You are a child—not quite girl or boy—when you spot the Green Man for the first time.
It is evening and you are lighting a candle at the tulsi altar. The scent of summer clings to the air: warm, heavy, glittering with dust motes. In a small cotton pouch, you gather a few fallen tulsi leaves and jasmine flowers. You have always felt the pain of plants—the faint tremors in the air when they hurt and bleed—and so you take care to not touch them, to pick only the leaves and petals scattered on the mossy ground for your mother’s puja.
Golden light trickles through the foliage, casting dappled shadows all around. For one strange moment you see something move behind the old vine-entangled statues in the garden. Then, the candle flickers and your vision blurs.
It could’ve been the silhouette of a young boy playing hide-and-seek, or as is the case with most fairies, just a trick of light and dreamy wistfulness.
#
The plants sing to you.
Ma notices this, and the way the branches seem to grow sturdy or tendrils curl to blooms when you water them. Every night when she braids your unruly hair with coconut oil, she tells you a ghost story, of how every tree in the garden is home to an ancestral spirit or a wandering faery.
The banyan tree is claimed by a Brahmin zamindar who built the house. You know he has a sweet tooth because you regularly leave an offering of mango chutney wrapped in a banana leaf under its wide branches. You’ve also been warned about lingering too long beneath the peepal tree at night—the ghost there is a violent wife-beating alcoholic who won’t even spare little flower-picking girls.
Even boys? you ask, as Ma smears a streak of sindoor on her forehead, marking her as wife and mother.
Even them, she gravely nods.
You feel disappointed. You often wondered what it would be like to have short hair like a boy’s and walk the marble floors wearing a man’s clothes like your many older brothers, but now not so much.
Perhaps you could ask the Green Man about it.
#
Ma never told you about the Green Man. You will later realize that she never really told you anything useful except that you were born beneath a summer moon, with the curse of girlhood upon you.
They christened you a girl-child. A castaway. Something that should’ve been thrown into a well before the moon even stole a glance at your terrified face. Only after your Ma’s pleadings did they let you stay out of sight, wandering in the garden or hiding inside cupboards, while your brothers learned to trace the Sanskrit and English alphabets with chalk. And so, the long, lonely hours of childhood became yours alone, with the rustling leaves and the flowers that whispered sweet nothings when you knelt to smell them.
That is how the Green Man finds you, a sprite like himself with petals in your hair, weeping to the rose bush about an older sister married and sent off to a distant land where there are no trees for miles around.
He brings you a flower (a peony for luck), wipes the tears from your eyes, and in return you who know nothing about destiny or the laws of the world, give him your name.
#
Once your elder sisters leave, you never hear from them again.
Some evenings, the ghost from the peepal tree possesses the man you call Father. By lantern light, you apply healing salves over your mother’s scars, tattooed across her back like the twisting paths of a labyrinth. Occasionally, you get a glimpse of the marks that your aunts carry and you wonder if the sisters trapped in faraway towns have someone to massage balms across tattered skin and bone.
Then, you think of the plants, mutilated each day for flower and leaf and fruit and wood, their plaintive screams that only you and the Green Man can hear, as echoes tossed upon the summer wind. On restless windy nights, he holds you close with jasmine-scented promises and tales of a world beneath the hills.
Born of summer and earth and forests humming with birdsong, he is lost like you, uprooted from an ancient land by the same white men whom your Father serves. A stowaway tucked at the bottom of a ship and then abandoned into the wild, he wandered into a place where the heat stung and burned, the air riddled with mosquitos and cicadas and chants in a language he cannot recognize.
The other ghosts shun him because he is different.
So, to give him company, you learn his language, while he stitches flower crowns for you and makes the petals flutter in intricate patterns. You touch his face, fair as a bright sky and his fingers curl in your hair like the gentle brush of leaves against skin.
Sometimes you fall asleep thinking you’d be quite content to live in the garden forever, playing hide-and-seek with the Green Man among the statues and bushes, like two leaves dancing in the wind.
You are both so young, after all.
#
But the years aren’t kind to you.
