blunder or kindness, has built Tendu to be what it remains.