Her voice sharpened, bitter and raw. “There you are, towering over everything, ancient and untouchable, and I’m just some small, broken thing spilling my stupid life at your roots. Like I’m nothing. Like I don’t matter. Like I should just disappear.”
Her voice broke into a scream. “Trust me, I’ve tried!”
She stopped, shaking now, a bitter laugh tearing out of her. “And don’t pretend you’re innocent either. People still whisper about what happened here. About why they spit in your direction.” Her voice dropped. “I didn’t care about any of that. I just wanted someone to hear me. To see me. To treat me like I’m real.”
Tears streamed down her face as she whispered, “I’m so tired. I tried to be good. I really did.”
Maya wiped the tears from her bloodshot eyes, steadied herself with a wavering step, and muttered, “Perfect. I’m talking to a tree again. Figures. Always been wrong in the head.” She reached into the worn satchel at her side, pulled out a bottle, and said, “Here. Take this and leave me alone.” She tipped the half-empty bottle, letting the cheap liquor soak into Taru’s roots.
Taru stood there, crestfallen and lost in a fog of confusion, unable to form a single coherent thought as Maya staggered off into the darkness of the night.
3
It was that time of the year again where most trees around Taru shed their leaves. But surely, they didn’t endure the same feeling of weathering away on the inside as she did. The raw wounds left by Maya gradually turned into an abyss of smothering anguish and desolation as the last of Taru’s leaves were swept away by the dull wind in her indifference. She hadn’t looked at the afternoon sky in its sun-soaked vibrance for months. There was no incentive now. She had lost the only part of her that once lived and thrived in the throes of the dying sun. Even her memories with Maya felt like fragile illusions. A tree pretending to be human, dreaming up conversations she could never have had.
Taru had turned into a miserable husk when Maya arrived at last. Maya strode towards Taru holding her satchel that bulged with something. She dropped the satchel on the ground and pulled out what seemed like a patchwork of tattered old clothes tied together to resemble a rope. Her glistening eyes were lucid as she approached Taru’s trunk with surefooted determination.
The fabric of the rope swayed slightly in the breeze, catching the orange glow of the afternoon in its creases, its rough knots dragging it down as if tethering it to reality. It was when Maya knotted the rope into a noose, a primeval terror woke up inside Taru.
Images sprang from the darkest corners of her mind and flooded Taru’s eyes. Flashes of what seemed like a life lived by a stranger bombarded Taru’s mind. Suddenly, an enormous sense of powerlessness and loss weighed on her shoulders and she could feel an immeasurable physical and mental pain unknown to her, yet so familiar in ways she couldn’t understand.
Taru saw a vision. A girl was approaching her in it. Strangely, Taru could see her own enormous, looming form with leafless branches through the eyes of the girl. But the girl in the vision was not Maya. The girl's face was bloodied and swollen, her private parts ached violently, each muscle in her malnourished body protested in pain. She didn’t see the bruises; she felt them. She could feel the broken bones grating beneath her skin as she inched towards the tree wheezing, carrying a makeshift rope almost identical to that of Maya's.
The girl looked at the tree that was Taru like it was a gateway to a place where her troubles would cease to be. No. It was Taru who regarded the tree through the eyes of the injured girl. She, as the girl, climbed up and tied the rope on the branch that belonged to Maya. She slipped the knot over her head, tightened the noose around her neck, and stood on the branch. She glanced at the orange skyline and the red sun over the horizon. It looked peaceful and calm. It was as though it was welcoming her to a world without pain. It was beautiful. She stepped off the branch.
The fogs of the nightmarish vision cleared and her neck began hurting again, the truth dawned on Taru. The girl from the vision was clearly not Maya. And there was no Taru, the tree either. Taru felt as though unseen walls inside her mind came crumbling down as she began to realize that the girl was Taru herself. Taru, the tree was just a fiction, fabricated by a lost girl hanging from a rope, forgotten by all, even herself. For eons, she hung from that tree, unremembered, losing her sense of self with passing time. She couldn't even recall what she was called before she was dubbed Taru. At some unknown juncture, her spirit became one with the mighty tree she was tethered to, providing her the strength she needed to stand the test of time. Taru was the cursed existence Maya unknowingly aspired to become.
