Amit Bhattacharya
1
I arrived in Pune on a Thursday morning, the kind of morning where the sun rises reluctantly, peeking through gauzy clouds like a child waking from sleep. The railway station buzzed with quiet urgency—porters dragging luggage, chai vendors chanting their rhythmic calls, mothers herding children in half-sleep, and the occasional clatter of metal from the stalls that never really closed the night before. I stepped out with a small suitcase, a laptop bag, and a mind still echoing with boardroom jargon and Slack pings. After seven years in a Bengaluru tech firm, I had resigned with no next job in hand, just a vague plan to write and “live slower.” Pune, someone had told me, was a city with memory—modern enough to breathe freely, but old enough to listen. That idea stayed with me. The flat I had rented was a one-bedroom unit above a closed tailoring shop, its signage faded and stitched with spider webs. My landlady, a retired schoolteacher with large glasses and louder opinions, handed me the keys with a warning: “Don’t expect the city to welcome you. You have to earn it.” I nodded, unsure whether to laugh or bow. That night, as I lay on the floor mattress in the yellowed light of a tube lamp, the silence of the unfamiliar neighborhood pressed in from all sides. No traffic sounds, no honking, no footsteps—just a kind of waiting. A hollow that neither frightened nor soothed, only observed.
It was during one of those early mornings—perhaps my fifth or sixth in the city—that I discovered the park. It wasn’t a grand park by any measure, more a patch of land bordered by rusted fencing and flanked by a line of ancient gulmohar and peepal trees. But at its center stood a banyan tree of such size and character that it demanded reverence. Its aerial roots had formed into secondary trunks, and the ground below was carpeted in dry leaves and soft moss. Near the tree, slightly askew as if placed in conversation with it, was a wooden bench. A plain, timeworn bench with slats weathered by rain, its iron legs spotted with rust, and nails protruding just enough to suggest hand-fixes over the years. But what truly caught my eye was the plaque fastened onto the backrest. Just a small brass rectangle, dulled by age, with the inscription: “For those waiting for something more.” There was no explanation, no dedication, no date. Just that. A line that wrapped around my thoughts like the city’s fog around the hills each dawn. I didn’t sit on it that day. Instead, I walked around it like one would around a shrine, curious and cautious. Was it meant to be philosophical? Romantic? A joke? A dare? I returned to that spot the next day, and the next, each time lingering a little longer near the bench, sipping coffee from a flask, sometimes with a book in hand but never reading a line.
On a Sunday, I found him there. A slender, older man in a spotless white kurta, his skin the color of old teak, with a satchel slung over his shoulder and a bag of birdseed in his hand. He was scattering the seeds near the roots of the banyan, talking softly—not to anyone in particular, it seemed, unless he meant the birds or the tree. I hesitated, unsure if I was interrupting something sacred. But when he turned and saw me, he smiled, his eyes warming into crescents, and nodded toward the bench. “Come,” he said, “no one should stand too long if their thoughts are heavier than their shoes.” It was such an odd, gentle sentence that I obeyed. We sat side by side, a careful foot of distance between us, and for a long time, said nothing. Eventually, I asked about the plaque. He chuckled, as if the answer was both simple and infinite. “My wife’s idea,” he said. “She liked to say that most people don’t know what they’re waiting for—but they feel the waiting all the same. So, she made a home for that kind of waiting.” I remember looking at him then—not just seeing an old man, but someone shaped by seasons I had yet to live through. He told me his name was Abdul, and that he came every Sunday, without fail, since Amira passed away five years ago. I nodded, unsure of how to reply. He didn’t seem to need sympathy, only presence.
