Asan told us that the grove had been there even when he was a little boy. But he could not tell us if the trees were packed so densely by nature or if someone had planted them that way. No matter how vehemently we pursued a point, he’d never admit he didn’t know the answer. “Why do I care about all that? All that mattered was it was a fine place for a game of cards,” he said, evading the question. But he was right. For nearly fifty years, young men from our town—as well as nearby towns—went to the casuarina grove for their early lessons in habits that would quench their minds’ appetites. Card games, ganja, alcohol, pornography, the Kama Sutra, symptoms of sexual ailments, their cures, stories of legendary whores—every casuarina tree in the grove has borne silent witness, watching and listening, as young men learned these things. Those simple trees must have been shocked and terrified by the deviancies of human minds, by our endless proliferation and perversion of desires.

Asan told us that, just as the morning sun started to bear down, the herding boys would arrive with their flock and drive the buffaloes into the tamarind pond. Then they would head off into the casuarina grove and turn the place upside down with their antics. They particularly enjoyed climbing the trees like monkeys. While the branches of the trees became smooth as the boys’ palms rubbed against them, the boys’ hands grew blistered and cracked like the branches had been—Asan was great at such naturalistic descriptions. I also remember Asan saying that, as the boys got used to leaping from branch to branch and tree to tree, in time they developed their own favorite pathways in the air, so much so that even when they jumped with their eyes shut, branches would appear magically to receive them.