GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2021/22

MANISH CHAUHAN
‘The Tree Wife’

SIMA EXPECTED THE PRIEST’S HOUSE TO SMELL like the inside of a temple – ghee, incense, vanilla-scented air freshener.  Instead, there’s the harsh, cloying stench of Tiger Balm.

She thinks of his young wife.  Imagines her slick fingers rubbing the grease over his back, his legs, before bed.    

Earlier, when she’d asked her mother how many years separated them, her mother had scoffed.  ‘All men are the same.’ 

It’s late in the afternoon, that time of day when the sky is at the point of turning.  Sima looks out through the front room window.  The light is pink and uneven, the clouds patchy.             

The priest recognises her mother from the temple.  ‘It’s always nice to welcome people with such deep faith,’ he says.

Just then, his wife emerges from the kitchen carrying tall glasses of rose sherbet that Sima knows are full of refined sugars but is too polite to refuse.

They’ve been married less than a year and it transpires the priest’s wife is from a village close to where Sima’s mother was born in Gujarat.  She is tall and thin with a face full of questions.  Over her Punjabi suit she wears a cardigan, thick and heavy, even though it’s the middle of spring. 

‘How are you finding Leicester?’ Sima’s mother asks.

‘Fine,’ says the priest’s wife.  ‘Full of Indians.’ 

Sima’s mother hands over Sima’s birth certificate, and as the priest goes about formulating a horoscope, Sima notices just how relieved her mother looks, despite the spray of acne that has erupted across her mother’s cheeks over the past week.

‘Your suspicions were right,’ says the priest.  ‘She’s Manglik.’ 

‘I knew there was something.  I should have come to you sooner.’

‘You’re here now,’ the priest reassures them, ‘and your daughter is still young.’

Her mother shoots Sima a look.  ‘She’s thirty.’ 

On each wall of the room are hung various paintings – of deities mostly; fair-skinned women with multiple arms, decked out in yellow jewellery, positioned atop pink lotuses, swans, crocodiles even.  Pretty.  Ready for battle.  Above the fireplace, a bronze statue of Natraj has been fastened to the wall.  It’s disconcerting to be smothered by so much faith and even though she doesn’t believe, it’s difficult not to feel as though they are being watched.

Still, what Sima does believe in is in keeping the peace, which is why she has agreed to accompany her mother to the priest’s house.  She doesn’t speak whilst they’re there, doesn’t trust her words won’t be used against her.  Instead, she looks with half-curiosity at the sorry display of books and charts scattered across the coffee table – mostly in languages she can’t read – and wonders whether it’s possible they contain the secrets to her life.  In amongst them she spots a tattered copy of Vogue.

‘You’re obviously an informed lady,’ the priest says to her mother and Sima detects a hint of something – flirtation perhaps, she isn’t sure.  ‘You probably already know that a tree marriage is the easiest solution.’

Her mother nods enthusiastically, but it’s the first Sima has heard of it.  The priest must see the alarm in her eyes because he lengthens his smile and switches from Gujarati into English.

‘Girls like you,’ he says.  ‘Unfortunate girls.  As soon as they marry, they pass their curse onto their husbands and become widows.’  She wants to laugh, bites the inside of her mouth instead.  He points to something on one of his charts, as though offering up proof, and she wonders whether some of her laughter has inadvertently crept into her eyes.  What would Joel make of this?

‘The idea is to marry a tree instead,’ the priest says, ‘so that it can absorb the curse.  Once the tree is fallen, it’ll take the curse with it, and you’ll be free to marry again.  People have been doing it for centuries.’

‘That’s a lot of dead trees,’ says Sima, but the priest looks bewildered.

‘What type of tree?’ her mother asks.

The priest clings to his smile.  ‘A peepal tree,’ he says.  Sima doesn’t know what kind of tree that is.  She’ll have to Google it. ‘She can even marry an idol of Lord Vishnu,’ he says but her mother looks dubious, as though it would be unfair to make God absorb a curse when a tree could do it instead. 

