Chapter 1: Exodus

When Parapritika bent over at the river, her cottonflax-swirling hand-tacked pleat-encased bottom was as perfectly rounded as the pot she delicately balanced on the shapely curve of her childish hip. And when she staggering under the weight, turned around, putting her obviously sun-kissed leg up on the rock before hoisting the pot with well-worked brown arms onto her small head of widow cropped black hair—it wasn’t only Shailaja who noticed that it was as though her almond eyes were a perfect match for the space between her semi-parted lips.
It was well whispered that Parapritika was a girl gone wrong. True, she was beautiful-evenly dusky as though her colour was constantly deepened by massaging with foreign nut oils that everyone knew her mother could ill afford. But her eyes sparkled, and her voice rang shrill through the little settlement by the river at any time of the day or night. These, the village elders sighed despite their own instinctive affection for the child, were bad omens.
The child lacked Adakkam – the subduing of temperament that allowed her to be moulded into the good woman and wife and child bearer that she needed, with all her beauty, to be. It was thus self-evident, at least to all the women near the watering hole, that Parapritika, at 12 was a child-woman gone wrong. She was not in the least conscious of her body, her gradually developing breasts bounded about unfettered underneath her still child choli, and on the days when she did not get her period, she still ripped off her clothes with no small amounts of immodesty appropriate to a woman-to-be-married her age, and jumped shieking to be noticed, from the mound off the east bank, into the deepest part of the river.
She had been chided. And she had laughed, peeled off her clothes, and dived in none the less. It was beyond decency to expect her father to intervene in such matters, and when her mother would come out of pardah long enough to be spoken to by the panchayat, one could get no more than gentle nods by way of assurance from her. And the angrier everyone got, the more it would seem her eyes would sparkle with whatever mischief she had planned for the next morning.
One day, an unclean Parapritika was swinging in from the tree above the old women’s heads as they finished their ablutions, forcing them to run back, muttering cleansing chants and curses; another, it was to not bathe at all, and run through the main street with abandon that caused old men to toss their canes and jump back in the nick of time to spare being polluted. On other days, when she climbed trees with her brothers despite having her periods, her father’s wisened eyes would dull and shimmer with all the things he wished he could have said to her, and didn’t for she was his dark eyed, doe like, only daughter, born to him after the long line of seven sons. And he would turn away so she would not see the hurt in his face at what others said, and she could continue to run like the wind through the trees of her childhood. For he knew it was only a matter of time when she would be married, and gone away, along with her laughter and her shrieks, and her hugs and her noise, with sad downcast eyes, and bridal tears, and that was not a sorrow his old heart would bear thinking of.
And it was thus that Shailaja saw her first, one afternoon, when Parapritika lay hidden in the river, holding her breath until all the women had taken to their corners, bursting out of the water like a purple common water lily that had bloomed all too soon – bursting in spots with colour, and in others paling into the deep jamun coloured folds of skin that were forming nipples, small shafts of hair beginning to show under the upwardly outstretched glistening wet arms, and the streaks of red blood running down her oily yet shapely thighs. One leg lifted in merriment out of the water just long enough for Shailaja to follow with horror struck eyes the linear curve from her perfectly carved ankle round the back of her calves and upwards, into the pink flesh that Shailaja of her own had only probed and guessed what it might look like in the middle of the night, when her family was asleep, and assumed the rustling was the rats in the grain sacks.
For hours later, when the commotion had ended, when the old ladies and her aunties had cursed and spat and dressed and gone, to complain again; when Shailaja had gone to the corner and retched her twelve year old disgust away in a pile of phlegm under the bitter berry bush; and long after the resolve to never again enter the polluted river had melted away, Shailaja still sat, holding her stomach, her knees drawn protectively under her chin, still in a state of partial undress, her hair still damp, and her toes still duck webbed by being left hanging in the water too long, Shailaja was still quivering, and pressing down the butterflies of desire in her lower bell.
As the sounds of the voices of boys floated down from over and across the other side of the hill, Shailaja recollected herself, put on her clothes as quickly as she could, and darted past them on the road out, clutching her long silky tresses of still damp hair in her hand, her downcast fair as wheat face a burning red like grains dry roasted for halva.

In the middle of the road stood the tree. It was old and brown and knarly and thick. It twisted up, around itself for a while, when suddenly bursting free of its own knots as it reached the second storey before it leaped freely into a canopy of branches, increasingly slender as it reached the peripheries and knocked against buildings, balconies and telephone poles.
Few on the road beneath saw the tree. As in, not really. It stood there, as it had stood for centuries, when the road was not a road, when the city was not a city, and when men had chest hair, and women had stood under its leaves to swoon over them. Today, marked with the spittle and gum of passing roadside romeos who stood underneath to swoon in mockery at the women, and the clandestine cruise point for fugitive lesbians, the adulterous married, the abandoned grandparents, the noon spoils of the children’s beggaring trade, and the occasional unemployed but lying executive, the tree still stood stoic, but its head, if one had looked up shook and swayed ever so gently with every passing breeze, as if listening tenderly to the world unfolding beneath it.
