Before living inside a giant sequoia tree, Bhumi used to live in a townhouse in Fremont, first with a professor of poetry, and later, with a data engineer. Although she didn’t come from money, she made decent wage working as a programmer at a social media company and could afford the rent by herself, but four years ago, during an afterwork social, she had accidentally ended up at an open mike on Shattuck Avenue, where the poetry prof gave the evening’s standout reading, demurred like a real celebrity in the face of applauses, and the next thing she knew, they were making out in his thriftily furnished studio on the next block. She was prone under him, locked in the simple geometry of his limbs, her eyes on the two gerbils digging up primal chaos in a cage opposite the bouncy mattress, when her jaw loosened. Her ulcerous mouth softened. She knew she had to see him regularly, so she could relax and metamorphose into a more positive person.
Very soon they leased the Fremont townhouse together, though there were periods—the three summer months, for instance—when she bore the rent alone. Living with a man was an extreme adventure sport. She was starting to see why her mother cherished her father’s absence for the better part of the day and rarely complained about the adda sesh and table tennis that delayed his return to their small flat in Indore. Ma was okay single parenting Bhumi, if she could keep her house a spouse-free zone. The rules of cohabitation with a partner were fuzzy unlike the dorm arrangements Bhumi had known in boarding school and college. It was like having to build a massive ocean bridge after gaining construction experience from Lego.
Her boyfriend’s attachment to an ideal of frankness awed Bhumi. She was as taken with the blunt, unvarnished thrusts he used to enter her body as she was with his raw compulsion to diagnose personal and social follies. He was a bougie millennial not doing enough for the burning planet. He didn’t think the art he had staked his life on made much of a difference, but he was terrified of trying something else and facing new types of failure. He also had a wild dislike of certain other poets, the mid ones who acted oh-so-precious about their words, didn’t create space for a fair exchange with readers but invited them to bow before the majesty of their sentences, those sterile gilded monuments. Bhumi learned to slink around him when he was on the cusp of a rant, hop over the landmines of his insecurities, and honour his changing dietary needs (now vegan, now paleo). For her labours, he kissed her on the head several times a day, especially when she was busy coding in her home office, as if to interrupt her flow state. Apparently, he found her most attractive when she was not focused on him.
The healthy equation was disturbed once he won a grant to write a book in which he would honestly and objectively (his words in the proposal document Bhumi proofed) transcribe his conversations with trees. She thought the project charming, assuming he would jot down stuff he spoke at a house plant, perhaps the pothos that had made its way from his studio to the box window of their shared apartment. But on his non-teaching days he started camping out in a nearby redwood forest to make field recordings.
He was not after the rustle of leaves or bird songs. He wanted to catch the redwoods talking. He returned from these excursions tanned, dehydrated, and shorn of meaningful vocabulary. His standard response to anything she said were variations on sounds good, too bad, amazing.
He was fussy about the project and refused to show her his notes, even after she baited him with charges of fudging them. But this one time he got into a jolly mood eating chaat at a neighbourhood café and pulled a bunch of spectrograms from his phone’s cloud drive, all of which visualized ultrasonic sounds emitted by a hundred-year-old sequoia. He said he’d nicknamed the sequoia after her. Bhumi. Earth. What endures.
His diagrams plotted active frequencies against time and were hopelessly gorgeous, the swirl of pigments suggesting a quiet devastation, like someone had torched the lips of purple carbon paper, and a stack of sheets was singing now, the ghost sparks traveling inside. When Bhumi held an image closer, its blues turned a dreary brown, the trail of fire looked a lot like blood spilling out of a wounded animal. Her boyfriend mimicked the sounds rendered in the spectrograms with his mouth. khat-khat-khat, like heels clicking on concrete, hail on tin roof, teeth grinding. How stupid she had been to doubt his ability to hear organisms she didn’t think capable of communication.
Bright orange red striations in the final diagram branched and spiked into hysteric peaks. The busy configuration reminded Bhumi of a stressed, gaping larynx, the CT scan of a child’s haemorrhaged vocal folds that would never return to their original state, how they were before girls in school gagged the child for telling on them. She could see herself tripping into the moist laryngeal abyss where bloody warts hatched dense knots of long-stemmed, shaggy fool’s mushrooms. She scrambled to leave the cartilaginous litter but as in a nightmare, she was getting pushed through the pale gills of a jawless creature. She was getting swallowed in.
