Lounge Fiction Special: ‘The many lives of a leaf’ by Uddipana Goswami

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. SUMMER Before the leaf plunged into the air and floated away with the wind, it was what the tree was, it lived where the tree stood, it swayed how the other leaves swayed. It was attached to the branch, the bole, the root, the ground.

The life of the leaf was a good one, with kith and kin, dancing and joy, feeding and feasting on the sun, the air, the soil. But it was a restless leaf; its thoughts travelled where it could not, it longed to follow its thoughts in the wind, through the world. Sometimes, it revelled in the solidity of the tree that kept it from straying, from doing the things that a leaf wasn’t meant to be doing—like wandering alone and aimlessly in the world.

At other times, it felt it stayed rooted, absolutely grounded, only because it could not leave. When the leaf had erupted in the Spring from the bark of the tree, it was a lime green speck that kept reaching for the sun, soaking it in, growing into its fullest and greenest every day. Watching it grow, it was told by the leaves older than itself that this was the one life it had.

And that this one life was meant to be in the service of the tree, making it stronger every day, helping it survive the battles that it fought every day for the sake of every leaf and every branch that constituted its organic body. When the leaf asked who this battle was against, it was informed that the enemy was anyone who was not the tree or of the tree. The leaf found this cryptic.

Being a small inconsequential leaf in a forest full of leaves, it decided to accept the elders’ words. But all through the Summer of its life, it remained dissatisfied. It knew it could not find the answers it sought among its leafy kin: they had decided it