In the days that followed, that bench became my quiet axis. I didn’t plan to return each morning, but somehow my feet led me there anyway. Abdul wasn’t always present, but when he was, we sat together like old friends who had simply misplaced each other for a few decades. We spoke of small things—tea vendors he missed, the birds that visited differently in winter, how newspapers these days reported everything and meant nothing. I didn’t talk much about my past, not right away. But something about the quiet wisdom of that place—the way the banyan held shadows like memories, the way the wind seemed to pause before passing—softened the walls around my thoughts. I began bringing a notebook, scribbling down whatever came. Sometimes it was the shape of a leaf, sometimes it was a sentence Abdul said, sometimes just a feeling I couldn’t name. I didn’t know it then, but the city was unfolding not around me, but within. I had expected inspiration to arrive like lightning; instead, it crept in like sunlight between blinds—slow, deliberate, honest. Pune was not a city that handed you answers. But if you sat still long enough, it might ask you the right questions.
2
He always arrived with the same quiet rhythm—never rushing, never late. Abdul Uncle, as I had come to call him in my mind, would appear just as the light broke through the tangled arms of the banyan tree. Each Sunday, he wore the same crisp white kurta, so clean it defied the dust of the city. His leather satchel, faded and cracked at the edges, swung gently from his shoulder, and from it he’d pull out an old jute pouch filled with birdseed. He scattered it with a kind of reverence, his movements slow and deliberate, like a gardener tending to invisible flowers. The birds knew him. Sparrows, pigeons, and the occasional mynah fluttered close, fearless, as if his presence belonged to them as much as the banyan did. I never saw him scold or shoo. He simply sat when he was done, hands folded neatly on his lap, watching the world pass by. There was a stillness to him that felt earned, not adopted. Like someone who had made peace with time rather than trying to outrun it. I joined him most Sundays now. Our conversations were brief, unhurried, and left enough silence for the wind to speak between words. He never asked me much at first—no questions about where I was from, why I had moved here, or what I did for a living. I appreciated that. Most people are eager to place you into a narrative. Abdul Uncle simply let me be.
It was the third Sunday after we met that he first spoke of Amira in more than passing. “She had a laugh that made tea taste sweeter,” he said, out of nowhere, as if responding to a question I hadn’t asked aloud. We were watching a pair of squirrels chase each other up the banyan’s roots. “We met in a library,” he continued. “I was trying to find a copy of Faiz. She was trying to return it. That was our first argument—whether poetry should be borrowed or bought.” He smiled at the memory, and I could hear the youth still living in his voice. “She owned a little bookstore, not too far from here. ‘The Listening Page,’ it was called. A quiet place, with lamps and old Urdu vinyl playing in the background.” I found myself leaning into his words, as if they were shade from the rising sun. “She believed that books find people, not the other way around. I was one of those people.” He chuckled softly, then fell silent. I didn’t prod. Some stories, I was learning, bloom only in pause. When he eventually spoke again, it was not about grief, but about presence. “After she was gone, I didn’t want to mourn her in loud places. So I came here. The bench was ours. We’d sit here even before she got sick. That plaque,” he pointed gently, “was her idea. She said people needed a place where they didn’t have to explain their waiting.”
I asked him, cautiously, if he still missed her. “Every single day,” he replied. “But missing her is not a wound anymore. It’s a garden. I water it. I prune it. I sit beside it when I feel lonely.” I had never heard anyone speak of loss so gently. Most people I knew either avoided talking about grief or were consumed by it. Abdul Uncle wore his with grace, like a shawl wrapped in winter—not to display, but to comfort. He once told me that grief is not a hole, but a window. “You begin by looking through it, and over time, you begin to see yourself in its reflection.” His words stayed with me long after I left the bench each week. I began noticing things I had earlier ignored. The way the park’s old watchman always offered his leftover lunch to a stray dog. The teenage boy who practiced tabla rhythms on his knees while waiting for his sister at the tutoring center next door. The elderly woman who wore the same purple sweater regardless of the heat. Everything seemed to speak in layers now. Pune itself became a conversation—half in silence, half in memory. I found myself writing more in my notebook—not just thoughts, but characters, dialogues, half-poems. It was as if sitting beside Abdul opened up a room inside me that I had long locked and forgotten.