‘We’re going to India in a few weeks,’ her mother announces, ‘to visit my mother. If we could have it all done whilst we’re there,’ but before the priest can answer, his wife, who has been sat on the sofa the whole time, points out that there’s a woodland very close to their village that’s full of peepal trees. Her mother nods, vaguely. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I think I remember.’

‘We used to play there as children,’ the priest’s wife says, ‘but I think the government wants to dig it all up – so that they can build a factory.’

‘Even better,’ says the priest.  ‘Soon the trees will be gone, and you’ll not have to worry about felling them yourself.’  His smile transforms into something genuine.

As they leave, her mother hands the priest an envelope with two twenty-pound notes inside.  Meanwhile, his wife writes down directions to the woodlands, which Sima’s mother puts away in her purse.

They are silent on the way home.

‘I’m not marrying a stupid tree,’ says Sima, but her mother keeps her eyes on the road.  The sky is purple save for a strip of dwindling light along the horizon.  She wishes they hadn’t gone, tries to imagine what her friends might say if she told them.  ‘Lol,’ most probably, or ‘WTF’.  Then she thinks of Joel, imagines him cracking up at the news, then telling her off for not standing up to her mother.

Once they’re home, her mother waits until Sima’s father is in the room.    

‘Nobody would have to know,’ she says.  ‘Think of the man you’ll marry.  Do it for him.’

‘It’s absurd,’ says Sima, ‘all the things people make women do.’

‘Why don’t you say something?’ her mother says, turning to Sima’s father.

‘This is between you two,’ he says.   

‘Please Sima.  I’m not asking you to believe in it, just to do it. For me. For your future husband.’

They don’t know about Joel and Sima wonders whether now would be a good time to tell them.  Then she changes her mind.  She and Joel have been together over a year but already she knows he’s not the marrying kind, at least not without heavy persuasion. If she told him about this, he’d mistake her for being pushover.  Just the other day he shocked her by casually floating the idea of a threesome with a girl from their yoga class.

‘I’ve literally never fancied a woman in my life,’ she said, and saw the look of disappointment sweep across his face, as though she was depriving him of something fundamental. Later, once she was alone, she imagined what conversations they must have had – he and the girl – for him to even entertain the idea.   

*

Three weeks later, they land into the fug of Ahmedabad airport.  Her mother’s face is covered in angry, reddish spots.  It’s early in the morning and Sima’s uncle receives them.  She hasn’t seen him since she was six.  His hair is completely grey.  He has the same forehead, tired eyes, protruding cheeks as her mother.  He’s bought bottles of mineral water and a big packet of masala-flavoured Lays that Sima pulls open and eats, slowly, whilst looking out the window.     

It’s early afternoon by the time they drive into the village.  Her grandmother sits waiting for them, a small bundle of a woman with thin slivers for eyes that are nestled among countless folds of skin.  Nobody knows how old she is.  She takes up one half of a low wooden bed; the other half used to dry slices of mango.      

‘You’ll get used to it,’ her grandmother says, as she gives Sima a tour of the four small rooms that comprise the house, finishing with the toilet.  ‘Besides, squatting is good for your legs and your bum.’  She grabs Sima’s behind then lets it go.  ‘No meat,’ she laughs.  ‘No meat.’  It hadn’t occurred to Sima that her bum might be too small, but suddenly she feels like putting her hands over, to cover it. 

There’s a big yard at the back; two cows tethered to a pole in the corner.  Along the opposite wall are two thick tamarind trees that look as though they’ve been there since the earth was formed.  Her uncle says they produce enough fruit each year for him to make decent money at the market.  He pulls a pod from one of the branches and offers it to Sima.  She winces at the sourness.

They sit down to lunch – Sima, her mother, grandmother, uncle and aunt.  Her grandmother asks what’s happened to her mother’s face.

‘The doctor says it’s stress,’ her mother says.

‘What have you got to be stressed about?  You’re the Queen of England.’

She tells them about their meeting with the priest and they recognise his wife’s name as soon as she says it.

‘Since when did you start believing in all that hocus pocus?’ her grandmother asks, and Sima wonders how it’s possible that a mother and daughter can be so different.

‘You won’t understand,’ her mother says.

‘Why won’t I understand?’

