The Banyan Keeps Rewriting Us
By Kumar Sen
When I was seven, my grandmother told me the banyan behind our house grew backward first, into memory, before it ever touched the ground.
“It does not grow forward like other trees,” she said, folding dough between her palms. “It learns what to remember before it learns how to stand.”
I asked her how she knew.
She looked past me toward the yard, where the tree’s shadow pooled even at noon like something that refused to finish being used. “Because I have forgotten things I should still remember,” she said.
At the time, I thought she was joking. Now I am not so sure.
The banyan stood at the edge of our village like a question no one had agreed to stop asking. Its roots dropped from branches in slow, patient strands, touching the soil wherever they landed, as if testing which version of the world would agree to hold them. The older villagers said it had always been there. The younger ones said it arrived before the river changed its course the first time. Both were right, depending on who was speaking. That was the first strange thing I learned about it: answers did not replace each other here. They accumulated.
I left the village when I was nineteen.
What I remember most clearly is that no one else remembers me leaving the same way I do. My mother remembers morning. My father remembers evening. My uncle insists I left during a storm that never reached our district. When I corrected them, they laughed politely, the way people laugh at children describing dreams too confidently. Only my grandmother never corrected me. She said, “Then you left at the right time for you.” I did not understand what that meant until much later.
In the city, I learned how fragile memory becomes when it has too many witnesses. People agreed on dates but not weather, on events but not their weight. Even photographs seemed to argue with each other if you looked at them long enough. I assumed this was normal. I assumed villages were where stories stayed small, and cities were where they got corrected. I did not know yet that correction is also a kind of rewriting.
The letter came eight years later. My mother’s handwriting looked unfamiliar, as if she had learned to write again after a long illness. The river has changed course again, she wrote. But this time, no one agrees where it used to be. At the bottom of the page: Come before the tree finishes remembering you.
I read that sentence many times, slowly, as if slowness might make it behave. Then I read it again until it stopped feeling like language and started feeling like pressure.
When I returned, the village was almost recognizable. The roads still curved around fields that still pretended to belong to seasons. The river still existed, though it seemed less confident about where it had been the day before. But the banyan had changed in ways that did not stay consistent.
It was larger, yes. But also unstable in its presence. Depending on where I stood, different roots existed. Some angles showed structures that disappeared when approached directly. Once, I walked a full circle and saw the same hanging root twice in two different places, like a sentence repeated with altered meaning. The air beneath it smelled faintly of crushed green mango, sharp and familiar in a way I could not place.
And then there were the voices.
Not sound exactly. More like thoughts arriving already spoken.
“You took your time,” my grandmother said before I touched the bark.
I stepped back. The villagers nearby did not react. That was the second strange thing: they did not seem to hear anything at all.
I began visiting every day. At first I told myself I was listening for grief. Then for memory. Eventually I stopped naming it. The banyan did not remain consistent with itself. On some days my grandmother’s voice was sharp: You left because you were afraid of staying. On others: You never left. You only moved into a different version of here. Once, there was only silence so complete it felt like refusal.
The problem was not that the tree spoke. The problem was that it did not agree with itself.
Then the villagers began forgetting small things. At first no one noticed. A woman insisted she had never owned a red sari, though I remembered it clearly. A shopkeeper rearranged his shelves daily, confused each morning by his own design. A boy asked me who I was, not rudely, but as if checking a label that had faded.
That was when I understood the banyan was not preserving memory. It was testing which version of the past could survive being spoken aloud.
One morning I pressed my ear to the trunk and heard disagreement. Two versions of the same voice speaking over each other. You never left. You left too early. Then, softer: You were not supposed to return.
I pulled away, dizzy. For the first time, I understood my grandmother’s warning about forgetting. The tree did not preserve memory. It selected it.
That night I dreamed of the river flowing in two directions at once, one following known geography, the other tracing something older no one in the village admitted remembering. My grandmother stood at the split, holding both currents like fabric she could not decide how to fold. “You cannot keep both,” she said.
On the ninth day I found the root that did not behave like the others. It hung slightly above the ground, not yet committing to contact. When I touched it, I saw versions of my life layered without agreement: a version where I never left, a version where I never returned, a version where my grandmother remained present but unnamed, speaking only through others.
In that version of the world, I felt intact. Unfractured. Then it vanished, but the feeling remained longer than the image.
That evening I asked the tree, “Which version is real?” Nothing answered at first. Then my grandmother’s voice, very quietly: “Real is not what survives. Real is what you refuse to replace.”
I understood then what had to be done, though understanding did not make it simpler. I went to an old toolmaker who no longer remembered why he made tools. He gave me a blade without asking. “It is for something that should not be continuing,” he said, then forgot our conversation before I left.
I returned to the banyan before dawn. The air felt like a decision not yet finalized. My grandmother spoke immediately. “You will lose me,” she said, not as warning but fact. I placed my hand on the root.
“I already have,” I said. It was not entirely true, but it was close enough to act on.
The moment the blade cut, the village did not change dramatically. It shifted subtly, like language being edited mid-reading. I felt it first in my teeth, then in my name, then in the memory of her face. The voices did not stop, but they no longer overlapped.
“You are cutting the part of me that remembers you correctly,” she said.
I hesitated. Then I replied, “I am cutting what replaces everything else.”
Afterwards, there was no sound of collapse. Only a settling, as if competing versions had stopped insisting on simultaneous existence.
The banyan did not become silent. It became singular.
My grandmother did not speak again. Not fully. Not in ways that held. Sometimes I think I still hear her, but only when I deny it immediately afterward.
The villagers stopped losing small things. The red sari returned to memory. The shelves remained where they were placed. The boy remembers my name again, though he pronounces it carefully now, as if repetition might undo it.
No one remembers the voices in the tree. Sometimes I wonder if I am the only one who does.
I still visit the banyan. It no longer argues with itself. It grows forward now, in the only direction left to it. The bark still holds warmth in one particular place, faint and persistent, and sometimes when the wind moves through it, I hear something almost like speech forming and failing at the same time.
On some days, I arrive certain I will find nothing new, and still I hesitate before touching it, as if interruption itself has become a kind of ritual. Even when nothing answers, the silence feels occupied, as though it has learned my habits and is waiting for me inside them. I do not listen for meaning anymore.
Only for what remains when memory is no longer allowed to compete with itself.
And even that does not stay still. Once, I am almost certain I hear my name correctly, and then I am not.
Kumar Sen is a mathematician from India. His writing explores cultural reflection, misrecognition, and the strange logic of ordinary life. He is also a musician, composer, and bibliophile. His work has recently appeared in the latest issues of Reading into Culture and Unbroken Journal.