"What a glorious tree, "we both exclaimed as we took refuge under the desert kalpataru. Every bit of it, from bark and leaf to fruit and wood was put to use by the villagers. The best part was that the tree could be lopped at the time of sowing and left to stand in the fields. It fertilized the soil with nitrogen and since it had no leaves it didn’t attract any straying cattle. But by the time the crop was ready for harvesting, the tree was also ready with its foliage, by now turning into excellent fodder for the cattle. So  hurrah and all that. The villagers worshipped the tree and believed it grew on its own. As human beings could not plant it, they had no right to cut it. Pure nonsense of course. In the forest, all trees grew on their own, with a little help from the birds and the bees. It was only human rapacity which prevented the spread of the forest and helped the desert come into its own. There was no point in saying this to Cheri. She knew it as well as I.

Cheri was putting a salve on the blisters on her feet. "We should have waited for the sun to go down, "she said and passed it to me.

"Your need is greater that mine," I said.
"How long before we feel we are dying of thirst?"
"Could be soon enough," I replied tartly.

But Cheri was not looking at me. A group of men, women and children was suddenly upon us. All of them carried spades. They halted a little distance from us, one man came and addressed us.

"You are travellers, aren’t you?" he said, "Come and rest in Papuji's Oran."

He waited for us to get up, leaning on his spade, as if he had taken root, ready to wait forever. The children surrounded us but the others stood rooted where they were, their gaze fixed on us in undemanding, dead stares.  In the failing light of the dying sun or was it the emerging light of the nascent moon, they looked like crude pieces of abstract sculpture.

We had to get up. Immediately the guide and the others came alive. They started walking towards the Oran and we followed.

"Tell me", said Cheri, "is there no place in India where one can be alone? Without someone staring at you from six feet away?"

"This is your famous village hospitality!"I retorted. The guide was not averse to talking. He told us that they were on their way home after a day's labour at digging tanks. Courtesy famine relief. No wonder their faces, hair and clothes were saturated with a fine dust making them resemble limestone statues.  But their eyes no longer were dead or dazed with endless waiting. They were on their way to the oran, back to a good, square meal, something they hadn’t had in days. They had finally received their daily wage, after a week!

I saw the well first, then the temple behind it and forgot about the Oran, as my throat was like a sand dune. How had I borne it till then?

"I hope the well has water?"
"But of course," said the guide, "this is Pabuji's Oran."

Oh, is it so? Whatever. The important thing was that they were going towards the well, their sandy faces sprinkled with the mica of hope. Water ! But I almost died. They stopped short of the well and stood with folded palms in front of the temple. God! Oh God, save me. And then someone offered me a small tumbler of water. In fact he offered it to Cheri first ; but as I saw her hesitate, I grabbed it. I poised it above my open mouth and let a trickle fall. I handed it to Cheri after one gulp and motioned her to follow suit. She did not take it. "I have water," she said.

"Take it or they will be offended," I urged.

She took the tumbler, opened her mouth, went through the motions but did not allow any water to touch her lips.

"Bacteria, eh?" I snatched it back.
"I have water, "she repeated.
"And blisters on your feet," I reposed, "why not apply cream on them."
"Shut up."

The priest was offering us prasad now. Cheri, of course, managed to evade taking any. I took mine and went to the well to drink deep of its water, the guide asked us to eat at his place but we requested him to kindly excuse us as we wanted to spend the night in the Oran.

"We can, can't we?" I asked.

"But of course."

We told him we would like to see their tanks, koondies and wells in the morning. "The tanks have water, haven’t they?" Cheri asked.

"Yes a little", the guide said,"But the wells are all dry except this one. This is after all Pabuji's Oran."He touched his forehead with folded hands.

"We have heard that the Kaliana Lake has dried up in Jodhpur. Is it true?
"Yes, it has, we saw it ourselves. But I don’t understand why the wells have dried up here, in the village?"
"What can you expect when the government starts digging deep tube wells to cart the water to the city. The water level goes down and ordinary wells run dry."
"What about the new tanks that are being dug under the famine relief programme?"

