Prologue
The mango tree had been old before anyone in the haveli was born.
It stood at the far end of the eastern courtyard, past the marble fountain that no longer ran, past the row of terracotta pots where the gardener grew tulsi and forgot to water it. Its roots had pushed up the stone around them over decades, cracking the courtyard floor into a map of some country no one had named yet. In summer it bore fruit that fell without warning — a soft, dense thud against the ground, and then the wasps would find it before anyone else could. The cook said the tree was a spirit. The gardener said it was simply old. The boy who sometimes sat beneath it said nothing, because he was nine and had already learned that silence was the safest kind of speech.
His name does not matter yet. What matters is this: it was the month of Jeth, when Lucknow wore its heat like a second skin, and the air smelled of jasmine going brown at the edges and somewhere, always, of itr, the attar of roses that the city exhaled through every door and window and passing sleeve, as though Lucknow itself had been soaked in it at birth and never quite dried. The boy sat with his back against the mango tree’s bark, a small Urdu primer open on his knees, not reading it. He was watching the light.
It came through the leaves in coins. It moved when the leaves moved. He had been watching it for the better part of an hour, which is a very long time when you are nine, long enough for the world to become simple again after whatever had happened that morning in his father’s chambers. The raised voices, the particular silence that followed raised voices, the way a room could be emptied of everything warm in an instant. He had learned to come here. The tree was indifferent to him in a way that felt mostly kind.
He did not hear her arrive.
She was simply there, suddenly and all at once, he has been staring at the light too long and when his vision adjusted, and she existed. A girl, perhaps five or six, standing at the edge of the courtyard in a yellow salwar kameez already dusty at the hem. Her hair was braided but coming loose, one ribbon untied, trailing. She had clearly been running, or trying to, the uneven flagstones making it difficult. She stopped when she saw she was not alone.
They looked at each other.
He did not know her. She was not from this part of the haveli, he would have recognized her if she were. She might have been the daughter of a visiting merchant’s household, or a servant’s child who had wandered past where she ought to be. She had the look of a child who ran wild without rules and without anyone telling her to be otherwise, eyes that moved over their surroundings with curiosity rather than caution.
Then, from somewhere beyond the garden wall, a musician began to play.
It was faint sound. A sarangi, or perhaps a bansuri, the kind of music that existed in the cracks between other sounds in this city, the way Lucknow was always holding some melody underneath its noise, waiting. Just a few bars. An evening raga played too early in the afternoon.
The girl lifted her face toward it.
And then, without preamble, without any self-consciousness, without looking again at the boy beneath the tree, she began to move. Not fully, for she was too young for full movement, too small for the vocabulary her body seemed to half-know but her little hands rose, and her feet shifted, and her head tilted with a precision that was not learned and not yet art but was, unmistakably, the seed of both. Her eyes were closed. The dusty hem swung. The untied ribbon trailed. She turned once, twice, slow, as though the music was carrying her rather than she performing to it.
The boy did not breathe.
He had seen dancing before, the mujra performed at court occasions, the ritual movement at temple celebrations he was taken to once a year. He had watched it from a careful distance, evaluating. This was different. This was a child who had heard three bars of afternoon music through a garden wall and had had no choice. He understood, in the wordless way children sometimes understand enormous things, that she was not performing. She was answering.
The music stopped.
She stopped with it. Opened her eyes. Looked around with the mild, unsurprised air of someone returning from a short journey.
She looked at the boy again, directly, without a hint of shyness, no hands clasped behind her back, head unbowed, and he looked back. He had the unsettling sensation that she had always known he was there, that his watching had not been secret at all, that she simply had not minded.
A flock of doves cried from somewhere beyond the far wall, the white wings flapped in the wind.
The girl looked toward the sound before she turned and walked away through the courtyard gate, ribbon trailing, and was gone.
The boy sat under the mango tree for a long time after. The coins of light moved across his open primer. The jasmine turned browner in the heat.
He never asked who she was.
And she forgot him.
The city closed around them both, and went on being Lucknow, which is to say, layered, and slow, and full of things that take years to understand, and older than anyone who has ever lived in it, and patient, so endlessly patient, in the way that only places that have outlasted every love ever made within them know how to be.
Somewhere, a bell rang once.
The mango tree held its fruit.
The story had not started yet.
___
Note
I am unsure what is the best platform for sharing this story. You may also read it on wattpad and blog. Please do let me know your thoughts.
Mistlefoe
Edited by mistlefoe - 8 hours ago
Iss Pyaar Ko Kya Naam Doon
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Seher Hone Ko Hai
