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The Neem Tree at Viswanathapuram
There is an orchard at Viswanathapuram.
I know this because I built it. Or more precisely, Kancha Bhatta and I built it — which means Kancha did the harder thinking and I provided the enthusiasm and the saplings, in roughly equal measure. We planted the trees over several visits across a few seasons, arguing cheerfully about spacing and soil, and congratulating each other on every tree that survived. Most of them did. Trees, I have observed, are more resilient than the people who plant them.
The orchard surrounds a house. The house belongs to Abirami.
I should say at the outset that Abirami did not ask for an orchard. The house is a different matter — the land on which it stands came about when her father found himself in need of financial assistance, and I stepped in, acquiring the plot for Abirami out of my own resources. No fanfare, no ledger kept against her. Her father was helped, the land came to her, and the matter was closed. I built the house on it about twelve years ago, just before Skandan's marriage. The orchard, however, was nobody's plan but Kancha's and mine — an unsolicited addition that she accepted with the composure she brings to most things she did not ask for and cannot quite refuse.
I first saw Abirami the way one sees a sudden clearing in a forest — unexpectedly, and with the distinct sensation that one has stumbled into somewhere one was always meant to arrive. She was fair-featured, unhurried in the way certain people are who have no need to prove themselves, with eyes that held a quality I can only describe as alert repose. She was watching the world with complete attention and complete composure, the way a good doctor watches a patient — not coldly, but without being swept away.
I was, as the phrase goes, quite swept away.
We had five years that I shall not attempt to describe, because the right words for those years belong to a younger man and that younger man has been gone a while now. Suffice to say that when Skandan was born — our son, the axis around whom both our worlds now revolve at a respectful distance — we believed, as young parents do, that joy of this magnitude was permanent. We were not entirely wrong. The joy remained. It simply got buried, the way good soil gets buried under construction.
The construction, in our case, was my career.
I will not dress this up. Work took me away — first for days, then for weeks, then in a manner so gradual and so total that the distance between us became less a physical fact and more a condition of our lives. I travelled. I built. I acquired. I returned home with the frequency of a migratory bird who has begun to question whether migration is entirely worth the trouble.
Abirami, through all of this, said nothing.
I mean this literally. When she disagreed, when she grieved, when she needed — she said nothing. Her protest was a silence of such completeness that it had texture and temperature. You could not ignore it. You could only misread it, which I, in those years, consistently did. I misread her silence as indifference. Then as reproach. Then as a kind of hostility. I was, I now understand, wrong on all three counts. Her silence was simply the form her dignity took. She had decided, somewhere early in her life, that she would not diminish herself by asking twice. If you did not understand the first time, that was your limitation, not hers. She was not going to explain herself.
You can imagine how this went down with a man of my particular temperament.
My ego, never a modest creature, took mortal offence. I retreated further. She retreated further. We became, over the years, two very courteous strangers who shared a child and a property and a history that neither of us quite knew what to do with.
There came a time — this is the part of the story I find hardest to write without the benefit of irony — when I moved to Dharmarajapuram. My mother needed care. The village offered a life at a pace she could manage. Kamakshi and Kancha Bhatta made the household what it was. I found, to my mild surprise, that I belonged there in a way I had not belonged anywhere in some years.
My mother passed away four years ago. She was tended well, she went peacefully, and Dharmarajapuram held its breath with me that day and then resumed, as villages do, with the unceremonious continuity of the living.
Skandan, meanwhile, had long settled into his own life. Married, employed, steady — the solid young man his mother raised, with perhaps a fraction of his father's restlessness tucked somewhere out of sight. The house at Viswanathapuram had already been built by then — I had put it up about twelve years ago, just before Skandan's marriage, on the land I had acquired for Abirami from her father. She moved into it and made it hers with the quiet thoroughness she brings to everything. After Skandan's marriage, Abirami was in her village, in her own home, with her garden for company.
Viswanathapuram is Abirami's ancestral village. The land on which the house stands came to her in a manner that I find, looking back, rather typical of how things arranged themselves between us — her father had needed financial assistance at some point, and I had acquired the plot from him for Abirami, out of my own resources, quietly and without ceremony. It was not a grand gesture. It was simply the right thing to do at the time, and the right things one does quietly tend to outlast the grand gestures one makes with announcement. The land passed to her. I had been thinking, in that way one does when distances have grown long and words have grown short, about what I actually owed this woman. Not legally. Not contractually. But in that older, harder accounting that keeps its own books.