One Sunday, I brought a flask of masala chai and two paper cups. Abdul Uncle accepted it with a smile. “She used to make tea with ginger and just a hint of cinnamon. Said it reminded her of monsoon.” He sipped and nodded. “Yours is close. But hers had more… mischief.” We both laughed. That day, he told me about the plaque again. “She wrote those words after watching a young woman cry quietly here one morning. Never knew her name. But Amira said there was a kind of sorrow that didn’t need solving. Just witnessing.” That line struck me. Sorrow that didn’t need solving. I thought of my own departure from corporate life—not dramatic, not tragic, just quietly exhausting. Everyone had expected me to leap into something greater, but I hadn’t. I had simply paused. I had no grand vision for the future, just an ache for stillness, for listening. Maybe that’s what the bench was meant for. For people like me. I asked Abdul if he ever thought of leaving the city. He shook his head. “Amira is here. In the air, in the books we once sold, in the tea we used to drink. And in that bench. Why would I go elsewhere?” It was the first time I understood what it meant to stay—not out of fear, but out of love. We sat there a while longer, as a child’s kite got caught in the banyan’s branches. The child didn’t cry. He simply looked up, then sat on the grass, as if accepting that sometimes, you lose what you reach for, and that’s okay. Abdul Uncle watched, and nodded, as if the boy had learned something vital.
3
There is a kind of conversation that unfolds without speaking—a quiet companionship built not of exchanged words but of shared presence. That is what grew between Abdul Uncle and me in the weeks that followed. We no longer felt the need to greet each other with formalities. I would arrive at the park each morning around seven, thermos in hand, notebook tucked under my arm, and more often than not, he would already be there, feeding the birds or simply sitting, eyes closed, as if listening to a memory instead of the morning. Some days we spoke, some days we didn’t. And yet, on the days when neither of us uttered a word, the silence between us felt full, not empty—like a cloth stretched out in the sun, absorbing everything. That silence became a kind of language, gentle and intimate. In it, I began to understand Abdul’s rhythm—the way his fingers rested on his knees, how his eyes would linger on a couple walking past, or how he’d quietly nod at the sound of a child laughing. He wasn’t observing people as much as remembering them, or perhaps watching echoes of his own past as they played out again in front of him. I began to do the same—let my mind wander, my pen follow. The notebook pages slowly filled with vignettes of the park: the boy who practiced cricket shots using a broomstick, the woman who always read Tagore aloud under the peepal tree, the rickshaw driver who parked nearby every day but never picked up a passenger. They became fragments of my own story—fiction and reality blurring.
One morning, I arrived to find Abdul wearing a black Nehru cap. He looked younger that day, oddly proud, almost celebratory. “Today would’ve been our 45th anniversary,” he said, answering my unspoken question. “We were married right here in this city, under another banyan tree not far from this one. No big ceremony. Just her, me, a qazi, and two of our friends. She hated fuss.” I offered him tea without a word. He took it gratefully. “Every year,” he continued, “we would go somewhere new on this day. Sometimes to a beach. Once to a cave temple. But most often, to a bookstore. She loved buying books on our anniversary. Said stories made better gifts than things.” He chuckled softly. “She used to gift me poems, but hide them inside real books—like a secret within a secret.” He paused to sip the tea. “You ever read a poem that felt like it knew you before you were born?” I nodded. He smiled. “Then you understand her.” We didn’t talk much after that. Instead, I watched him as he took out a small paper-wrapped parcel from his satchel. He carefully placed it beneath the bench—an old, cloth-bound volume with faded golden edges. He didn’t say what book it was, and I didn’t ask. Some gifts don’t need explanation, just space to breathe.