The spicy tamarind chutney dripping from dahi vadaa yanked her back into the chaat café. She licked her wrist clean. Her boyfriend placed his hand on hers and needlessly conjured his bass fuck-me voice to say, when trees fall sick, they cry like you and me. With a pinch of horror, Bhumi realized her namesake was also diseased.
Her boyfriend seemed super happy recording shrieks of the sequoia, and though Bhumi didn’t care much about tree life, his progress cheered her. He had grown up feeling nobody really saw or heard him. His younger sister, the more studious and athletic child, was cherished by his father’s side of the family—the Ukrainian side, the only side that mattered to him. US academia and the poetry community had their ways of making him feel like an impostor. But now, at thirty-nine, he had found his tribe: Bhumi and the trees. Some nights Bhumi desperately wanted to spread like a massive evergreen conifer, fill their home with her thirsty feeder roots, her damp earth scent, claim all of him.
###
Their second Halloween together the professor suggested hosting a party for his grad students. Bhumi made meticulous lists to shop for food and wine. He volunteered to do the decorations which when finished looked odd and autumnal but not exactly spooky: strings of dry leaves made from plastic laced a mantle mirror, two black lanterns picked from a Halloween Store guarded the entrance, and an Amazon-bought elaborate silver candelabra that would be returned after the event prettified the dining table. He transported the gerbils from the upstairs loft to the living room, so the mirror could multiply their movements, add some frenzied activity to the décor. He had also picked their costumes—a black ankle-length skirt with small pleats for Bhumi, to be worn with a puff-sleeved bodice, and a black, high collar coat fitted around the waist to go over his own white silk shirt.
Bhumi thought the idea was to look dark Victorian until another Bengali woman, at least ten years younger, ten pounds bonier, but with a heart-shaped face that could be mistaken for hers, showed up in a generic grey-brown jumpsuit. An editor of the college’s literary magazine, she had come early with a bottle of cheap Barefoot wine and a gym bag stuffed with board games to help the hosts set up. She would be sitting out the cosplay, Bhumi assumed, but after helping lay appetizers on the table and clinking wine glasses with the hosts, she wrested a crafted headdress out of her bag.
Tendrils with narrow wispy leaves shot down her paper crown. Oh, the Casuarina tree, the prof remarked, and his student grinned, swaying the impractical headdress, a delicate tree caught in the wind, before informing Bhumi she was not any she-oak but the one a Bengali poet called Toru Dutt saw from her window at dawn, the subject of a fifty-five-line poem. More students trickled in wearing rather ordinary clothes but wrapped in intricate webs of textual references that escaped Bhumi. She felt ridiculous laughing at their inside jokes.
Turned out the prof too wasn’t any vintage man but a specific one. Lord Byron. Ironically baroque, the Casuarina Tree quipped and pivoted toward Bhumi wanting to know what she was. The professor answered for her. A noble lady. Casuarina Tree shook her head, disapproving the vagueness that, she said, reeked of sexism, and insisted that the party recognize Bhumi as Ada Lovelace, Byron’s mathematician daughter. The distinction pleased Bhumi, the hint of an incestuous dynamic between her lover and her was tantalizing, until another student declared Ada Lovelace was either crazy or had a lifelong fear of madness.
Tipsy from drinking wine and cider, students fawned over the professor’s redwoods project. His upper body wiggled every time a wave of adoration passed through it. Bhumi learned his project’s brand-new title from the conversations: Infinite Book of Secrecy. Isn’t that, like, Shakespeare? asked a gangly man with a translucent bell-shaped covering drawn over his head reaching past his shoulders. Sure, it is Shakespeare, the professor said with a shallow laugh that confused Bhumi. Casuarina Tree seemed to have caught on though. So, the allusion was not intended? she asked. This time the professor bit into a cracker and licked crumbs from his lips, slowly, almost flirtatiously, without answering.
