Does It Sit on the Branches for a While?

The question came one afternoon in the summer of 2020, as unexpectedly as most of my grandmother’s questions did.

She sat cross-legged on the floor opposite me, shelling peas with the efficiency of someone who had repeated the same gesture for decades. Every few seconds she slipped a seed into her mouth and dropped the rest into a steel bowl that rang softly whenever another handful landed inside. The television was on in the background, though she wasn’t watching it. She rarely watched television; she argued with it. News anchors would shout and she would shake her head and mutter that none of them had been slapped enough as children.

That afternoon the internet had decided to become philosophical. The little symbol at the top of my phone kept appearing and disappearing as though it had commitments elsewhere. I was standing by the window, arm stretched toward the courtyard in the hope that a better angle might persuade it to remain.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Trying to catch the Wi-Fi.”

“Catch it?”

“Yes.”

“Where is it?”

I pointed toward the router hanging high on the wall.

She looked at the router. Then at the guava tree growing in the middle of our aangan. Then back at the router.

“And when it leaves the box,” she asked, “does it sit on the branches for a while?”

I laughed immediately. It was the sort of laugh children reserve for old people who ask innocent questions about modern things.

She didn’t laugh.

She waited.

I lowered my phone and looked at her properly, trying to determine whether she was teasing me.

She wasn’t.

Her question startled me because it belonged to a much older world. Invisible things, in her understanding, were rarely homeless. They occupied spaces and obeyed habits. Ghosts preferred peepal trees; ancestors visited cows. Why should the internet be any different?

When I was seven or eight, my grandmother’s stories were my preferred bedtime companions. They possessed very little internal logic. Cinderella appeared often enough, though she shared shelf space with women who had backwards feet, child-stealing leopards, and ghosts who seemed incapable of deciding whether they wished to murder passersby or merely comb their hair beneath tamarind trees.

Most often, however, there were churels–restless female spirits who haunted crossroads and trees.

I was particularly disturbed by her story about braided cow tails.

According to her, witches visited cowsheds at night and braided the tails of sleeping cattle. By morning the knots would be so tight that no human fingers could have tied them. I accepted this explanation completely. For years, whenever we visited the village, I inspected our neighbours’ cows with the seriousness of an underpaid detective. One neatly plaited tail, I believed, would confirm everything.

My grandmother narrated these stories in the same tone she used to discuss grocery prices, distant relatives, and the medicinal properties of fennel seeds. There was never any dramatic lowering of the voice, no attempt to frighten me. Ghosts simply existed in her world the way electricity existed in mine—occasionally inconvenient, mostly avoidable, and certainly not worth arguing about.

By thirteen, I had acquired the particular arrogance peculiar to children who have recently encountered science textbooks.

Ghosts belonged, I decided, in the same category as Santa Claus, fairies, and the monster my cousin insisted lived inside the bathroom drain. I returned from school carrying facts the way medieval knights carried swords. Wi-Fi was electromagnetic radiation. Eclipses had nothing to do with serpents swallowing the moon. Witches, if they existed at all, probably had more pressing concerns than braiding livestock.

I explained these things patiently to my grandmother.

She heard me out with the indulgence adults reserve for children explaining things they discovered last Tuesday. Then she tore off a piece of roti, set it aside for the cow as she always did, and asked whether I wanted more dal.

I regarded superstition as something one outgrew, like bedwetting or an attachment to stuffed toys.

This confidence lasted until approximately eleven forty-five every night, at which hour all mirrors became vaguely suspicious and my feet developed a profound attachment to blankets.

I trust maps that recalculate routes without explanation. I save photographs to a cloud that exists nowhere my grandmother would think to search for. Some of my conversations survive only because someone forgot to delete them.

It has never occurred to me to ask where these things go when they are not being used. I have never wondered where they sleep.

A year later the guava tree in our courtyard was cut down because its roots had begun disturbing the flooring. The workers removed it in less than an hour. I remember feeling mildly inconvenienced by the noise and then embarrassed by my own indifference.

The new connection works beautifully. Films stream without complaint and lectures no longer dissolve into frozen faces.

I never answered her. The conversation drifted elsewhere, as conversations do. We probably discussed dinner, or whether I had completed my homework, or why the neighbour’s guavas tasted sweeter than ours.

Years later, when heavy rain interrupts the signal and I find myself standing by the same window waiting for the bars to return, I still look toward the patch of courtyard where the guava tree once stood.