The priest's laugh was like a cry of pain, "What's the use when there is no ground water?" he asked and then answered himself, "Ah yes, the poor get jobs and wages to tide over. Time will be when it will be ". I understood him. I knew time meant a year of rain in the desert. The rest was timeless famine.

I saw Cheri had made herself at home. She was sitting on the skirting of the well, taking photographs of the relief workers. She looked quite like an Indian in her kurta-pyjamas.

Behind her was a vast expanse of the Khejri trees of the sacred grove they had referred to as Pabuji's Oran. Something about them bothered me, but what?

"You are not allowed to cut trees here, are you?"I asked the priest. He clicked his tongue on his teeth and said, "Never ! We can pick the fallen twigs for funeral pyres but cut a tree, never, never! This is Pabuji's Oran, you know. Even the government does not dare. Whenever it has tried, it has got kicked in the arse. There was this officer who came last year, with sin in his heart, planning to cut the trees. As soon as he entered the forest, he fell down in a heap. It was a full three months before he could rise from the bed. Since then, no one has dared to come."Again he touched his forehead with folded hands to honour the keeper of the Oran.

"Can we go inside?" I asked.
"Sure, Sure," said the priest.

Cheri and I entered the Oran together. It was turning dark. It was not the setting sun. I had seen earlier but the rising moon. It's light was as yet pale and melancholic, too weak to fight the darkness but the earth beneath my feet had turned cool. We walked to the center of the Oran and came to a stop in silent agreement. There was nothing except the darkness, the weak moon and the Khejri trees around us.

I flung myself on the ground and began to massage my feet. Cheri sat down slowly, with the bag still on her shoulder.
"Put down the bag. Eat something. I had my fill in the temple. "I said. She did not move, just sat there in a stupor, staring ahead.
"There is no one here at six feet, is there?" I teased.
She did not speak. I lay down and closed my eyes.

There was no breeze. The torrid, scalding heat of the day was over but if was unbearably muggy. If only there was some movement of the air. It would have been an affirmation of life. I waited for a puff of air to touch my body. Not a waft, just a flutter; a tremor as slight as the inhaling and exhaling of breath. I could have slept then. But there was nothing. The oppressive stillness of the grove made me open my eyes in sudden dismay.

The moon had decided to confront the darkness. Its pale light had turned milky and partially illuminated the phantom Kherji trees. The black and emaciated trees stood inert like corpses. What use was the breeze to them? They hardly had any branches to swing with the wind. All they had were spindly trunks. They stood like armless cripples. Were they trees or skeletons ? Human skeletons. Was not the forest raised for the dead? The priest had said they were allowed to gather only fallen twigs for funerals. He had lied. They did not gather fallen twigs. They cut them off the trees. They were all dried up anyway.

God, how many people, died here every day, for them to have stripped all of them bare? A corpse for each tree! I moved closer to Cheri. She sat as before, dazed. Her moist clothes clung to her body. I touched her. There was no response. Accustomed to the moonlit darkness by now, I looked at her and saw tears streaming down her cheeks.

"Cheri," I called.
"No one should have to leave one's home," she said.
"They have no choice during a famine. But they come back when it rains. It is their destiny."

"Destiny! Religious belief! Superstition! Will you ever get rid of all that shit, The government may decimate whole forests elsewhere, it cannot prune the trees here because this happens to be a sacred grove. But one can blithely go on quarrying stone in the catchment area of the Kailana lake. Stone houses are status symbols after all." She was angry.

"Looks like they have started pruning the trees here, too."

"No, the trees look wasted, precisely because they have not been pruned. Otherwise, they would have sprouted new shoots and foliage. We saw how flourishing they can be on the way? But no, superstition decrees that the trees here may not be touched, so they are left to become scrawny skeletons without branches or leaves."