Another day, I saw Abdul arrive without his satchel. He looked different—frailer, thinner, as if the weight of memory was heavier than usual. He sat down slowly and leaned back, closing his eyes. I noticed his hands were trembling slightly. I waited, unsure whether to speak. After some time, he opened his eyes and said, “You know, Amira and I never had children.” His voice was not sad, only matter-of-fact. “We tried, but life had other plans. At first, we mourned that emptiness. But over time, we filled it—with books, with young readers who came to the shop, with letters exchanged with strangers. We believed in adopting stories instead of people.” He paused. “But sometimes, like today, I wonder what it would’ve been like. To see a version of her growing taller each year. To see her in someone else’s eyes.” I had no reply. I only reached into my notebook and tore out a page—a haiku I had scribbled days earlier about the banyan tree and the old bench. I handed it to him. He read it slowly, then folded it twice and tucked it into his pocket. “She would’ve liked that,” he said. It was the only time I had ever seen his eyes turn glassy. But he did not weep. He just sat back and looked up through the banyan’s canopy, watching the filtered sunlight dance between the leaves, like the universe giving him space to remember and release.
In the quiet that followed, I thought about my own silences—the questions I avoided, the griefs I had buried under career deadlines and city noise. I had always assumed silence was something to be filled, escaped, broken. But Abdul showed me another way: that silence could be a room to sit inside, a well to draw from. I began staying longer at the bench, even after he left. I watched the park in the late mornings—how the pace changed, how the elderly gave way to young couples, how the birds shifted perches, how the sunlight moved across the bench like a slow hand of time. The plaque caught the light differently each hour, the words “For those waiting for something more” changing tone—sometimes gentle, sometimes urgent. I wrote every day now. Not always with purpose, but with discipline. I no longer judged the words. I simply let them arrive, like Abdul’s stories, softly and on their own terms. That month, I sent out my first essay to a small literary magazine. It was about a bench and a banyan and an old man who scattered birdseed with reverence. I didn’t expect it to be published. That wasn’t the point. The point was this: I was no longer afraid of silence. I was beginning to speak through it.
4
It was a Wednesday, unremarkable in every way, when I arrived at the park and found the bench empty. No birds. No scattered grain. No scent of Abdul’s tea-infused clothes in the breeze. At first, I thought perhaps he was late, or visiting the bookstore he often mentioned. But when Thursday came, and then Sunday passed without him, I felt a quiet unease settle in my chest. The bench suddenly looked different—bare, almost embarrassed to be alone. A week later, I went to the tiny shop near the gate, where the watchman sometimes sipped chai in the afternoon, and asked about him. The shopkeeper nodded solemnly. “Abdul bhai passed away last Monday. Heart failure, they say. Went peacefully in his sleep.” The words dropped into my stomach like a stone. I stood there, frozen in the middle of the day’s buzz—the clang of autos, the chirp of sparrows, the rustling banyan leaves—yet everything felt suspended. I had known the man only for a few months. But in those months, his silences had spoken to mine, his stories had cracked open windows in my own soul. The idea that he simply… left, that he wouldn’t return with his satchel and gentle words—that realization was harder to absorb than I expected.
I sat on the bench for a long time that day. The air was thick with the smells of wet earth and marigold garlands from a nearby roadside shrine. On a whim, I reached below the seat, where he had once left that cloth-bound book on his anniversary. And to my astonishment, there it was again—not the book, but a plain envelope, weathered at the edges, my name scrawled across the front in slightly shaky handwriting: For you, in case I don’t return. My throat tightened. I opened it slowly. Inside was a single sheet of paper and a pressed gulmohar flower, dry and crimson. The letter was short. “You have been a gentle listener, and sometimes that is all a person needs to keep returning. I see in you the kind of waiting Amira used to write about. Whatever you are looking for—don’t rush. Let it walk toward you. The bench is yours now. Use it well. – Abdul” That was it. No dramatic farewell, no summary of his life. Just a simple passing of something invisible, something tender. I held the flower between my fingers, and a strange calm settled over me. It wasn’t closure in the typical sense. It was more like a soft exhale, like the way birds take flight without warning—quiet, certain, unannounced.