The first time you bleed, you know instinctively that a huge injustice has been done to you, to your body. You do not recognize the person in the mirror and you are certain you never will. The pain blinds you, your breath hitches. Ma and the aunts accuse you of being a dramatic little bitch.
The Green Man sits by your window all night, wills the fallen leaves to dance. They cast shadowy patterns on the opposite wall, and for a while it delights and distracts you.
But you never learn to drape a sari the right way. You burn the rice and stumble over your prayers. Stitches come apart and your fingers tremble when you hold a conch shell to your lips. Every failure is carved into your back with cane, sanctified by a slew of slurs.
Yet it is still not enough to justify your dowry.
The sandalwood incense you burn every evening does not carry your prayers to the heavens but to the plants instead. The tulsi leaves floating in the water goblet stare at you with sadness and understanding. When you stumble into the garden weeping, the trees nod softly, acknowledging your hurt. They offer all they have—leaves, petals and sap find their way beneath your mortar and pestle, into your potions and salves.
Your Ma trades them to buy you more time, but the Green Man who lingers in the shadows knows it isn’t enough.
You will always resent him a little for it.
#
The night before your marriage to a stranger, the Green Man asks you to choose him instead.
You know what it means to be a wife. You know it because they’ve prepared you all your life for it and assured you that you’d make a terrible one. You think of your body that grows and morphs against your will, pliant and subdued in the grip of a man you cannot love. Like a tree bent and heavy with ripe fruit, you imagine yourself laden with countless children. They carry the faces of the sisters who disappeared, along with the aunts and the babies whose ashes you’ve tossed into the river.
And then, you try to imagine a life beneath the hills as the Green Man’s consort, eternally dancing in a cavernous hall, among the stone-hearted Fae you’ve only encountered in stories. You think of their bloodlust and sharp teeth and petty enchantments and your guts twist in revolt.
You realize you never had a choice to begin with, and so you willingly ask the Green Man to dance. His eyes, yellow-green like a pond, glimmer with sadness.
For a long time that is the only thing you trust.
#
He takes your proffered hand, and leads you from bramble to bush, trusting the trail of will o wisp and mushroom rings. Through sunless shores and rotting bridges and narrow tunnels, you follow him with a hammering heart, all the way into the fetid darkness of a forest where vines spring forth from the undergrowth, cutting into your weary legs, claiming you for their own.
The deeper you go, the music of the plants fades into a stony silence.
#
At the entrance to the underworld, the Fae await the Green Man’s return.
They offer you a mask, if you will take it. It is heavy, carved with ivy and wisteria with gilt borders that shimmer in the weak light of dusk. You have not looked at your face in so long, you wonder if you will miss it.
You decide that you won’t.
Before he presses the mask against your skin, he cups your face in his hands and asks if you are certain about your choice.
Yes, you lie, trembling at his touch. He knows you are lying, but he doesn’t question it.
(It is these little things about him that you remember later.)
They gift you a silver-white dress with black thorny vines curling all over the heavy fabric. When it fits you well, you feel a spasm of disappointment in yourself.
He, of course, is dressed in dark-green brocades with a crown of laurel and oak leaves. A summer king restored to his former glory. His black hair shining with hints of burnished emerald, tumbles playfully past his shoulders. His eyes gleam with youthful mischief. His ears, you realize, are pointed like the elves in a picture-book Father had once gifted and you’d left behind.
When he takes your hand in his, green tendrils curl around both your fingers and knot in a complex pattern, binding you together. All those years, you’d never properly beheld him, and now your heart is filled with a strange sense of mourning.
I am afraid, you whisper in all honesty. The faeries overseeing the rites, snigger maliciously.
I know. But then his eyes beseech, I am too.
His grip tightens. I am sorry. I wish there was another way.
The lights are dizzying. You feel choked by the tendrils that are now delicately crawling all over your neck and face, yet you put on a brave smile. Me too.
He bends closer, his lips inches away from yours. At least, this way, you won’t be alone.
You think of the strange plants with unfamiliar scents blooming all around you, and nod silently. The tendrils dig beneath your skin, cutting deep and drawing blood. It slowly dawns on you that despite his twinkling eyes, he is bleeding too.
