Prologue: The Last Vaidya

The banyan tree at the edge of the Kulkarni property had been dying for eleven years before anyone noticed.

Not the villagers of Varandha Ghat, who walked past it every monsoon on their way to the temple at the top of the pass. Not the MSRTC bus drivers who used its shadow as a landmark — left after the big banyan, then two kilometres of hairpin turns before the plateau. Not even the forest department officials who catalogued it as Specimen 847-B in their biodiversity survey of 2019, noted its aerial root spread at fourteen metres, and moved on to the next tree without touching its bark.

Baban Kulkarni noticed.

He was eighty-three years old, and he noticed because the tree told him.

Not in words. Trees do not use words. Trees use a language older than Sanskrit, older than the cave paintings at Bhimbetka, older than the first Homo sapiens who pressed a palm against bark and felt something press back. Trees speak in volatile organic compounds — isoprene and monoterpenes and sesquiterpenes — released through stomata in concentrations that vary by the picogram depending on what the tree needs to say. They speak in mycorrhizal networks, fungal threads thinner than spider silk connecting root to root across hectares of forest floor, transmitting carbon and nitrogen and phosphorus and information at speeds that would embarrass the Jio network on a good day. They speak in electrical signals that pulse through phloem at centimetres per minute, slow by human standards, urgent by the standards of an organism that has been standing in the same spot for four hundred years.

Baban Kulkarni could hear all of it.

He had always been able to hear it. As a boy growing up in this same village in the 1940s, he had thought everyone could. He had assumed that the tingling in his fingertips when he touched the jamun tree behind their house was normal — that everyone felt the slow, deep pulse that rose through the bark like a second heartbeat. He had assumed that the headache he got every March, precisely when the teak trees began their annual leaf-drop, was a common ailment. He had assumed that his ability to walk into a forest and know — without looking, without thinking, just know — which trees were healthy and which were stressed, which had water in their roots and which were parched, which were in conversation with their neighbours and which had gone silent — was something all vaidyas could do.

It was not.

His father, also a vaidya, had the gift. His father's mother had it. Her father before her. Going back — if you believed the family's oral history, which Baban did, because the trees confirmed it — to a time before the Marathas, before the Yadavas, before the Chalukyas, to a small Adivasi settlement in these same hills where the first Kulkarni had been not a Brahmin record-keeper but a vanaspati-vakta. A speaker-to-plants. A person who stood at the boundary between the human world and the green world and translated.

The British had a word for people like Baban. They called them superstitious.

The forest department had a word too. They called them local informants and paid them ₹200 per day during field surveys, then ignored everything they said.

Baban had stopped trying to explain it by the time he was forty. He practiced his Ayurvedic medicine in the village — setting bones, treating fevers, making poultices from neem and turmeric and ashwagandha that he harvested from the forest at times the trees told him were right — and he kept his mouth shut about the rest. The trees didn't mind. The trees had been keeping secrets for four hundred million years. They were patient.

But the banyan was dying, and patience had limits.

He felt it first as an absence. A place in the network where signal used to flow and now didn't. Like a dead pixel on a screen, except the screen was three hectares of sacred grove — devrai, the villagers called it, the forest-of-the-gods — and the dead pixel was its oldest, largest, most deeply connected member.

The banyan's roots, which had once pulsed with the slow electric language of a tree in full communion with its neighbours, were going quiet. One by one, like lights switching off in a building at the end of a workday. The mycorrhizal threads that connected it to the surrounding forest were thinning, the fungal partners withdrawing their hyphae from roots that no longer offered adequate carbon exchange. The volatile compounds it released had shifted — less isoprene, more methyl salicylate. In the chemical vocabulary of trees, this was not a whisper. This was a scream.

I am sick. I am under attack. Help me.

Baban pressed his palms against the bark. The trunk was three metres in diameter at this point, the bark rough and ridged, warm from the afternoon sun. He closed his eyes. He breathed in through his nose — the sweet-rot smell of fallen figs, the mineral tang of laterite soil after rain, the faint acrid note that shouldn't have been there. The wrong note. The note that told him the tree's vascular system was compromised somewhere deep, somewhere he couldn't see or reach.

He stayed there for forty minutes. An auto-rickshaw passed on the road below and the driver slowed, watching the old man hugging a tree, then shook his head and accelerated. A langur troop moved through the canopy above, the dominant male barking once before leading his group onwards. A koel began its ascending call from somewhere in the understorey — ku-OO, ku-OO, ku-OO — the sound rising like a question that never gets answered.

When Baban finally stepped back, his eyes were wet.

The tree was dying because the grove was dying. The grove was dying because the water table had dropped — borewell after borewell drilled into the plateau above for the new resort development, each one sucking water from the same aquifer that fed the ancient root systems below. The trees could survive drought. They had survived droughts for centuries. They could not survive the systematic extraction of the water that connected them to each other — the water that carried their chemical messages, that fed their fungal networks, that kept the living internet of the forest operational.

Without water, the network fragmented. Without the network, the trees lost their collective intelligence. Without their collective intelligence, they were just wood.

And wood burns.

Baban Kulkarni died on a Tuesday in March 2015, eleven days after his eighty-third birthday. Heart attack, the doctor in Bhor said. Baban's grandson — a biochemist working at NCL in Pune, too busy with his mass spectrometer and his funding applications and his marriage that was falling apart to drive three hours for the funeral — arrived two days late and found a house full of mourning relatives, a kitchen full of food he couldn't eat because grief had sealed his throat shut, and a letter.

The letter was in Marathi, in Baban's trembling handwriting, on the back of a forest department survey form. It said:

Nikhi,

The devrai is dying. You are the last one who can hear it. I know you think I was a superstitious old man. I know your science says trees cannot speak. Your science is wrong, and I can prove it.

Come home. Touch the banyan. Listen.

If you hear nothing, burn this letter and forget. If you hear what I heard — God help you, because no one else will.

Your Ajoba

Nikhil Kulkarni folded the letter and put it in his wallet. He did not go to the banyan. He went back to Pune, back to his spectrometer, back to the apartment where his wife's absence was louder than any tree.

He kept the letter for eleven years.

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