Meeting a Five-thousand-year-old Peepal Tree

After dinner, Arjun could not sleep. He tried the ceiling fan's helicopter-doubt soundtrack for approximately twenty minutes and then gave up and went to sit on the front step.

The night was extraordinary. He had forgotten — or perhaps never fully learned — how dark a sky could be when there were no city lights to argue with it. The stars were not individual points here; they were a field, a crowd, a complete overcrowding of light so excessive that it seemed almost rude. He stared at it for a long time.

From somewhere in the darkness beyond the last house, he heard something.

It was a sound like many small voices speaking at once. Not human voices — softer than that, and more continuous. A rustling that was somehow also a murmuring, as though thousands of small leaves were turning over the same thought simultaneously.

'Nani,' he called softly into the house.

She appeared at the doorway, wrapping a shawl around herself. 'Why are you not sleeping?'

'What is that sound?'

She listened. Her expression became, for a moment, something he couldn't quite read. 'That is the tree,' she said simply. 'Go inside. Sleep. You will see it tomorrow.'

✦ ✦ ✦

The next morning Arjun ate poha with peanuts and a small fried papad on the side, and asked Nani about the tree.

'Which tree?' she said, with the manner of someone who knew perfectly well which tree.

'The one that makes the sound.'

'The Peepal. At the edge of the village. It has always been there. Before the village, I think, though no one can say for certain.'

'How big is it?'

Nani put three more mini-mountains of poha on his plate. 'Bigger than you can imagine,' she said, 'until you see it. And then bigger than that.'

He found it before lunch.

He had been exploring — which is to say he had been walking in increasingly wide circles around the village, systematically not being impressed by things, when he followed a small alley between two houses that became a path, the path that became a dirt track, and the dirt track that arrived at a low stone wall that had been decisively defeated by tree roots.

The roots came first. That was the thing. Before he even raised his eyes to see the canopy, the roots were already everywhere — grey-brown cables running across the ground, lifting the old stones of the wall, disappearing into the earth and re-emerging several metres away, creating a landscape of wooden ridges and shadowed tunnels that would have been excellent for toy cars and was, Arjun thought, probably excellent for snakes.

Then he looked up.

✦ ✦ ✦

The tree was —

He didn't have a word for it. He had words for large things. He knew 'enormous' and 'massive' and 'huge.' He had seen the Gateway of India and Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus and the sea. But those were large things that existed in relation to other large things. The Peepal tree at the edge of Banspur existed in a different category entirely. It was the kind of large that reorganized your sense of scale.

The main trunk rose out of the ground with the unhurried confidence of something that had never, in its life, considered the possibility of not being there. It was wider than Arjun's bedroom. The bark was grey and deeply channelled, like a map of a river delta, and the channels were home to moss and small ferns and at least one tiny spider who had clearly made excellent property decisions. From the lower branches hung aerial roots that had, over what must have been centuries, reached the ground and become secondary trunks, so that the tree was not quite one tree but a parliament of them, all connected, all part of the same ancient enterprise.

The canopy was immense. It blocked a significant portion of the sky. And in it — through it, around it — moved the leaves: heart-shaped, with their distinctive long tips, trembling in a breeze that Arjun couldn't actually feel on his face. The sound they made was the sound he had heard the night before. Constant. Complex. Almost like —

He sat down.

He sat down not because he decided to, but because his legs brought him to the base of the trunk and arranged him there — back against the bark, knees drawn up, the roots making a sort of accidental armchair around him. The bark was warm. Warmer than the air, which was already verging on serious in the April heat. He put his palms flat against it.

The sound of the leaves increased, slightly.

'I wonder,' Arjun said, to no one in particular, because he was eight and sometimes thought out loud without noticing, 'what you have seen. In all these years.'

Nothing happened.

The leaves rustled. A crow somewhere above delivered its opinion of the world. A dragonfly performed a series of aggressive manoeuvres near Arjun's left ear and then departed.

Arjun leaned his head back against the warm bark and closed his eyes.

He meant to just rest them for a moment.

✦ ✦ ✦

He dreamed — or thought he dreamed — of time moving backwards. Not quickly, not like a film rewound, but slowly, like a river reversing its current. He saw the village shrink: the concrete houses becoming wood, the wood becoming mud, the mud becoming open land. He saw the road become a path become a deer track become nothing. He saw the sky go from hazy to clear, from orange with city-light to the impossible star-crowded black of last night, and then further back, to a sky that had never known smoke.

He saw the tree.

It was younger in the dream — the trunk narrower, the canopy smaller, the aerial roots just beginning their patient descent — but it was recognizably the same tree. The same essential quality of watchful stillness. And in the dream, the tree was watching something: a group of people who were not quite like the people Arjun knew. They wore different things and moved differently and they were sitting under the tree's younger shade and one of them was speaking and the others were listening, and even in the dream, even watching from a great distance of time, Arjun could feel that what was being said mattered enormously.

I remember them, said a voice that was not quite a voice. It was more like the meaning that hides inside sound — the thing your ears deliver to your chest rather than your brain. I remember all of them.

Arjun woke up.

The afternoon had moved. The shadow of the canopy had shifted and the light was a deeper gold now, full of floating motes. His back was slightly sore from the bark.

He sat very still.

The leaves were rustling.

He was almost certain that was not what leaves normally sounded like.

✦ ✦ ✦

Excerpted with permission from The Trees Know All the Stories written by Saharia R. Published by Notion Press (April 2026, Pages: 286, Rs 499)