Bhumi was relieved when the party moved on to playing board games. Code Name, Scrabble, Cards Against Humanity: entertainment with rules she could understand. She had played Scrabble competitively in the college circuits of Mumbai. Although the lack of practice had weakened her speed of word recall, she remembered enough to demolish the poets. Casuarina Tree came closest to beating her. After their tight match, the prof brushed aside the paper leaves tickling his student’s face to congratulate her. This gesture added to his silence about her own winning streak inflamed Bhumi. But as they were cleaning up after the party, the prof dramatically kneeled before her, as though in supplication, and gushed his praises. He had no idea Bhumi had such great people skills, that she was so good at Scrabble. It was the first time he seemed truly in awe of her.
###
They broke up before the holidays. He picked a fight saying he was tired of guessing her thoughts, and accused her of hiding her true emotions, which left him unsure and bewildered. His allegations blindsided Bhumi. She habitually overlooked his flaws—like how often he forgot to take out the trash, how long he took to bring out his credit card when they were grocery shopping, and how much he complained about grading student work. He, on the other hand, was searching for an excuse to abandon her. She didn’t care for the excuse—poor communication, my foot. The real reason had to be some bright young thing. So effing predictable.
After he moved out with his belongings, she couldn’t bear to return to the stripped down twelve-hundred square feet townhouse. Her secret fear was she would die alone in the building, and her corpse would rot without anyone knowing for a long time. To carry on, she had to devise various hacks. She bought pothos to fortify every window of the house. She considered gerbils too but skipped them because they required more than water refills. She started to attend random social gatherings to get through the evenings.
Soon she was a regular at a Bay Area Scrabble Club that convened at the Dyer Street IHOP on Fridays. It was at one of their meet ups, more than a year after the breakup, that she ran into the Casuarina Tree again. The woman’s face looked smaller, swathed in coal-black feathery hair, no trace of the twisty highlighted bun Bhumi remembered from the party. She was lugging a backpack with a Balenciaga logo (Bhumi couldn’t tell if it was an original) and had come in a high-end electric car.
Bhumi read the signals—the car brand was an ensign of desi tech wealth—and sure enough, over a match, Casuarina Tree told her she’d dropped out of the poetry program to earn a certificate in data science. She was training pricing algorithms for a startup. Bhumi asked if she liked her new line of work, and the woman said there wasn’t that much of a difference between writing poems and analysing data. Both required you to find patterns and connections among unlike things. Bhumi lost to Casuarina Tree this time. Along with studying data, the woman had been memorizing the Scrabble Players dictionary.
Was Casuarina Tree in touch with the prof, Bhumi asked, feeling somewhat pathetic for failing to maintain a dignified indifference about his affairs. He had mailed his former student a draft of the Infinite Book of Secrecy for feedback some months ago, Casuarina Tree admitted, but they were not in touch beyond that, not really.
That night Bhumi lifted a self-imposed moratorium on stalking her ex’s Instagram—of course, he was not wallowing in sorrow over their separation, and she didn’t expect him to take her back, but she was frustrated by how little she learned about his life from the feed. There were posters of poetry readings, reflections on the challenges of the writing life, and a series of images showing everyday objects hashtagged dailywonders.
###
Casuarina Tree had been asking around for a new place to rent at the Scrabble meet ups. Although Bhumi hated living alone, she hesitated before inviting the woman to sublease a bedroom in her townhouse. But the impulse to watch the woman, possibly figure out if she had anything to do with her ex, ultimately crushed all other concerns.
And Casuarina Tree jumped at her proposition: I was hoping you would offer, can’t wait to move in. What Bhumi found peculiar was not the woman’s enthusiasm but that she didn’t haggle to bring down the asking rent. Bhumi had quoted a higher-than-market rate thinking any self-respecting desi woman would bargain. There would be a round of back and forth before they settled on a satisfying median. But nope.
Bhumi’s new tenant ritually challenged her to matches around dinner time. A local champion now, the Casuarina Tree was essentially unbeatable, but she encouraged Bhumi to study the dog-eared, fiercely underlined copy of the Scrabble dictionary she owned. Leafing through its pages, Bhumi could inhale a heavy patchouli scent, as though Casuarina Tree had sprayed the book with her deodorant. She much preferred practising against an engine between prowling on GitHub and Slack during work hours. Letters patterned into a range of mathematical possibilities in this happy phase of her life. When Bhumi saw POETRY, she could picture sixty-eight combinations: tepoy, ropey, pyre, ryot (this last one supposedly meant tenant farmer in India, but Bhumi had never heard the word used there or anywhere else). BREAKUP contained upbear, beau, and puke.