‘I got married so young; you didn’t have to worry about me.  Sima’s thirty.  I already had two children by then.’

For a moment they are all quiet.   

‘She’ll get married in her own time,’ her grandmother insists. 

‘But I’m her mother.  I want to remove whichever obstacles I can.’ 

Her grandmother gives Sima a look, before gulping down the last of her water. 

Before bed, Sima checks her phone but the signal is terrible.  She had hoped to upload some photos but isn’t sure it’ll work.  In the end she did tell Joel about her mother’s plan.  He thought it hilarious, demanded photos of the tree she was two timing him with.  It had pleased her in a way – his capacity for jealousy, as toothless as it was.

‘At least now you’ll have something worthy to put on Instagram,’ he said.

‘Oh ha ha.’

‘Just make sure you don’t fall in love with it.’

She winked.  ‘You never know.’

*

The following afternoon, Sima’s uncle takes her and her mother to see the woodland.  It’s close enough for them to walk but the heat is unrelenting, swirling about them in thick swathes.  They don hats and she offers her mother sun lotion.           

The trees appear as if by magic and they find themselves in the thickest part of the cluster. The sunlight falls in a gentle cascade through the space between the leaves, illuminating them. It’s as though they’ve found themselves in the pages of a children’s book.

‘Can I pick my own tree?’ she asks. 

Her uncle laughs.  ‘Girls from England.’ 

To their left she finds one with a saffron thread wrapped around its trunk. 

‘Is there any way of knowing which ones are already taken?’

Again, he laughs.   

‘They’re not men,’ he assures her.  ‘Just trees.’

Before they move on, he rips a handful of leaves and pulls off some of the bark.  ‘For the acne,’ he says, nodding in her mother’s direction.   

*

At night they sleep, all five of them, out on the open roof.  It’s a large white space used for drying clothes, chillies, turmeric.  In the early evening, after dinner, her aunt brings up thick layers of bedding, flimsy sheets in case it gets cold and they sit and talk, leaving the rooms below completely deserted.  It’s around this time that her mother begins to open up, as though permitted by the darkness to reveal who she is.  She talks about her colleagues at the Tax Office, about the new temple at the end of Catherine Street that’s carved entirely in wood and marble, about the priest and his young wife who serve it.  She laughs, about things that happened before Sima was born.  Their memories whirl about them like mosquitoes, humming, settling gently on the ground.

‘Everything over there is so stressful,’ her mother says.  ‘Everything is so busy.  Sometimes all I want is to sit down, like I am now, and do nothing.’

Her grandmother tells stories; they emerge fully formed, lit up.  Nobody seems to care whether they are true or not.  Then, before they sleep, she asks for something, and both Sima and her mother watch in astonishment as her uncle rolls a joint. 

‘Since when you have you started smoking ganja?’ her mother asks, unable to mask her distaste.

‘Since forever.  Since my legs started to hurt.’

‘And you,’ she says, turning to her brother.  ‘Giving our mother ganja.’

He shrugs, as though it’s nothing to do with him.

‘It’s not good for you.’

‘I no longer care what’s good for me,’ her grandmother says. 

Sima asks if she can try some and her grandmother hands it over without a moment’s hesitation.

‘No,’ says her mother, ‘give it back.’  But beneath the blackening sky, Sima ignores her protests and takes an emboldened drag.

‘Why don’t you try some?’ Sima offers, but her mother simply covers her nose and looks away.

‘You’ve given birth to a wise girl,’ her grandmother says.

‘How long has this been going on?’ her mother asks but nobody responds.      

‘You’ve both come this far,’ her grandmother says. ‘Once you leave, you’ll not see me ever again.’

It takes just three puffs for Sima to feel the warmth in her head.  The weed she and Joel sometimes smoke is nothing like this.  She wonders how easy it would be to smuggle some back home. 

In the morning she wakes early, pulls on leggings and a vest to go for a run.

‘People will stare,’ her mother warns, and when that doesn’t work, ‘you’ll get lost,’ but their walk to the woodland yesterday has already etched itself onto Sima’s memory.  Still, her uncle insists she take her phone, just in case. 

