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An old crone moved to sit closer to him. She had so many canisters, he was forced to lean right out of the window and to hang on for dear life. What is more, she was one of those old women who despise a silence. Especially irritated by Sampath’s face in its cocoon-like veil, she used her voice like a needle to reach and poke. ‘Where do you come from and what is your family name? What does your father do and how much does your uncle earn? How many relatives do you have in your house and how many cupboards? And the way to really good health is to drink a litre of buffalo milk first thing in the morning before the sun rises.’

Sampath felt the marvellous emotion that had overtaken him begin to sag. The bus groaned its way up the slope of the hill. For a brief moment, the engine hiccuped and the bus stopped. In this moment, before the driver changed gears and proceeded up the hillside, Sampath leapt from the window of the stalling bus, spurred by his annoyance at the old crone’s voice. Amazed passengers who happened to be looking out at the view as they continued their journey saw Sampath racing into the wilderness towards an old orchard visible far up the slope. He ran with a feeling of great urgency. Over bushes, through weeds. Before him he saw a tree, an ancient tree, silence held between its branches like a prayer. He reached its base and feverishly, without pausing, he began to climb. He clawed his way from branch to branch. Hoisting himself up, he disturbed dead leaves and insect carcasses and all the bits of dried-up debris that collect in a tree. It rained down about him as he clambered
all the way to the top. When he settled among the leaves the very moment he did so – the burgeoning of spirits that had carried him so far away and so high up fell from him like a gust of wind that comes out of nowhere, rustles through the trees and melts into nothing like a ghost.

The passengers who happened to be looking out of the window might have sworn they saw a monkey man leaping in the orchard, causing the leaves to jump and quiver. But they were tired from selling their milk all morning and rubbed their eyes before they looked again so as not to be deceived. By then the bus had left Sampath’s tree far behind and everything was its normal self again.

The tree Sampath had climbed was a guava tree. A guava tree larger and more magnificent than any he had ever seen before. It grew in the orchard that had been owned by the old District Judge of Shahkot, before the government declared the land to be part of an area reserved for national forest.

Concealed in the branches of the tree he had climbed, Sampath felt his breathing slow and a wave of peace and contentment overtook him. All about him the orchard was spangled with the sunshine of a November afternoon, webbed by the reflections of the shifting foliage and filled with a liquid intricacy of sun and shadow. The warmth nuzzled against his cheek like the muzzle of an animal and, as his heartbeat grew quiet, he could hear the soft popping and rustling of plants being warmed to their different scents all about him. How beautiful it was here, how exactly as it should be. This orchard matched something he had imagined all his life: myriad green-skinned globes growing sweet-sour and marvellous upon a hillside with enough trees to fill the eye and enough fruit to scent the air.
The leaves of these trees were just a shade darker than the fruit and the bark was a peeling away of tan over a milky paleness so delicate and so smooth that his fingers thrilled to its touch. And these trees were not so big, or so thick with leaves, or so crowded together, as to obscure the sky, which showed clean through the branches. Before his eyes, flitting and darting all about him, was a flock of parrots, a vivid jewel-green, chattering and shrieking in the highest of spirits. This scene filled his whole mind and he wondered if he could ever get enough of it. This was the way of riches and this was a king’s life, he thought … and he ached to swallow it whole, in one glorious mouthful that could become part of him for ever. Oh, if he could exchange his life for this luxury of stillness, to be able to stay with his face held towards the afternoon like a sunflower and to learn all there was to know in this orchard: each small insect crawling by; the smell of the earth thick beneath the grass; the bristling of leaves; his way easy through the foliage; his tongue around every name. And then, as the afternoons grew quick and smoky and the fruit green-gold and ripe, he’d pick a guava … He’d hold it against his cheek and roll it in his palms so as to feel its knobbly surface with a star at its base, its scars that were rough and brown from wind and rain and the sharp beak of some careless bird. And when he finally tasted it, the fruit would not let him down; it would be the most wonderful, the most tasty guava he could ever have eaten …

Yes, he was in the right place at last. Tiredness rolled over him like a wave and, closing his eyes, he fell into a deep slumber, lodged in a fork in the guava tree.