She was getting over her ex, fully regaining her self-confidence, when the tech recession hit. Rumours of a mass fire flared. She considered it her duty to comfort the Casuarina Tree, who was new to the industry, with stories of mad productive techies thriving in an earlier financial crisis. She was consoled in return. Casuarina Tree reminded Bhumi she’d been with her employer for over seven years, an anomaly in the Bay Area, and if there was such a thing as reward for loyalty, she had nothing to fear. Despite exchanging reassurances though, they played a low scoring match that evening. No bingos on either side. Casuarina Tree’s best word was AZURE, worth only thirty-four points with Z on a triple value square.
Since reaching adulthood Bhumi had been moving in search of career opportunities which left her with no close friends. Scrabble with Casuarina Tree structured her days, and the two had become, at least Bhumi hoped, something like friends. But if Casuarina Tree lost her job, she would have to go live with her parents in Gainesville, and if Bhumi, who was on a H1B visa got laid off, she would have to fly back to Mumbai within a sixty-day window.
Returning jobless and empty-handed to India terrified Bhumi. How could she face the cousins she gifted Costco-bought Toblerone on the other annual trips? And what would her dear mother think—the great joy of the woman’s lonely monastic life was bragging to the neighbourhood aunties about her daughter’s successes in America. No, Bhumi would rather die than shame her mother.
She and the Casuarina Tree were binging Love is Blind after wrapping a Scrabble match, both rooting for the happiness of a hot desi data analyst with major body image issues stuck in a gerbil playhouse with a desi jerk, when—for no particular reason, she recalled a popular Bangla children’s story about a prince who got separated from his friends and started living inside a mango tree. A demon ruthlessly chased the prince—demons were always pursuing prince and princesses in these stories—but just as the demon got closer, the prince found the strength to transmigrate from the first mango tree to the next. He kept shifting homes until—. The middle of the story was a blur, but Bhumi remembered the end where the prince steps out of the tree, finds the parrot holding the demon’s soul, and kills it. A neat resolution.
She wanted to ask Casuarina Tree whether she knew the story in their shared mother tongue, but when the credits rolled, Casuarina Tree said rather casually, you know, I used to camp out in the sequoia grove with your ex.
Bhumi tried to regard the woman with an expression withholding judgement but failed to suppress a frown.
It was a no-nonsense arrangement, Casuarina Tree insisted. The prof and she didn’t hook up. Just that she felt sorry for the man. He would set up his gear in the woods but, he was so tired from teaching and housework, that he inevitably nodded off. Someone had to watch over his recording equipment. He was hopeless at sound editing and visualization too. He had been able to establish the significance of his project in the grant application, peg it on the coordinates of climate crisis—the correct historical coordinates for nature writing—but he lacked technical dexterity.
The woman made Bhumi’s ex sound ridiculous, and Bhumi was ashamed by how this thrilled her. Fussy he was but bumbling and technologically challenged? No way. Yet, it would be nice if she could file him away as a silly, unworthy man.
During the long hours of field study, the prof had mentioned Bhumi to his student. And I was obsessed, the student said with a fierce glow washing her eyes that worried Bhumi. When she prodded to know what exactly the prof had said about her, Casuarina Tree didn’t offer anything of note. This and that, she murmured before jolting up with pride and saying, we nicknamed a tree Bhumi.
Bhumi was unsettled to think this woman sharing her couch, her lease, her bowl of trail mix was circling her in stealth long before she knew it. The spiny green branchlets of Casuarina Tree may have been dangling outside her peripheral vision, but they were looming all the same, even advancing to gather in a stressful knot around her neck. The woman was like an appendix, the tiny organ that had played an unclear role in Bhumi’s digestion since birth but became known to her right before she was rushed into an emergency surgery.
Did the professor and Casuarina Tree still visit the woods? Bhumi asked.