People do stare, but she pretends not to notice.  She runs in a big loop around the village, passing a pond in which two buffalos roam, a row of shops with their metal shutters drawn, a field of pink flowers.  Before long she finds herself back amongst the trees.  The woodland is empty save for a woman sweeping up dead leaves.  She gathers them into a pile, ties them up into a bundle, carries them away on her head.  Sima sits on the ground and gets her breath back.  At the very centre there appears to be a cluster of trees, but on closer inspection she sees that it’s only one.  The bark folds over itself endlessly, mysteriously, like fabric.  The ripples remind her of a Cadbury’s Flake.  She walks around it, peers into its deep crevices.  A large hollow space has formed where the wood has split in two and re-joined further up.  It’s wide enough to sit in.  Strings of heart-shaped leaves hang over, creating a dense canopy.  There is no sound aside from the chirping of crickets.  She pulls out her headphones to listen to music, then decides against it.

Whenever she visits the woodland – which is almost every day – she’s surprised to find it thicker, more radiant, than before.  It appears to shed and accumulate layers all at once.  She notices the mud dusting the bark, the flutter of leaves along the base, roots like maps scribbling the earth.  She takes photos of the branches, of the shards of sunlight flitting down from above.  She attempts a selfie and fails, then wonders how many followers she’ll lose if she doesn’t upload anything for the duration of their stay.  

A while later she lays on the ground and takes a photo of the sky through the leaves.  Each surrounding tree is different, each with its own story.  She takes photos of them all, but not a single photo manages to reveal the truth of what she sees.  Invariably she finds herself back at the biggest one, its wide branches open like arms, the hole in its trunk, a cradle.  

On the fifth day she arrives dressed in a sari, one her mother has chosen – red with a green and gold border – that Sima thinks is too showy.  It hadn’t occurred to her she’d have to dress up for the wedding, that she’d have to become a bride.  The village priest is summoned.  He is a bald, smiling man who laughs each time he opens his mouth.   

‘You’ve picked a good one,’ he says, once she points out her tree.  ‘Look how big it is, look how strong.’  But as the ceremony takes place she finds herself torn – wanting at once for it to be over, but also wanting to know the minute details of what she’s signing herself up for, of what it all means.  Between mantras she asks the priest about the significance of the fire, about the steps he makes her walk around it, but his English is poor and he warns they’ll miss the auspicious alignment of planets if he has to explain everything.

‘Let him get on with it,’ her mother whispers. 

The whole thing takes an hour but before they head back to the house, the priest uses a knife to cut a small branch from the tree.  A single leaf has sprouted from its tip.

‘Take this back with you,’ he says.  ‘It’s good for a woman’s fertility.’

Finally, Sima asks her mother to take a photo.  The tree is so vast that only a small portion fits into the frame, and she makes her mother move far back in an attempt to get the whole thing in.  Later, once she’s changed out of her wedding clothes, she assesses the photographs.  In the second one she is nothing more than a tiny red sliver.  She makes a list of potential hashtags: #imarriedatree #treehusband #howdowelook, then deletes all three.

Deep in the night she wakes from a nightmare – one that slips from memory the moment her eyes are open.  The women are snoring beside her but in the far corner she sees her uncle stood smoking a cigarette, looking quietly out into the distance.  

‘What will they do with all the wood?’ she asks, startling him.  ‘When they dig up all the trees.’

He looks at her oddly, then shrugs.  ‘Whatever people do with wood.  Build houses.  Burn bodies.’ 

She visits the woodland even on those days it rains.  On their penultimate day she arrives later than usual and finds a group of boys climbing her tree, hanging off its branches, kicking the trunk to give themselves extra swing.  She waits nearby in the hope that they’ll leave, but they don’t and she has to come back later in the afternoon, when its hottest, just so she can sit in its cradle one last time.  She looks around herself, wants to remember everything – the trees that stretch beyond what her eyes can see, the green mist borne of sunshine.    Soon it’ll be gone; the thick, mangled roots torn from the ground, the million leaves left to curl and rot. 