Over the weeks that followed, I began tending to the bench. It wasn’t anything formal. I’d bring birdseed in a tin box, sweep away fallen leaves, and sometimes leave books beneath the seat, just as Abdul had. Strangers began sitting more often—some for a few minutes, some for entire mornings. One day, a woman in a green shawl cried softly there. Another time, a man in his thirties scribbled furiously into a notebook. I never asked anyone why they came. I simply nodded if they looked at me, and went about my small rituals. The banyan stood its eternal vigil, and in its shade, I realized that the stories we tell—through words, through silence, through presence—don’t end when we do. They echo. They wait. Sometimes, they find another person to carry them forward. I began writing about Abdul more, not as a eulogy but as memory preserved in narrative—his metaphors, his pauses, the invisible garden of grief he taught me to tend. One piece was accepted by the very magazine I’d submitted to earlier. The editor emailed back: “This reads like a meditation.” I smiled. That’s exactly what it was.
Months passed, and the seasons shifted. The banyan bloomed and shed, birds came and went. I kept returning to the bench—not out of habit, but because something in me had rooted there. I had stopped looking at it as a park bench. It had become a sanctuary. I wrote my first book sitting there—essays stitched together with threads of memory, loss, and rediscovery. I dedicated it to Abdul and Amira, two names that never needed last names to feel eternal. I placed a copy under the bench on the day it was published, wrapped in brown paper with a note: “For someone waiting for something more.” And I walked away that afternoon without looking back, certain that someone—somewhere—would find it, just as I had found Abdul. The city, too, had changed. Or perhaps, I had finally started listening to it properly. Its pauses. Its rhythms. Its soft confessions hiding in alleyways and under banyan roots. Pune hadn’t just given me a place to rest. It had offered me a place to begin.
5
It started subtly—the way things always do when you’re not looking for them. One morning, I noticed a young man sitting on the far end of the bench, shoulders hunched, eyes fixed on a yellowing envelope in his lap. He didn’t speak. Just sat there for nearly an hour, blinking often, his thumb running repeatedly over a name scribbled in blue ink. When he finally looked up, I offered him a slight nod. He returned it, then stood and left without a word. The following week, a woman in her late fifties arrived with a bag full of small picture frames. One by one, she laid them on the bench—portraits of people, black and white, faded, loved. She sat quietly beside them for a long time. I didn’t interrupt. Later, when she packed them away, she whispered something under her breath. I couldn’t hear it, but I felt it—a kind of release, like wind exhaling through trees. These small episodes became frequent. The bench had begun to gather people like Abdul once had gathered sparrows. Each with their own grief. Each with their own silence. I stopped wondering why. Perhaps it was the plaque. Perhaps it was the tree. Or perhaps places learn to carry stories the way old walls carry warmth.
I slowly became their silent witness, not a counselor, not a sage—just someone who had learned how to be present. I didn’t offer advice. I offered time. And tea. I kept the thermos full, the bench clean, and my pen moving. People began to leave things behind, just like Abdul had. A child’s drawing tucked between two roots. A rose pressed inside a poetry book. A folded letter, unsent. I never read them unless invited. But I touched them, respectfully, as if greeting the ghosts they carried. One day, I found a package wrapped in brown cloth placed beneath the bench. Inside was a handmade diary with the words “For whoever is listening” written on the first page. I left it there. A few weeks later, I noticed someone had added a page. Then another. It became a kind of living book, with people pouring fragments of their lives into its growing spine—grief, hope, regrets, and strange joys. A man wrote about the first time he saw his daughter walk. A teenager confessed to stealing mangoes. A widow scribbled a prayer. I added a line too: “Every silence has a shape. This bench is one of them.” The book never stayed full. Once it was filled, someone always left another blank one.