#
The decades blur as you accept your new life among the Fae.
You are relieved when you find out that you aren’t the only one. The underworld is bristling with changelings and lost souls, from fabled continents and distant towns. Each eager to escape a sordid reality, only to be a plaything tossed upon immortal arms promising solace and a home.
You wonder if any of your sisters have found their way here but the masks make it difficult to discern anyone.
You long to think that the Green Man is different from the rest, but as the years flow and your memories dim, you too join him on the Wild Hunt, riding behind him through the woods, chanting feral cries to his name. You learn that he is just a minor deity among the endless bickering gods, worth no more attention than a pageboy polishing enchanted cups or delivering missives, and you are even more irrelevant—just a mortal he has taken a fancy to.
Yet, he is kind, shielding you from the roving eyes of the other kings and queens. He carves a hollow from a gnarled oak trunk with leaves and lanterns swaying from the ceiling—a shadow-play to beguile you each night. He brings nuts and berries you have never tasted before, teaches you a new language of flowers, and holds your hand when the sadness shakes your whole body like a tree caught in a storm.
In turn, you reawaken the child in him, in the afternoons when you both go about collecting chestnuts and acorns, chasing each other down woodland lanes and wading through mossy lakes. The spell of an unending golden summer wraps around you snugly, like a promise kept. Eventually, even these unfamiliar plants begin singing to you.
Then there are the children—Jae and Jana—one is yours and the other you adopt, but you neither remember nor care which one is which, and being a mother doesn’t feel as strange as you once thought it would be. Feral and wondrous, they amaze the both of you.
It isn’t exactly contentment, but it’ll have to do.
After all, since he had stolen your name as a child, your heart felt rather dispensable.
#
Some nights the Green Man wakes up, thrashing and screaming, and you must lull him back to sleep. Another bad dream, he shrugs, of forest fires and the Fae dying. He buries his face in the crook of your neck, breathing in your floral scent, his tears wet upon your shivering skin.
You lie awake, muttering incantations to keep your little family safe, as the smell of burning draws closer.
#
Slowly, the old fears scuttling over your heart return, like mosquito bites on humid nights that you cannot itch away.
You remember a time you hated your oily pigtails and wanted to dress up like a boy.
You remember a world where you had no choice, where you waited in the shadows when the grown-ups talked and fought. The ancient claustrophobic walls you sought escape from. A garden filled with trees and flowers and old statues that sang to you, where you found a strange temporary refuge. You remember what the plants taught you, all the potions you made to heal scars and chase away bad dreams.
#
One day, you take off your mask and stare into the glassy water of a stone fountain. Your breath catches.
You continue weeping, even after he finds you and caresses your hair. In the distance, you spot your children playing in the meadow, laughing gleefully, never to grow up or grow old, like the Green Man.
It doesn’t take long for you to break the spell and make up your mind.
#
The next evening, when he asks you to join the Wild Hunt, you refuse. Instead, you tell him that you’re leaving and you’re taking the children with you.
He is hurt but he accepts your choice.
(You realize that he could’ve refused, that in his domain he had the power to trap you forever, weaving a spell of forgetfulness to make you stay by his side.)
You thought he’d stolen your name but for the first time you wonder if you had, by sheer accident, stolen his instead.
He lays a trembling hand upon your back. All those years ago, why did you choose me?
You turn to face him, kissing his hand. Because you’re the only one who let me breathe.
Your tears fall upon his shaking fingers. You have a hunch that he mistakes your love for pity or something else but it is too late to correct him. You chose him because you had no other choice, and men never understood that sort of thing.
He probably wishes for you to ask him that question back, but you won’t. There are answers you simply do not care for.
They are burning the forests, he warns.
That’s one part of why I am returning.
And the other?
You take off the mask and throw it at his feet. He gets it.
I wish you well, he says.
You too.
I just have one request.
You are surprised. What is it?
Remember me even when it’s all gone. Promise me.
You smile sadly. Always.
#
You return with your children as a witch ready to reclaim their home.