‘Did you at least get to say goodbye to your husband?’ her grandmother winks, once Sima’s back at the house and sat beside her on the wooden bed.  ‘When your grandfather died I was younger than you are,’ she says.  ‘One morning I packed him three rotli and some khichri and sent him off to work and he never came home.’

Sima has heard this story before.  With each telling, further layers of legend are applied.  The grandfather who refused to speak a bad word against anybody, who’d gone out to work in the fields and suffered a seizure atop a banana tree.

‘When they found him,’ her grandmother says, ‘he’d vomited out the food.  He was lying in puddle of it.’

‘Didn’t you want to get married again?’ Sima asks.  Her grandmother’s face twitches, startled.  If Sima’s mother was here, she knows she’d tell Sima off.   

‘You don’t know how lucky we were,’ her grandmother says.  ‘Not long ago they used to make widows throw themselves onto their husband’s funeral pyre.  Imagine that.’      

‘Once they dig up all those trees,’ says Sima, ‘I’ll be a widow too.’

Her grandmother looks at her, her eyes wet. 

‘It’s a sin,’ she says.  ‘A sin to cut a peepal tree.  A sin to cut any tree, but especially a peepal tree.  It’s where God lives.  The roots are Brahma, the trunk is Vishnu, the leaves Shiva.  But does anybody care?’

Early the next morning they leave for the airport; Sima sees how tightly her mother clings to her grandmother, how neatly the old woman fits into her daughter’s embrace.

‘Stop worrying about so many things,’ her grandmother urges, ‘what’s going to happen will happen.’  Her mother begins to sob – loudly – and for a while is unrecognisable, transformed into the young girl she once was, before she left the village, before the weight of things settled across her shoulders.

‘So,’ Joel laughs, the next time they’re together. ‘You’re a married woman.  Well, as long as he makes you happy.’  She’s in his flat, on his bed.  She pulls the clip from her hair, allows the curls to fall down her back and settle in his lap.  There are so many things she wants to tell him – they multiply by the minute – but she fears speaking even the smallest amount might diminish some of their magic.

‘Guess so,’ she says, showing him the photos her mother took on the wedding day.  He looks at them fleetingly and smiles.  Just as easily his attention shifts back onto his phone and she fights an urge to snatch it from him.  The calm of the past three weeks evaporates in a single swoop.  She closes her eyes, tries to sleep, but he keeps shifting his body.

‘I’ve got cramp,’ he tells her as he begins to parade down the length of his tiny bedroom.

‘Haven’t you been keeping up with yoga?’ she asks, but he just keeps walking.  All she wants is for him to be still.

At night she finds herself back in the yellow-green fog of the woodland, asleep among the branches, the bark rough against her skin.  In the time she and Joel have been seeing each other, he’s tried to convince her that marriage is something unnecessary, but she’s no longer sure.  After each night spent in the woodland, she wakes with a distinct feeling of possibility, for the day, the life still ahead.  With Joel, all she can ever think of is the present moment.  Like a bright star he appears, then vanishes the moment she reaches out for him.        

Her mother’s face is almost clear now.  She starts dropping the names of boys into conversation – boys Sima has never heard of.  One afternoon, Sima sees a list of names next to the landline.  Beside each is an age, a profession, a phone number.  Half of the list has already been crossed out.

‘Why don’t you at least meet a few of them?’ her mother encourages, but before the conversation can go any further, Sima tells her about Joel.

‘Over a year!’ her mother says.  ‘I can’t believe you kept it from me.’  She seems relieved more than anything, as though it hadn’t occurred to her that Sima could take matters into her own hands.  Sima doesn’t know whether to feel pleased or insulted.  Her mother wants to know everything, about Joel’s family history, about his job, about the kind of person he is, probing questions that Sima has to think about, things that up until now hadn’t been a concern.  

‘Why don’t you get engaged?’ her mother urges, and immediately Sima regrets saying anything.

‘Please don’t start.’

‘Why not?  You’ve been together a whole year!’ 

‘He’s not keen on marriage.’

Her mother looks dubious, lets out a long, defeated sigh.  ‘What kind of man is that?’     

