Liminal

“Liminal”
By Oindrila Ghosal
The mangrove tree that once stood, propped between water and mud, was the first to drift to the meandering river that partitioned the forest in half. The silver sands of the now dry riverbed glistened under the soft moonlight. Its dense foliage of rounded leaves, bathed in lunar iridescence, fluttered in the breeze like those of the inhabitants of the stretch. Unlike it, they, who had never spread their roots in nothing but rocky terrain, wafted a few pleasantries its way and went about rustling their leaves with the mundanity of everyday existence. It only eavesdropped—without adding anything of its own. It knew that, like its erstwhile audience, fatigue had long settled in the recounting of the uprooting. At least they had new incidences to share in the midnight catharsis. At least they were not entwined in the loop of blooming and logging.
The duplex bungalow with the front garden, staggering on its wooden pillars, walked out of the sea of whispering exchanges and joined the tree, slipped into silence on the pebbles. It dug its pillars deep into the sand and painted every inch of its dimensions in ethereal glow. Almost in another life, when its occupants had dined on its veranda under the full moon, their laughter and secrets had deepened the flood of light. In the rooms, on other days, it seeped in their melancholy. It had even decked up with them for festivities. And then, before being razed to the ground, it had waited alongside its garden weeds, for their return through many calendar years. The new tenants, the moss carpet and the peepal shoots sprouting on its nooks, brought no news of them. They never walked through the gates again. The bulldozer did.
Through the tree’s and the bungalow’s reminiscence, the woman emerged from the woods and sat between them on the sand. They had a cyclicity to revisit, to rewind. She had none—nothing she wanted to recollect.
In the river, where they were now basking in their own fables and the moonlight, her battered body, tied to a log, had been drowned. Breath had long left her body, along with her plucked-out entrails. And in the autumn, when the river had parched, she had finally sat upright in her reclaimed body, atop the cage of her bones, and had remained that way through the life and death of the river, till one night, her two unusual companions—the tree she had not been bound to, and the house she had not grown up in, befriended her.
And like every new friend, they had poured out their sorrows in languages neither understood, in the first night. They had only sympathised with the pain in stories penned in the same ink. Their transparent bodies had even fitted themselves into each other’s narratives to see through the unambiguity of life better.
Now, her white, moon-like face stared at their meditative structures and looked the moon in the eye. Miles away, it was a witness to the string of their lives and afterlife. The intimate, flimsy sand beneath was another.