The old house you grew up in is in ruins, colonized by ferns and roots and creepers. Mushrooms bloom carelessly along the rotten rafters and mossy window panes. All the people whose voices once resounded through the glimmering halls are gone, dead or somewhere else. The garden you loved is in disarray, overgrown with weeds. Vines choke the fallen, fragmented statues.
Yet the trees still remember you and welcome you in.
Among the cob-webbed rooms, you find a glazed mirror, some torn clothes, and broken furniture. Your children tip-toe across the dusty floor, leaving a trail of mischievous footprints. They uncover a small box carved out of walnut wood, filled with small glass bottles and dried herbs that flake into powder and dust when touched. A sudden warmth fills your heart.
You cut off your hair until it is quite short, stash the dress in an old trunk and wear a shirt and men’s trousers instead. You slowly weed out the garden, plant new shrubs, till the soil to make a vegetable patch. Pigeons and doves pause their nest-making to watch you work, cooing gently.
You painstakingly grow vegetables—lemons, gourds, chilies, spinach, beans, jackfruit—cooking them into curries, with only a little bit of oil, or pickles to be stored in jars. The bay leaves shine, ready to have wishes inscribed on them. You rebuild the old tulsi altar, encircled by aparajita and hibiscus blooms. The bees trust you with their honey. Soon, you are back making salves, balms and healing potions.
With the rotten wood, you set up a small shack, trailed with vines and wisteria. It becomes your apothecary, with shelves lined with glass bottles and boxes, and a workbench where your tools sit: mortar, pestle, chalice, knife. The room smells musty, of sweetened herbs and dried flowers. A lantern creaks at the entrance, next to a wooden sign where the children have hand-painted your initials.
After a hard day’s work, you look into the mirror, rubbing the sweat and grime off your forehead. You look rather like an effeminate pageboy, with your boyish curls and mischief glimmering in your eyes. Your face, creased with exhaustion, breaks into a smile.
You no longer bleed each month and the plants sing to your children too.
#
You return to a world of gossip and whispers. They say that you can do magic. At first, you pay them no heed.
Your local apothecary attracts enough visitors. Mothers with sore throats, headaches, and scars they’d rather hide. Young girls with troubled secrets, following a breadcrumb trail of rumors that lead to you, the last resort in certain matters. Older women, who’ve seen their fair share of horrors, hoping for a draft to ease the aches. Even a few shy men, fumbling in their pockets and glancing around every few minutes, afraid they’ll be judged or overhead.
You nod, listening to their woes, as your fingers move with precision, only interrupted when your children bring you a bundle of herbs or show you a flower they’ve never seen before. Your ointments and potions work wonders. Soon, you are off healing sick children, curing day-long fevers, mending broken hearts, treating fungal infections and training young mid-wives.
People come to you with the strangest of problems because the whispers say that you always have an answer—even though most of them avert their gaze when you murmur a few words into a concoction. They all know who you are—or rather the girlchild you were in the past—and they make up stories about a marriage overseas that you neither corroborate or deny.
When they come asking for help, they notice your strange clothes and stumble over their words, wondering how to address you.
(It amuses you.)
You are kind and offer them all you have: potions, conversation, a portion of your food and drink. A couple of young women stay back for long hours, sharing their stories. You don’t wish to trust them but slowly, you learn to make friends. They teach you new recipes, play with your children, comb their hair. A few strangers even beg you to take them on as apprentices, to share your secret knowledge.
You tell them to look to the trees that have taught you everything you know. The tulsi leaves that you scatter over meals for protection and purification. The roots of the ancient banyan, from where you learned about resilience and hope. The arms of the creepers, begging you to cling onto what you believe. The light dancing upon hibiscus petals, whispering of beauty in unfamiliar places. The Easter lilies you nurture, promising renewal. The scent of jasmine and rajanigandha enfolding you at night, reminding you of all the sweetness in the world that goes unnoticed.
Your children are surprised to learn that the trees do not sing to everyone.
#
As word of your miracles spreads about town, the whispers turn bitter, edged with malice.