*

All through the summer, she and Joel attend weddings.  But rather than become engulfed by the saccharine mist of it all, she feels them drifting apart.  It’s obvious he has no desire to be there; she can see it in the way he drinks, the way he talks.  And it’s only on the dancefloor, once they’re both drunk enough and pressed up against each other, that she feels any semblance of that familiarity that once made her happy.  The things that first attracted her to him – his cocky assuredness, his free spirit – become the very things that begin to annoy her.  She looks around at their friends; nearly all engaged (in a few years there’ll be children) all neatly wrapped up in the bubbles of their own happiness.   

When, a few months later, things are still the same, she asks for a break and it’s unclear when exactly that break becomes something more permanent, but it does, until eventually a week goes by without her hearing from him. 

When she tells her mother about it, she ends up crying, even though it was Sima who instigated the breakup.

‘What if I can’t find anybody?’

‘Nothing’s too late,’ her mother assures her.  ‘Nothing’s too late.’

‘Is it really too much to ask,’ says Sima, ‘to be with somebody reliable, somebody solid who’s always there?

*

A year passes before they receive a call in the middle of the night, telling them Sima’s grandmother has passed away. 

‘How can that be?’ her mother demands.  ‘How can that be?  I spoke with her only yesterday.’  She locks herself in the spare room and emerges hours later, her eyes dull and sore, to announce that she wants to attend the funeral. 

‘I’ll come with you,’ says Sima.  A flight is booked for that evening.

They telephone her uncle, who arranges for ice to be bought to the village, on which the old woman’s body will be laid out, to stop the decay and the smell, although by the time Sima and her mother arrive at the house, most of it has already melted and her grandmother looks like a puffy white cloud, fallen to the ground, leaking water.

The funeral takes place later that afternoon.  A wooden frame holding the body is lifted from the ground and men from the village carry it on their shoulders all the way to the edge of the pond.  It can’t be that heavy, Sima thinks; her grandmother’s face and body look like two empty sacks.  She closes her eyes, tries to imagine her grandmother’s laughter but can’t, then finds herself crying because of it.  Her mother, stood beside her, takes a hold of her hand.

The body is lowered onto a funeral pyre and covered with planks of wood, each a different shade, a different size.    It’s impossible to tell whether it’s branches she’s looking at or the trunk.  Perhaps it’s neither, perhaps it’s the roots.  From the side it looks like an entire forest.

The priest who conducted her wedding carries out the funeral.  He stands to one side chanting prayers as her uncle walks around the pyre, a small clay pot on his shoulder from which a stream of water runs steadily to the ground.

Once the fire is lit, it takes only a few minutes for the wood to catch, for the flames to rage and hiss like serpents, until the whole pyre is covered in blue and orange.  She feels the heat against her face, and the smoke.  The fire grows taller, faster, louder.  Every so often there’s the sound of something breaking or exploding.  She no longer wants to be there.  She wishes she could simply turn and run, but beside her, her mother is heaving with sobs.  Then she remembers what her grandmother said and thinks of all those women who were made to jump onto it, who were pushed.  She hears their screams as the fire tears through their flesh, their bone.  She clenches her fists, thinks of hell.    

The following day she walks to the woodland but finds it gone.  She walks back to where she began, starts again, in the hope that it might appear.  She approaches a young man perched by the side of the road, selling oddly shaped tomatoes and cucumbers on a slanting wooden cart.

‘That’s all gone,’ he says, throwing a hand over his shoulder, as though it’s a person they’re talking about rather than a woodland.  She returns to the empty construction site where the earth has been levelled, where mounds of concrete and steel frames have been set out along the ground.  There’s a sign to keep people out; she ignores it.  Once she’s at the centre, she closes her eyes and tries to invoke the magic of all those trees.  In places where the earth is still visible, she searches for roots, stumps.  She wants to know where all that wood has gone, and the leaves – masses and masses of them.  She thinks of houses.  Burning bodies.  The heat of the afternoon thickens with each passing moment, beating down mercilessly, until she can feel the sweat in her armpits and on her face.  She looks up, half expecting the leaves, the branches, to still be there, shining down, protecting her.