I sometimes wondered what Abdul would have thought of it all. I imagined him watching quietly from a sunlit patch beneath the banyan, smiling at the way people continued to arrive, to grieve, to pause. I didn’t see myself as his replacement—how could I? But I had inherited his listening. And that, I realized, was the most precious thing a person can pass on—not money or advice or even words, but the capacity to witness. My own writing began to shift too. It no longer reached outward for success or validation. It began reaching inward, tracing the echoes others had left with me. I started a weekly column in a local paper called Whispers from the Bench, where I documented the anonymous glimpses I’d been granted. It wasn’t sensational. Just human. Just real. People started writing back—some thanking me, some sharing their own benches, some admitting they now visited the banyan after reading. I never claimed ownership of that space. I simply guarded it. The municipality eventually repainted the bench, added a new cobbled path nearby, even installed a small signboard: “Community Reflection Bench — In Memory of Abdul and Amira.” I wept when I saw it. Not because I was sad. But because something had been seen.
Years have passed since then. The banyan continues to grow, its roots more intricate, its shade more expansive. Children now play tag around its trunk. Lovers still carve initials into its skin. The bench has been repaired twice. But it holds. It always holds. I still go there, still carry my notebook, though now I often find others already seated when I arrive. That’s how it should be. I sit when there’s space, or lean against the tree when there’s not. And I listen—to the pigeons, to the wind, to the lives unfolding beside me. Sometimes someone will turn to me and ask, “Did you know Abdul?” I nod. Sometimes they ask, “Do you come here every day?” I smile and say, “Not every day. But whenever I need to remember what matters.” Because in a world obsessed with noise, the banyan and its bench remind us that silence too has shape. That stories don’t always need telling to be heard. And that every now and then, when we’re lucky, we meet someone who scatters birdseed not just for the sparrows, but for the soul.
6
It was in early spring—when the gulmohar blooms had only just begun to whisper red into the trees—that the idea came to me. I was re-reading entries from the anonymous diary left beneath the bench when I noticed something curious. The voices in it had shifted. Where earlier pages brimmed with sadness and solitude, the newer ones had begun to reach outward—offering comfort, posing questions, even leaving encouragements for the next reader. “If you’re sitting here today, remember—grief bends, but doesn’t break.” Or, “I was here last August. I left heartbroken. But I returned today, and I’m okay.” The book had stopped being a container of sorrow; it had become a dialogue across time. Each entry no longer stood alone—it was now in conversation with the ones that came before it. That, I realized, was something sacred. Not a guestbook. Not a confessional. Something else. A book that listens. That holds space. That echoes. That’s when the seed took root: I would preserve these stories—not just copy them down, but curate them with care, names removed, voices intact. A listening book. Not written by one, but shaped by many. Not bound for profit, but gifted freely to those in need of remembering.
I began slowly, carefully transcribing the pages into a single manuscript—each voice kept in its raw form, each emotion held like breath between lines. I called it The Listening Book, and wrote a quiet foreword: “These are the stories people leave behind when they believe no one is watching. In reading them, you are not invading. You are witnessing. Let them echo inside you.” I approached a small, independent press run by a former journalist I had once shared tea with under the banyan. She read the manuscript in two days and replied with a simple message: “Let’s print it. No edits. No ads. No author bio. Just let it breathe.” The first hundred copies were printed on recycled paper, hand-stitched, the cover made of old sari fabric scraps collected from local tailors. We didn’t sell them. Instead, we left them in public places—a library corner, an old train station, a hospital waiting room, a classroom shelf. Each copy had a card tucked inside: “Leave a note, or not. But carry its silence with you.” We weren’t sure what would happen. But slowly, like the blooming of a reluctant flower, responses began arriving. Handwritten letters. Emails. Even anonymous notes left under the banyan bench, thanking the unknown souls whose words had helped them feel less alone.