The townsmen are wary of your skills. Like the Father you once had, the male doctors utter curses to your name when the patients they’d left to die, return alive, asking for their coin back. The men in your locality begin to chop down trees, fill up the algal ponds, and demolish the old empty houses. They put up wires and electric lights, entangling the sparrows and crows unfortunate enough to get caught.
Try as you might, you cannot save them all.
They leave dirt and dead rats on your doorstep. No matter how strong your wards are, some of your plants wilt and wither. The first to go are your precious tulsi saplings. Then, the banyan tree that had stood long before you were even born. Your vegetable patch is poisoned, and a white fungus eats away each of your china roses.
The kids in the neighborhood bruise your children until you are forced to keep them locked at home. Expletives are painted upon your doorframe, next to your initials. For every customer you help, there’s another who narrowly misses hurling a glass bottle at you but flings an insult about you being neither a man nor a woman.
They say that you are no longer a healer, but a vile spirit of the woods who must be driven away to keep the town safe.
Their betrayal hurts you, but it cannot startle you. You have seen the fear and powerlessness in their eyes, the scars they carry and the men whose houses they look after. You try not to blame them.
You consider running away but there is always a small crowd gathered outside your home, holding demonstrations with burning torches, denouncing you as a daini, a witch. Skin prickling in helpless anger, you are forced to close down your little business, only allowing a few trusted customers to your home, through a back gate.
You fall to your knees, begging your plants for help, a spell, some protection for your children.
They remain silent. They no longer sing to you. They haven’t been able to for a while—and there’s nothing more you can do to ease their pain.
Perhaps, they’re also disappointed in you, so desperate to save your own, at any cost.
#
You are going to die.
This thought occurs to you with alarming clarity when one morning you find your spider lilies trampled and uprooted. You gingerly pick them up, press them to your ears and then place them in the cooling waters of a marble birdbath. You stare at your itching fingers long afterwards, as if pricked by invisible thorns, thinking, they will burn me as a witch.
They will burn you as a witch.
By midday, there’s no getting around that fact and so you do what needs to be done. You lead one of your “friends” through the back entrance and beg her to take the children. Widowed as a child, her eyes are filled with a grim determination that probably helped her outlive all her in-laws.
Keep them safe. Raise them to be kind. Tell them Mama has to go away for a while.
She nods. What about you?
You both exchange a look of silent understanding, until tears fill your eyes again. Tell them I love them. That I’ll always love them.
They will burn everything, won’t they?
You sigh in defeat. Alas, I’m not a god.
She doesn’t ask you to come with her, and you appreciate that as you set about strengthening your wards, drawing sigils over the doors, burning incense the way you did as a helpless child long ago. By evening, Jae and Jana have packed their clothes and favorite saplings. They think they’re going to the beach and are sad you aren’t coming with them.
I’ll join you, soon.
Jana gives you a little drawing she made. It is the face of a man, surrounded by leaves.
It surprises you very much. You remember him?
Of course, he brings me flowers. Says it’ll keep the nightmares away. Jana turns out her pockets. Petunias, peonies, yellow roses tumble out.
You have the dreams too? Of…of…the trees burning?
A few times, but after Daddy came to visit, they stopped.
You turn to the garden, wondering if he is there, eavesdropping among the shadows. You don’t feel him anywhere nearby. You knew he’d have followed you if you asked, but you hadn’t wanted him to. Yet the years have not dulled the memory of playing hide-and-seek in the garden, two summer sprites gleefully chasing each other all day long, or of that night when he’d helplessly asked you to choose him because he could see no other way.
But even after leaving him, his dreams have haunted you to the waking world. In those visions of the future, you have seen the forest fires and the glittering edges of axes wielded by mortal men. You have writhed in pain in your sleep, knowing how the world was too much, searching for a way out. Now, the smell of burning is at your door, upon your skin.
You kiss your children goodbye.
#
You don’t go out without a fight. Despite their silence, the trees come to your aid, strangling the villagers who’ve come to carry you away. Their kindness and sacrifice surprise you. You tell them to stop, to go home, that the battle is lost, and they tell you that you were their home and always would be.
