“It happened so suddenly that afternoon!”
“I know. The storm was bad. Wasn’t it?”
“Well, I guess the tree was also quite old. This one had been here since we moved into this society, five decades ago.”
“Anyway, it was dangerous the way it was leaning on one side. And that Abdul’s tapri underneath was also big nuisance. Bats at night and the brats all day. I hated it.”
“What a sound that was! Heh, na?”
It has been 36 hours since the Municipality’s emergency help arrived and cleared the tree blocking the apartment gate. But people would not stop talking about it: how strange, how shocking, how sudden, oh so scary, so lucky. Sometimes she wonders if everyone ever sees the same things, the world as she does. Did they know he was there that afternoon? Did anyone see him die?
The rain was still heavy, when she got out from the auto near Abdul Chacha’s shop. There was waterlogging on the road and the autowallah refused to go any further. Chacha recognised her, came running with an umbrella and handed it over to her without a word. He nodded his head. She understood, accepted it with a smile, a return nod, and began crossing the waterlogged road to reach the apartment a little further away. Not for a minute did she think that the climate was changing.
An hour later when she rushed to the window on hearing the crashing sound it seemed like some new forest had come rushing to the main road. It took a while before she started noticing, in the distance the old tree now fallen. And peeping like a white dove from a tree hole, a taqiyah, his skullcap.