The day their son moved into a tree, the Chawla family, worried and full of distress, took up residence outside the local police station. They sat on the bench beneath the station’s prize yellow rose creeper and waited for news of his whereabouts. That is, the three women sat on the bench while Mr Chawla walked around and around the building, making the policemen dizzy by shouting through every window he passed during his circuits. If he were the Superintendent of Police, he said, Sampath would, right this minute, be back in his usual vegetable-like stupor between them.

The town made the most of the drama. Neighbours came by regularly for news and everyone shouted out their support on their way to and from the market. In some places there are people of quiet disposition and few words, but around Shahkot they were a very rare exception. People visited their friends a great deal, and when they visited their friends, they talked the whole time, and in this way a great deal of information was passed back and forth, from even the most remote and isolated of places.

So although for one awful day it seemed as if Sampath had vanished for ever, the next afternoon the watchman of the university research forest bicycled into town to bring his married sister some curd. Along with the curd, he also brought the news that, in the old orchard outside Shahkot,
someone had climbed a tree and had not yet come back down. Nobody could tell why. The man, he said, would answer no questions.

‘If someone in this country is crazy enough to climb up a tree, you can be sure it is Sampath,’ said Mr Chawla. ‘There is no doubting the matter. Thank goodness the property no longer belongs to that judge or he would have Sampath clapped in jail for making a disturbance in his trees. We must just get him down without delay.’

Holding hands, the family ran together to the bus stop, their rubber slippers slapping against their heels. They caught the same bus Sampath had taken on his journey out of Shahkot and got off close to where he had leapt from the window to run up the hillside, and here, far beyond the edge of the town, they made their way down the crisscross of little paths that led into an old orchard that had once borne enough fruit for it to be shipped to and sold in New Delhi. But it had been abandoned for many years now, the fruit acquiring the tang of the wilderness, the branches growing into each other, and these days was used only by an occasional goatherd grazing his flock. The orchard trees stretched almost all the way up the hillside, bordering, at its edge, the university research forest.

With determination and purpose, the Chawla family clacked about, shouting up into the leaves. At last, at the far corner of the farthest guava grove, right near the crumbling wall that bordered the forest, they discovered Sampath sitting in his tree eating a guava, his legs dangling beneath him. He had been watching their efforts with some alarm.

What on earth was he to say? He imagined himself declaring: ‘I am happy over here.’ Or asking in a surprised fashion: ‘But why have you come to visit me?’ He could answer their accusations with a defiant: ‘But for some people it is normal
to sit in trees.’ Or, serene with new-found dignity, he could say: ‘I am adopting a simple way of life. From now on I have no relatives.’ However, he did not wish to hurt anyone’s feelings. Perhaps he could leave out the last line and add instead that everybody was his relative. He could hold on to the branches and shout: ‘Pull at me all you want, but you’ll have to break my arms before I’ll let go.’ He could scream: ‘Try to move a mountain before you try to move me.’

In the end, as it happened, he said nothing at all.

‘What are you doing up there?’ shouted Mr Chawla. ‘Get down at once.’

Sampath looked sturdily into the leafy world about him, trying to steady his wildly fluttering heart. He concentrated on the way the breeze ran over the foliage, like a hand runs over an animal’s dark fur to expose a silvery underside.

Pinky felt a sudden surge of embarrassment for her brother. ‘Get out of the tree – the whole family is being shamed,’ she said bitterly.

‘Oh, come down, Sampath, please,’ his grandmother exclaimed. ‘You are going to fall sick up there. Look at your thin yellow face! We had better take you to the doctor straight away.’

Still, he was silent.

Looking at her son, Kulfi felt the past come rushing back to her, engulfing her in the memory of a time when she was young, when her mind was full of dark corners, when her thoughts grew deep and underground and could not be easily uttered aloud. She remembered the light of a far star in her eyes, an unrecognizable look that had made her a stranger to herself when she stared into the mirror. She remembered the desperation she had sometimes felt, that rose about her as if she were being surrounded and enclosed by an enormous wall. She looked at her son sitting up in the
tree and felt her emotions shift, like a vast movement of the spheres, and then she said: ‘Let him be.’

‘Let him be!’ said Mr Chawla. ‘Do families allow their sons to climb up trees? You are the number one most strange mother in the world. Your son climbs up a tree and leaves home and you say: “Let him be.” With you as his mother, no wonder he has turned out like this. How can I keep normality within this family? I take it as a full-time job and yet it defies possibility. We must formulate a plan. Only monkeys climb up trees.’