"Is there some reason that you are angry with me?"
"No"
"You are not saying anything"
"it is not necessary for some people to say everything that crosses their mind"
"Very well, if you don’t like it, don’t listen to me again."
"I didn’t know that option was open to me."
"Oh, you are impossible."
"Nothing. I’m thinking of nothing. The Buddhists call it sangham."
"I believe that there is, but you are so selfish, that you will burn alone rather than tell me."
"I tell you everything,"
"That you choose to…. I take it I have not yet merited your trust, nor even your heart. No matter, it is probably a lack in something that I do. I trust you will kindly give me the time and space to right my wrongs"
Shailaja tossed her braided tresses back over her shoulder with the exaggerated sarcasm of gesture that underlined her words before storming off with raised eyebrows, and a seductively feminine gait.
Parapritika nervously glanced at her lover with raised eyebrows before supressing a smirk, and jumping out of the way of a passing cart. Just as she gathered up her skirts, and adjusted her silver anklet off her heel, to run after Shailaja, she thought she glanced baba turn the corner and head this way with the men of the panchayat, and both women scurried to get out of the way.
The women were sixteen, and both had been betrothed in their childhoods-to whom they did not know-and they had spent many an afternoon at the forbidden Friday bazaar wondering which of the fair traders come from the neighbouring villages might take them back with them on their next trip. The excitement was infectious and a group bond between all the girls of the village. It was all they spoke of as they worked the fields, and washed the clothes, and grew their hair, and learned to cook, and wash down the courtyard, and yet in all, and more so in Shailaja and Parapritika, lay the hope that doing their chores with sincerity, and pleasing god and the elders, would keep away the inevitable.
It was far easier for Shailaja, for womanly graces came very easily to her, even though, by all standards, she was the stockier and the more hardy of the two – but she had fine child bearing hips, and a no nonsense attitude that made her the more comely in weight of gold to a husband looking for a suitable goddess of good fortune to bring into his home.
She was fair, and even in complexion, with arms and feet, it was said, as soft as the malai her mother set aside for her from the cows in her father’s tabela.
It was now widely whispered that it was the good fortune of Shailaja’s company that had turned the errant Parapritka into an obedient child worthy of her soon-to-be-husband’s home. And this had only sent Shailajas own repute and her acclaim worth its harvest. What could she not do if she could do this? No mother-in-law, surely, would be match for her. And while Parapritika seethed and simmered, Shailaja would pat her hair, and while braiding it in the open courtyard, run an index finger gently up and down the nape of her neck to soothe her throbbing nerve. The two were by now inseparable.
And in time, Shailaja had taught Parapritika to grow her hair, subdue the fire in her eyes into more fruitful uses, whisper into her ear instead of shout across the courtyard, and act coy instead of brazen. There was little to be done about her walk, her habit of climbing trees, and sitting on the roof of her house when she got upset, but the very alteration of Parapritika’s personality was enough, and the silence about the duos comings and goings from the riverbank, spoke volumes of the miracles that had been performed.
And it was seen, and it was blessed. And it was held to be good by all.

For many days the spaces around the old deodhar tree seemed missing an aura, but it was not noticed by many. But when the breeze blew and descended around the trunk, it found a heated argument less, a spirited fight less, and a joyful screech of laughter less to cool. And it wondered what it was the two friends had argued over, and why they did not return to discuss it, and thought that they would meet not here but in the open courtyard that surely must connect their two homes.
And when Srimoyi, the village gossip with her loyal entourage came by at the end of the week, the restless breeze dropped and knew, like everyone else did by then, that Parapritika, she of the dark, almond eyes, and short cropped hair, the loveliest child widow in all the discovered lands, and sharp spoken, and the best langdi catcher in the girl’s team at the pathashala, had hung herself by the freyed ends of her blue and white dupatta from the deodhar that stood just outside her window, when she heard she was to be sold as helper to the old man with seven children in the town at the other end of the dust track.
Srimoyi said it was not the old man that worried her, but the children. And the tree added a wrinkle to its already furrowed brow when young unmarried Shailaja sat beneath her boughs, and clung to her knarled rooted feet and wept and wept until she shook, and the tree shook, and the breeze died, and the world, unshaken, came by to pick her up and take her home to fix her wedding to the same old man, who needed a child wife to look after his children, and cook his meals and press his feet, and stare at the ceiling, or out the window, as he pressed himself into her, and she bore him an eighth and a ninth and a tenth, god willing.
And god willing, Shailaja soon forgot, in all the tending and the cooking and the parenting, and it was only when she passed by the tree, which was rarely ever, that she remembered. But only for bit-when the twinge in her met the twinge in the tree-and the both bowed their heads and scurried past the memory that increasingly became fainter than a lover’s touch.