She was right. Such was the nature of Khejri in tune with the desert ecology. It had to be lopped to grow. It died if cut across the trunk and if left totally untouched, grew thin and scrawny like an ascetic. But things were not quite so simple. The line between cutting and pruning was so thin that it was sometimes necessary to take recourse to superstition to maintain it. But before I could say that, she burst out, "like me."

"Who?"
"These trees are me. No shoots or leaves. But at least they have roots. I have lost even those."
"You don’t need them after all, you are a citizen of the first world. A world which can send its garbage and poison to us," I said. The moon had moved overhead by now. She sat bathed in the moonlight. My statement shook her. She rested her hands on my shoulder.

I slumped to the ground and closed my eyes. That was not what I had wanted to say. I wanted to explain to her that for us, religious belief were more like military strategies than superstition. Allow the trees in the Oran to be pruned, let people know they were not sacrosanct and no power would save them from being cut.

Only an absolute decree against touching the trees could protect them. Otherwise the Oran land would have been acquired long ago by the Government for some vague development scheme or by wealthy Kulaks for private use. The ordinary villager would not have got even the little fodder and firewood, he did now. The well would have dried up, too. I could guess her retort, "Is the government your own or are you  still a colony?"I could guess it because that was exactly what I was asking myself. But I knew the answer. The rich used the poor in India just as America used the third world, to dump its garbage and poison. We were our own colony.

But the time for saying that was not now. The silence had deepened with the darkness to engulf the whole Oran. The leaves had long been motionless. Now the sky and the earth joined them in their slumber. It was impossible to break that immaculate silence. It had become an article of faith. I had begun to understood the true nature of nirvana.

A profound quiescence hushed darkness. The perfect union of the sky and the earth. There were millions of stars in the sky but they were soundless. The Khejris on guard were mute. We were a part of the unsullied silence. I fell into a soundless calm.

With the first light of the new day, the breeze let out its bated breath and woke me. I found Cheri sitting. Had she been awake the whole night? She smiled at me, adjusted her sling bag and got up. The temple bells rang out : I had to be up and about. Something made me stop on the way to the Temple. A luxuriant Khejri, rich with green leaves, stood on the threshold of the Temple. How had I not seen it the night before! "Strange", I muttered. Cheri smiled as if she was privy to a secret. And I couldn’t help but smile. I felt joy as if it had just rained. The breeze moved a little.

I filled my lungs with the fresh air as I paused under the canopy of the Khejri. May be it stood outside the precinct of the Oran. Or may be the boundary lines were not clearly drawn. I laughed. Have fun, sovereign tree, you are not bound by any rules. "Imagine, we missed this tree in the dark of the night," I sang.
"Maybe it was not there." Cheri said.
"What?"

She continued to move towards the well. I took time to collect myself. I found her by the well. She had the water tumbler expertly poised over her open mouth and she drank of the falling trickle in satisfied gulps. Her face was serene.

"What happened to your water?" I asked.
"I poured it in the Khejri".
"And its branches grew and spread overnight!"
And she dared to call us superstitious!
"No", She smiled, "That was part of my agreement with Pabuji.
"What are you trying to say?"
"You slept too soundly last night. I kept awake."
"So?"

She gazed silently at me for so long that the night's quiescence took hold of the Oran again. The birds, who were chirping away a while ago, fell silent. The temple bells stopped pealing.

For a moment the early light of the dawn grew as mute as the dark of the night. It was going to rain. I felt, drop on drop, if no more. I did not need words. There was answer enough in Cheri's eyes. The temple bells rang out again. Cheri spoke keeping time with them, "I am not going back." These were the words I had read in her eyes. Still, I sought confirmation. "Not going where?" I asked.
"America", she said.
"But all that later," she lowered her voice to a whisper. "Right now, I have to go to that part of the jungle." I had to laugh. So did she. As we moved on, I saw her salute the luxuriant Khejri.