I had kept her funded throughout — this I can say without self-congratulation because it was simply what one did and does, and she would not have permitted anything less. Abirami has her pride. It is, along with the garden and the silence, the most defining thing about her. She routed everything through Skandan — what she needed, she told him; what he could not provide, she went without. I was never approached directly. I was, in her management of our arrangement, a silent investor in a company whose operations she ran entirely herself.
Building the house on her land, twelve years ago, was my way of saying something I apparently could not say in any other register.
Kancha and I grew the trees. Mango and coconut and gooseberry and, of course, neem. The neem was Kancha's idea, and it was the right one. It is now the most vigorous tree in the orchard — dark-leaved, faintly bitter in the air around it, growing with a kind of opinionated energy that I find, upon reflection, entirely appropriate.
Abirami lives at Viswanathapuram now. She tends the garden with the focused affection she has always reserved for growing things. She knows every plant by temperament, the way a good teacher knows every student — not just the name and the grade, but the precise nature of the difficulty. She does not talk to the plants, as far as I can tell. She simply pays attention to them. This, I have come to believe, is her version of love.
I visit. Not as often as I should, and more often than is perhaps wise, which is the particular arithmetic of complicated relationships.
When I arrive, Abirami stands at the door — not rushing forward, not hanging back. Simply present, in that composed, watchful way of hers. A meal appears without consultation. She knows what I eat. She has always known. The meal is her first statement. It is also, usually, her most affectionate one.
And then, sometimes, the storm arrives.
I have never been able to fully predict it. Something is said, or not said, or the visit is too short, or the gap since the last visit was too long, or the accumulated weight of years and distance and silence chooses that afternoon to make itself known. She flares. It is not pretty and it is not quiet and it is, I have had to accept, entirely legitimate. She has earned the right to her storms the way a person earns anything — through long patience that was never adequately acknowledged.
I listen for as long as I am able. Then, if the weather does not break, I retreat to Dharmarajapuram, carrying my guilt and my relief in roughly equal portions, like a man who has just narrowly survived something he deserved.
And then — this is the part I cannot explain and have stopped trying to — she calls. Or Skandan mentions that she asked after me. Or I arrive on the next visit to find her standing at the door in exactly the same composed way, and the meal is on the table, and the storm has passed as completely as if it never came. She does not reference it. She does not apologise and she does not require an apology. We proceed.
I used to find this maddening. I now find it, cautiously, something closer to grace.
She wants me to live at Viswanathapuram. She has said this, in her way — not by asking, but by making the house so unmistakably ready for it. The orchard is tended. The rooms are kept. The kitchen is stocked with the knowledge of exactly what I will want at exactly what time of day.
I am, in the language of my own village, a man still making up his mind.
My work keeps me near the city. Dharmarajapuram keeps me sane. The distance is two hundred miles, which is not far in the scheme of distances this relationship has already survived. I would like to settle at Viswanathapuram eventually — this I know as well as I know anything. There is something clarifying about the idea of ending where one began, of finding in one's final chapter the things that the middle chapters crowded out.
But not yet. And Abirami, who has waited with more patience than I had any right to expect, continues to wait. She does not ask. She does not remind. She stands at the door when I arrive, places the meal without consultation, tends the neem tree in the orchard, and allows the storms when they come and the warmth when it comes, with an equanimity that I can only describe as one of the more remarkable things I have witnessed in a lifetime of witnessing.
The neem tree, I should mention, is doing exceptionally well.
It has grown faster than anything else in the orchard, taller than the mango we planted the same season, broader than the coconut, more assertive than all of it. It drops its leaves in the summer heat and grows them back with an energy that is almost argumentative. The village women take its leaves for their rituals, its bark for their remedies, its oil for everything else. It gives without being asked. It does not sweeten itself for anyone. It is, in every sense, indispensable.
Kancha, when I pointed this out on our last visit, scratched his chin and looked at me with the expression he reserves for observations he considers approximately but not entirely correct.
"The neem," he said, "does not know it is indispensable. That is why it grows so well."
I looked at the tree for a while. Then I looked at the house, where Abirami was moving about in the kitchen, doing something unhurried and purposeful with the late afternoon.
I thought about saying something. Then I did not.
Some understandings are better arrived at in silence.
The Hillranger writes from Dharmarajapuram, where the evenings are long and the questions are longer.
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