At the center of it all was our tamarind tree. Power lines brushed the top of its canopy. Telephone lines too. The string of lights crisscrossing the storefronts and rooftops looked like someone had sliced up a bolt of lightning and rearranged it back in space. By five in the evening, the tamarind-tree junction was buzzing with crowds. A single hour at the junction was equivalent to spending ten years living in the town. Just standing there you could witness the town’s highs and lows, its charm and its filth, all in one place. The junction brought so much wealth and change, there was no end to the number of housing colonies that kept springing up to the south of the tamarind-tree junction. The people who moved to the town from elsewhere had a difficult time finding a place to live.

Yet, no matter how much the town changed, the tamarind tree was just the same. People stuck advertisements on its trunk. Tattered movie posters hung from its lower branches. Flags of all political parties fluttered from its limbs. The tamarind tree stood there, enduring it all, involved in nothing. No one even paid attention to the tree any longer. But they were saying its name all the time, for every little thing. Tamarind-tree junction. They might have forgotten the tree, but they still had to utter its name.

Asan had once spoken with pride about how he had served the human race well by saving the tree. It was true, as far as he was concerned. But even today I am not able to say with certainty whether the tree’s survival that day was a loss or a gain. I know about all the tragedies that followed. Asan didn’t—he had simply used the standards of his own times as a yardstick to calculate gain and loss. When you consider everything that happened later, perhaps it might have been better if the tamarind tree had been destroyed that day. After all, wasn’t the tree the very reason for the quarrels, arguments, disputes, and animosities that followed?

But perhaps we cannot say this with certainty. When man is hell-bent on taking the path of ruin, nothing can stop him.

4

4.

When the tamarind-tree junction was still the tamarind pond, there used to be a grove of casuarina trees to the south of it. Once upon a time, this grove was steeped in darkness. Like a pair of bellows, it constantly hissed haughty gusts of air. Anyone who lost their way and found themselves at this desolate place was overcome with a sense of emptiness and dread, and they quickened their steps, walking away as briskly as they could.