They will not let you go out without a fight, sharing their last bit of strength with you.
But the trees are few and they are many. Your world is dying as you’d always feared it would. Your head hurts with the sounds of all the hacking and hewing, and then, someone knocks you out with a well-timed blow to the head and your world is dark again.
#
When you wake up, they’ve tied you to a wooden pole, your body half buried in firewood. They’ve surrounded you, faces carved with hate and anger and lechery and revulsion, like the ghosts of the ancient trees your Ma taught you to pacify or avoid.
You’ve slept with the devil, they say. You’ve tamed the trees and the birds to do your wicked bidding. You’ve stolen the jobs of men, taught their wives to rebel, broken apart families. You’ve taught little girls to behave like boys. You’ve hexed those who spoke against you. Your black magic has poisoned the town, and so they must burn you and your scheming trees for the greater good. Even your goblin children who’ve run off, deserve to burn and die. They will find them and kill them.
The flames catch, the heat sizzles.
It hurts so much you cannot breathe. After all this time, you still feel like a child, helpless against elders who will never understand, and you are so afraid. Wrapped by the fumes, you cough and sputter and writhe, wishing for the pain to end quickly.
You’ve tried so hard, but you cannot be brave any longer.
If only…if only you could see your children for one last time. If only you had the power to build a better world for them. If only…you had the choice…to heal instead of hurting.
A faint floral scent lingers in the air. Like a memory of a faraway summer.
In your last moments, the Green Man is with you again.
A broken laugh escapes you. You came back?
He cups your face in his leaf-like hands. To help you breathe.
The outside world is fading out. The enraged villagers are a blur. It is just the two of you again, trapped in the restless heat, burning together. You smell blood and ash and a flower you cannot remember the name of.
Everything hurts.
Burns.
Bleeds.
Vines erupt around you. Ferns lace around your neck and chest, willowy leaves brush against your signed face, creepers wrap along your legs, protecting you from the flames.
Your heart is still beating. Furiously. But…you will die.
They’ve already burnt my forests and my home. The Fae are but a story and I am only a dying god.
No, no…you whimper in pain.
But you, he says, as if seeing you for the first time, you are beautiful.
You want to scoff, but instead you finally ask him the question. Tell me then. Is that why you chose me, all those years ago?
He looks hurt, a little crushed. No. I…for a very long time, I thought I was the only one, who could hear the trees sing. Who could feel their pain when they bled.
You wonder if love is a secret truth that only two people share, something to carry in one’s heart like a song in the other’s absence. Or perhaps, what made the heart sing was just the relief at being granted the permission to use the other. Both of you, saving each other to save yourselves. You brush that dark thought away with a smile. That hurt…never stops, does it?
No, it doesn’t. And that is why you must live.
You look at each other deeply. You who have loved him knowing how little love mattered in a world that wanted you to burn, while using him to find your own path. You who care for him still, aware that it isn’t enough, it never would be enough, to save the world you both loved so much. He knew it, too.
I’ll keep your promise.
With your burnt lips, you kiss him. He kisses you back softly, quickly, a leaf’s rustle, a lull in the summer wind, and then, he is gone.
*
The vines are thick and thorny, as you climb out of the rubble, brushing off the ash and bristles from your skin. Every bone in your body aches and stings as you stumble, looking around.
The men who’d chanted those slogans and set fire to your home are all dead, strangled by the thick creepers that seem to have erupted from the very ground, or trampled on by the gnarled branches of ancient trees that seem to have fallen from the sky itself.
There isn’t a single living soul nearby that you can see or feel, except for your beating heart.
Relief doesn’t wash over you—at least, not yet. You carefully sidestep past the bodies, your vision blurring, thirst and hunger getting the better of you. You lean against a heavy branch, struggling to catch your breath.
At the edge of everything you’ve known and loved, you stand alone.
Something falls out of your hair. A flower. A peony like the one he’d brought you all those summers ago when you were a child, golden-scented, listening to the leaves sing in a faraway garden.
You kneel, picking up the flower still real and soft in your fingers, and cry.