Sampath clutched the branch he was sitting on and held it tight.

Monkeys climbed up trees. Beetles lived in trees. Ants crawled up and down them. Birds sat in them. People used them for fruit and firewood, and underneath them they made each other’s acquaintance in the few months between the time they got married and the babies arrived. But for someone to travel a long distance just to sit in a tree was preposterous. For that person to be sitting there a few days later was more preposterous still.

In desperation, the family called upon Dr Banerjee from the clinic in the bazaar, and, an energetic man, he arrived as quickly as he could to view his patient. He had a moustache and round glasses and a degree from the medical school in Ranchi. ‘Come down,’ he shouted good-humouredly. ‘How do you expect me to examine you while you’re sitting up in a tree?’

But, oh no, Sampath would take no risks. He was not a fool. He would not climb down to be caught and – who knows? – put into a cage and driven off to the insane asylum on Alipur Road, like the madman who had interrupted the ladies’ home economics class at the university and been lured and trapped by a single sweet. So, at the family’s
pleading, Dr Banerjee, who prided himself on being a good sport, hoisted himself into the tree, stethoscope and blood-pressure pump about his neck. He climbed all the way up to Sampath so he could look into his eyes and ears, check his tongue, listen to his heart, take his blood pressure and hit his knee with an expertly aimed karate-like move of his hand. Then he climbed down and got back into the scooter rickshaw he had arrived in. ‘He is a crazy person,’ he said, beaming, the mirth of the entire situation too much for him. ‘Nobody except God can do anything about that.’ And he disappeared back into town.

The family went on to see the doctor of Tibetan medicine who had been recommended by their neighbour, Lakshmiji. ‘A variety of cures may be prescribed,’ he said. ‘For example, medicines derived from the scorpion, the sea scorpion, the sea dragon and the sea mouse.’

‘What sea mouse?’ shouted Mr Chawla. ‘There is no such thing as a sea mouse,’ and he dragged the family from the dark little clinic, despite their interest in the sea mouse. They went on to the homoeopathic and Ayurvedic doctors, and to the naturopath who lived all the way in Kajuwala.

‘Unless he faints from hunger, a diet of millet and sprouts is not going to make Sampath descend from the tree,’ said Kulfi firmly, and they decided not to pursue the recommendation made by the nature doctor. After all, they did not want to starve Sampath. However, dutifully they pounded pellets into powders, brewed teas and once, twice, sometimes ten times a day they counted out the homoeopathic pills that looked and smelled promising but wrought none of the miraculous changes they had been assured of. Finally, they visited the holy man who lived outside the tea stall near the deer park.

‘Sorry to disturb you. Our son is afflicted.’

‘How is he afflicted?’

‘He is suffering from madness.’

‘How is he suffering? Is he shouting?’

‘No.’

‘Having fits?’

‘No.’

‘Is he tearing his hair out?’

‘No.’

‘Is he biting his neighbours? Biting himself? Is he sleepwalking? Does he stick out his tongue and roll his eyes? Is he rude to strangers?’

‘No. He eats and sleeps and takes good care of his hair. He doesn’t shout and he doesn’t bite himself. He has never been rude to strangers.’

‘Then he does not exhibit any of the sure signs of madness.’

‘But he is sitting up in a tree!’

‘Arrange a marriage for him. Then you can rest in peace. You will have no further problems.’

It is necessary at some point for every family with a son to acquire a daughter-in-law. This girl who is to marry the son of the house must come from a good family. She must have a pleasant personality. Her character must be decent and not shameless and bold. This girl should keep her eyes lowered and, because she is humble and shy, she should keep her head bowed as well. Nobody wants a girl who stares people right in the face with big froggy eyes. She should be fair-complexioned, but if she is dark the dowry should include at least one of the following items: a television set, a refrigerator, a Godrej steel cupboard and maybe even a scooter. This girl must be a good student and show proficiency in a variety of different fields. When she sings
her voice must be honey-sweet and bring tears of joy to the eyes. When she dances people should exclaim ‘Wah!’ in astounded pleasure. It should be made clear that she will not dance and sing after marriage and shame the family. This girl should have passed all her examinations in the first division but will listen respectfully when her prospective in-laws lecture her on various subjects they themselves failed in secondary school.