One day, a school teacher brought her entire class to the bench. They sat cross-legged in a circle while she read from one of the stories in The Listening Book. It was a simple entry: “I lost my father last year. He never said much. But he always sat with me during storms. I do that for my daughter now.” After the reading, she asked the children to write their own ‘listening entries’ and leave them under the tree. Some drew pictures. Some wrote poems. One simply wrote, “I miss my mother. I think the wind carries her voice when I sleep.” That afternoon, the bench became a classroom without a blackboard. The banyan became a shelter for unspoken learning. And I—wept again. Not from grief. From the sheer tenderness of it all. Abdul’s legacy had traveled beyond memory. It had become ritual. And somehow, without meaning to, I had become its keeper—not its author, never its owner—but the one who helped pass the lantern forward. That was enough. More than enough.
By the time the second edition of The Listening Book was ready, it had grown thicker. The new entries weren’t from the bench alone—people had started mailing stories from faraway places. A girl from Shillong wrote about her first snowfall and how it reminded her of her grandmother’s shawl. An old man from Chennai sent in a Tamil verse about watching his city change. A prisoner in Delhi mailed a folded page that simply read, “I haven’t seen a tree in twelve years. Please describe one.” I responded with a letter full of leaves and shadows. The banyan stood still through all of it, arms open wide, shade endless. And I understood then what Abdul had truly given me. Not just a place to sit. But a way to stay—with the world, with its aching, with its questions. He had taught me to listen, and then to carry that listening like a torch. I am older now. My hair is grey at the temples. My walks are slower. But each time I sit on that bench, I still hear the quiet. And in that quiet, stories still arrive. Waiting, always, to be heard.
7
He first appeared on a humid August afternoon, just after a sudden burst of rain had left the ground smelling of monsoon memories. I was sitting on the far end of the bench, editing a new introduction for the third edition of The Listening Book, when I noticed him—mid-thirties perhaps, lanky, wearing a frayed kurta and battered sandals. What caught my eye wasn’t his appearance, but the way he sat—utterly still, as if he had been part of the bench before I arrived. No phone. No book. No distracted glances. Just presence. After a long silence, he spoke without turning his head. “How long does it take to stop waiting?” The question startled me—not for its directness, but because I had once asked myself the same thing. I didn’t answer immediately. The banyan stirred, and a myna shrieked from somewhere above. He waited. Eventually, I replied, “As long as it takes to realize you’ve already started healing.” He nodded faintly, as if filing that away, then said nothing more. That day, he left only after I did.
He returned the next day. And the day after that. Always at the same time, around four in the afternoon, and always leaving just after dusk. He didn’t talk much. Some days he brought old books—never reading them, just holding them. Some days, he brought nothing at all. On the fifth day, he introduced himself. “Rajan.” No surname, no occupation, no qualifiers. He asked if I believed that benches could remember things. I said yes. “Then maybe that’s why I’m here,” he murmured, “because I think I’ve forgotten something I promised to remember.” There was something fragmented in his voice—not broken, but disassembled. Over time, bits of his story began to surface—not in full confessions, but in quiet drops. A brother who disappeared during the pandemic. A fiancé who stopped writing. A home that no longer felt like a place. “I came to Pune for a week,” he said once, “but I couldn’t leave.” He chuckled softly after saying it, as if realizing how long that week had stretched. “I forgot how to go back.” I didn’t tell him to. That wasn’t what this bench was for.
Instead, I gave him space. Sometimes, he would help me distribute the newest batch of Listening Books across libraries and bus terminals. Other times, he just sat nearby, humming to himself, almost as if rehearsing a tune he once knew but had misplaced. People started recognizing him—calling him The Quiet Man of the Banyan. He didn’t mind. Once, I found him gently repairing the loose wooden slat on the bench with borrowed tools. Another day, he helped an old lady find her dog. Slowly, without intention, Rajan became part of the bench’s rhythm. I once asked him if he still felt lost. “Not lost,” he said. “Unanchored, maybe. But I like floating here.” It was then I realized—some people don’t come to the bench for answers. They come for permission. Permission to pause, to drift, to not know. And sometimes, to stay.