No. While helping the prof, the student had discovered her love for tagging, classifying, and clustering data. Casuarina Tree lectured on about the similarities between the creative brain and the classifying brain, but Bhumi didn’t follow. Her brain was busy classing every word the woman uttered, her every little hand movement as a treachery.
###
When Bhumi was laid off, she kept it a secret from her roommate. She would find another job and then reveal, her suffering safely in the past. If Casuarina Tree asked to play Scrabble, Bhumi made excuses. She was so mad at the woman, so angry with herself, she could not focus and if she could not focus, she could not win, and a win was the only acceptable outcome now.
Meanwhile, her visa clock was ticking, every tick threating to undo a life built like a controlled experiment. Out of despair, she sent her resume to any job matching her skills on LinkedIn—didn’t matter if it was lower paying than her last gig or an entry-level position. To keep up the semblance of normalcy on weekdays, she drove up and down I-5, burning fuel, stopping for coffee at a different Starbucks every time. The Central Valley could not decide whether it was an unnaturally cold summer or an unusually warm winter, and she nodded when men and women at the cash registers made small talk about the unfriendly weather.
Driving without destination was like being on an endless vacation—Bhumi could get used to the feeling if her savings didn’t begin to show a sizable dent, the stock market didn’t continue tanking, and fuel prices didn’t go up. Soon Bhumi suffered cortisol spikes first thing in the morning. The teeth grinding was back, and along with it the sense that every millisecond of calm was nothing but a prelude to some horror.
She thought to concoct a farewell meeting with her ex and would have acted upon the thought if a quick glance at his Insta didn’t reveal he was on an extensive book tour. He had pinned the picture of a massive redwood to his feed with a lengthy caption explaining how the tree gave him clarity and a sense of direction.
Bhumi too was desperate for clarity and direction. So, around the fiftieth day mark of her job loss, after looking up flight prices to India, she set out for the redwood grove her ex visited.
The forest was a green yolk splattered at the junction of three suburbs. It had to be popular with families and hikers on holidays but since this was a foggy weekday, Bhumi had no trouble finding parking.
Her shoes crushed the reddish-brown dirt and the copious tree litter, wily ferns brushed her ankles, as Bhumi craned her neck to study the spiderweb of leaves and branches blocking the sky. It was freezing among the aggressively tall sequoias. Sheets of fog had gotten trapped in the jumble of vertical lines, some of which were living wood, others were charred poles. Bhumi began to delight in touching the soft, mushy surfaces, running her fingers through depressions and blisters, choreographing her path around slimy golden molluscs and the round-capped Super Mario mushrooms that grew on dead matter. She had read mushrooms didn’t have skin—their insides were their outsides—and wondered if her ex would be attracted to such bare-bodied things.
How to find a tree in a forest? Through a rush of jitters, Bhumi realized she had come to see not any tree, but a totem—her namesake that was supposedly writhing and groaning in pain. Perhaps she would catch the vibrations it discharged, and it would sponge her troubles.
She wandered listening for strange sounds but detected nothing other than the high-pitched calls of chickadees and the slushing of a hidden stream. Her feet got caught in a mess of duff and roots in front of a spectacularly ugly sequoia with large cankerous bulges. She who knew so little about plant life could figure the tree was living on borrowed time. Critters had bored tiny dark holes in the trunk, brown needles started at the bottom, and someone had engraved, DSO + REN on its bark. Had to be lovers’ initials. She almost wished they belonged to her ex and Casuarina Tree, but the letters didn’t quite fit unless they had secret nicknames for each other. Bhumi’s mind was already unscrambling the letters into other words and seeing other possibilities. Sonder. A category of yacht. Sonder, she had read somewhere, was also a word for vivid life of things.
She pictured her ex falling at the sequoia’s feet to record its cries, his knees spore printing the decomposing litter, while she was home, waiting for him. She leaned closer to the trunk before making a hard fist to strike it. The first strike didn’t do anything for her. Second time, quashing the fear of injured knuckles, she hit harder. A third hit punctured the creased skin capping her finger joints. The most delicious sensation. She didn’t want to stop bleeding.
An air of intimacy gathering around the dying redwood slowly calmed her. She had no idea how long she’d been standing there, a rubber doll looking up in anticipation at a giant organism, when the stomatal openings heaved as though in recognition. The tree’s hideous lips teased her into surrendering control. An impossible crack formed on the bark. There were more cracks inside calling out Bhumi, Bhumi, Bhumi.