Except occasionally when Shailaja moaned by mistake when touched in her sleep, or thought that she had been so, would Parapritika come floating back to her in a night’s memory. Only to be lost to the morning.
Later, much later, when Shailaja had spent a lifetime in acquiring wisdom, she would berate her children for playing in dark spaces with her neighbour’s children, and boys could not play with the girls, and the girls could not play with the girls when nobody was there in the room.
And she grew wiser, and her lines deeper, and her eyes keener, and her tongue sharper, and the children and their wives, and the children and their husbands would scurry away their intentions at her slightest displeasure.
When she died they called her matriarch, stalwart, hub of the household, and they stuffed cotton in her nostrils and her ears, and tied her feet and as the funeral procession went past her childhood home, through the market place, and past the venerable old tree, the tree looked away, for he thought he saw Parapritika move from her perch in the old Deodhar, stir with life, and dance again with abandon in her boughs, as her beloved Shailaja would now come to join her.
For the rest of its life, the tree regretted what it had done – looking away, for it was said for centuries to come – that the tree became the symbol of the freedom of the sexes, the trans sexes, the bi sexes, the over sexed, the undersexed. It became a tree of sexual liberty, for travelers who sat underneath its boughs when the village was razed to dust by passing marauders and nothing stood of the people it once was the pride of, not even their graves – it mysteriously gave old men lust, and young men love, it made peace amongst warring couples as fresh as a good night’s sleep, and it found lover’s hands and held them together, and it was not always good. For fathers who had bestowed their daughters elsewhere would bemoan at the foot of it, and rich men lost to poor girls would be cursed by mothers who wished better fortunes on their sons. And wives who had lost to their husbands best friends and who knew not how to compete with men for their men came by and tied threads of passion around the trunk of the tree to pray for the secrets that would bring them back their men.
And the two sprites on the tree danced with mirth and giggled with joy when a prayer floated up to them amidst the boughs. And they picked some to answer, when they were moved to tears by the supplicants, and they picked some to disdain, when they were met with aims that did not suit their own free ones. And they mischievously turned some around so they wounded the answered, and created trouble where none was intended.
And thus old men ran away with their neighbours’ granddaughters, tailors with the milk men, and brothers with their sisters’ beaux. Children-little boys played with little boys in dark spaces – and their mothers were away tying threads around the tree trunk.
Soon enough was chaos – for the orders of marriage broke, and vows of the promised meant nothing. And when elders went to speak to other elders of the family, they found grandfathers holding hands with their boyfriends, and mothers happy to be part of threesomes from which children could never be born.
So in the lands between the two hills, under the tree of threads, and of many secrets, grew towns and villages and settlements where sex was, and passion and lust were free. It was free between genders, between ages, between societies and castes, between the colours of the skins and the kinds of bodies, and those who heard of the village, and who had loved and had no courage to speak their love came here to be unhidden, and unbidden.
They came from all over – some with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and despair in their hearts, some with everything they possessed – some came with lovers, some came alone. Some came with skills, some came with no clue of how to fend for themselves, how to earn for a living, where to find food, or how to cook it even. Young girls came in pardah, some in burqa, men in kurtas, some shirtless and dhoti clad. Muscular labourers blackened by the sun under which they baked their ardour, and nawabs in turbans and pearls and silken handkerchiefs.
And of the trees in the vicinity, the tree was the broadest and the oldest and the most sprawling. So some built tree view homes, and some built river view homes. Some set up shops in a merchant street where they could barter with their neighbours and haggle with the wholesalers. Some built dharmashalas to feed the constant flood of new arrivals. Others made foods, maps of the city, others sewed, swept, built houses, wrote letters back home to tell them not to worry, not to look for them, for they were safe, and happy and were not coming back.
But they soon realized they needed an army and a police force, and jails and a judge, for all the men who came weren’t honest, and all the women who came weren’t truly in love. Some came for money, some came for convenience, some came for the love of doing what was unbidden unto them. Some came for curiosity and soon their boredom bade them unto fresher pastures. Some of the men who came and proclaimed their love for their same sex lovers soon sheepishly went away back to their wives and children.
For love is not so rapturous as when it is forbidden. Some girls ran back to their homes, and being cast out for having run away joined the whorehouse in the dilapidated town squares as bi sexual prostitutes who sold their charms for what would barely buy bread.
Some returned to claim later to broadsheets that they had gone in as spies working for government agents and decried the moral state of destruction, the degeneration of moral fibre, the age of the fall of man.
One national leader won a landslide victory in his constituency by instituting counselors to weed out national menaces, teach correct sexual conduct, burning copies of the kamasutra.
But Parapritika and Shailaja wove a gauzen cover of innocence around the hamlets around the tree, and the news neither filtered in, nor if it did, did it affect the peace of mind, of those who lived under its silken frenzy.