It has been over a year now. Rajan still visits, though not daily. He has taken up work at a small publishing house nearby, and I suspect he now writes under a pen name—he once left behind a typed page folded inside a copy of The Listening Book. It was a story about a boy who followed a sparrow into the heart of a banyan tree and never came back the same. I didn’t ask if it was his. I didn’t need to. The bench has seen many come and go. And a few, like Abdul and Rajan, who forget to leave—not because they are stuck, but because they’ve found something here that the world outside often forgets to offer: stillness without expectation, presence without performance. And so the banyan stands, ancient and knowing, its roots now intertwined not just with the earth but with the lives it holds gently in its shadow. And I? I remain its keeper. But more importantly, its student.
8
The first sign of change was not dramatic. It came softly, as most endings do—like the hush before birds return to roost. One early winter morning, I arrived at the bench and found an envelope resting gently on the seat, weighed down by a stone. It wasn’t addressed to anyone. Inside was a note, handwritten in tight, careful script: “I don’t know your name. But thank you. For the shade. For the tea. For the silence that asked nothing from me. I think I’m ready now—to go, to return, or perhaps to simply begin.” There was no signature. But I knew it was from someone the bench had held, someone who had healed enough to walk on. I sat with that note for a long time, rereading it until the words blurred into meaning. It felt like closure, not just for the writer, but for me as well. Not an ending of place, but of a chapter in the long, slow unfolding of what this banyan had become—a cathedral of unspoken sorrows and slowly gathered joys.
That same week, the city council sent word. A new road project was being proposed, and the stretch of land where the banyan stood might be affected. For the first time in years, I felt fear—not for myself, but for the fragile ecosystem that had grown in the shade of this tree. It wasn’t just wood and roots anymore—it was memory, it was communion. I spoke with local residents, activists, even school children who had once written poems under its branches. To my surprise, the community responded like water to a cracked stone—filling it with urgency, resistance, care. Petitions flowed. Articles were written. And one morning, a group of schoolkids formed a human chain around the banyan, holding signs that read “This Tree Listens” and “Our Stories Live Here.” The message was not shouted. It was sung softly, like a lullaby. Days later, the project was rerouted. The bench was spared. The banyan remained. It was, perhaps, the tree’s way of whispering back: I’m not done yet.
In the weeks that followed, something shifted inside me. I began visiting the bench less frequently—not out of neglect, but trust. The place no longer needed me in the same way. It had become self-sustaining, a living organism shaped by countless hands and hearts. Rajan now tended to the bench some days, others brought fresh books, even the local tea vendor began leaving small cups on the armrest every morning, one marked with a chalked “A” in memory of Abdul. The original Listening Book was preserved in a glass case inside the nearby community library, and a new volume—Volume 7—had just begun. I stood beneath the banyan one golden afternoon, watching as a young woman read aloud to her blind grandfather, both of them seated on the bench, their voices weaving into the rustle of leaves above. I realized that while I had once thought I was the keeper of this space, it had actually been keeping me all along.
Now, I write from my small room, not far from the park. The window lets in the sounds of birds, and sometimes, the distant laughter of children near the bench. My journals are full—not just of others’ stories, but of what I’ve learned: that time doesn’t heal all wounds, but presence does. That listening is not passive—it is sacred labor. And that when a place holds space for grief, it becomes something holy. I think often of Abdul, of his patience, his grace, his birdseed rituals. I think of Amira’s quiet dignity, of Rajan’s half-spoken verses, of the thousands of anonymous voices who trusted a bench under a banyan tree. And I know now: they’ll keep coming. Because somewhere in the heart of this noisy, hurried world, there must remain a place where silence lives. A place where birds return. A place where stories sit down, stretch out, and rest—until they’re ready to fly again.
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