Would the trunk fork and crash, swept in a torpedo of sadness with her? Bhumi stepped back to wrench away while she was still intact—a put together thing. But the roots were jawless tentacles that leapt and hooked to her bruises, knotted around her waist and limbs, and with a loud thump, slammed her flat against the base to swallow her.
###
Bhumi was not living inside a hollow pit. Her new home had pestled her flesh and bones, and though terrified at first, she had stopped turning and twisting to set free. She had no memory feeling bodily pain seeping like fog into the wood and becoming elastic. She hadn’t exactly become the tree, but she wasn’t anything else either. She was now dizzy in love with the early morning light. The ancient base of the tree was a trampoline. She shot up sometimes to plead with the sun, begging it to stay longer. She was not a fan of the bioluminescent invertebrates that crawled all over her visual field at night.
Living inside a tree wasn’t stressful, though it could get boring. She learned to channel luminous vibrations toward the nearby fungi for entertainment and received bursts of microbial energy in return. She was shocked by how little she missed her old life—her job, her family, boyfriend, pay checks and immigration paperwork. But even so, during the peak hiking season, she craved drama. She wanted the Casuarina Tree and the prof to show up, so she could know what had passed between them. Sometimes she choked remembering experiences that didn’t seem to belong to her—like playing hide and seek with a big man who she could tell was lying when he said he loved her, his child. She got excited thinking she had gained mystical powers to parse other people’s memories, but it was false confidence.
Hot flashes of wakefulness grew scant. Bhumi had stopped counting the years when a fast-spreading fire came close to destroying her. She joined the chorus of blighted leaves to ask for help, all the while doubting anyone heard them.
Ultimately her home didn’t burn in that fire. It was chopped down to show in a hysterically bright forest museum. The tech company that had employed her started managing a portion of the forest to offset their carbon footprint, and Bhumi lay prone in a blanched hall, part of an exhibit schooling visitors about native species.
Chained and attached to the floor, Bhumi could not read the museum label describing her, which didn’t bother her until a child visitor read aloud the title. HEARTWOOD. The dense, dead part of a tree trunk.
What an insult. Bhumi had the urge to fight whoever had her illustrate inert matter when she was a living, breathing, and throbbing organism. But she was too lethargic from decades of inactivity to properly rouse in rebellion.
HEARTWOOD. Scratching the surface of her numbness, Bhumi tried to reorder the letters into other possibilities. Rooted, Dearth, Threw. Even this exercise proved difficult beyond a handful of obvious combinations.
Every now and then Bhumi tried very hard to focus on the chatter among visitors about the text on the museum label. Over the years she would learn HEARTWOOD on the plaque was followed by a few lines composed by a California poet. The lines contained no decipherable words. Only diagrams. During guided tours certain museum staff said the diagrams represented sounds sequoias emitted in distress. Some visitors rejected the explanation in favour of an alternate theory. It was the voice of a woman the poet loved, they said, a woman who had lost the ability to speak in an accident. His lover had freed the poet from his obligation to words.
“Heartwood” was a runner-up for the Brooklyn Review’s 2023 Short Story Contest.
About the Author
Torsa Ghosal is the author of a book of literary criticism, Out of Mind (Ohio State University Press, US), and an experimental novella, Open Couplets (Yoda Press, India). Her fiction, non-fiction, and translation have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Literary Hub, Bustle, LA Review of Books, and elsewhere. A writer and professor of English based in California, Torsa grew up in Bengal, India. You can follow her on Twitter @TorsaG and Instagram @torsa_ghosal
About the Artist
Kira is a visual artist. Their abstract work manipulates landscape visual tropes and centers themes of environmentalism and the anthropocene. Kira’s work was most recently shown at Gallery Petite in Brooklyn at their first solo show, “The Fire When We Burned Everything”. They have been featured in a variety of literary publications, including the Iowa Translation Workshop’s Exchanges journal, the Minetta Review and Oneirocritica. Kira lives and makes art in Brooklyn, New York. You can follow them on instagram @aaronakirasg.