Chapter 15: The Katkari

The Katkari settlement was seven kilometres from the farmhouse, on the other side of the ridge, in a valley that the ghat road bypassed because nobody who built roads thought about the people who lived where roads didn't go.

Nikhil drove the Jimny as far as the track allowed — about four kilometres — and walked the rest. Vanya came with him. Bhaskar stayed at the devrai, monitoring the instruments and pretending he wasn't also monitoring his phone for a response from his mother, who had listened to his questions in Sangli with a silence that was heavier than anything the forest produced.

The walk was steep. The trail — not a trail, really, more a consensus among feet about which route was least likely to end in a sprained ankle — wound through dry deciduous forest that was less dense than the devrai. The trees here were younger, thinner, recovering from a logging event that Vanya dated to approximately 2005 based on the growth rings she could sense through the root network. The stumps were still visible — grey and weathered, surrounded by coppice growth, the trees regrowing from old roots with the stubborn patience of organisms that had been cut down before and would probably be cut down again.

The Katkari were one of Maharashtra's Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups — a designation that sounded like protection and functioned like bureaucratic abandonment. Their settlements were listed in government databases. Their welfare was theoretically the responsibility of the Tribal Development Department. Their children theoretically had access to education. Their healthcare was theoretically covered. The word "theoretically" did a lot of heavy lifting in Indian tribal policy.

The settlement was a cluster of fifteen houses — jhopdi, the traditional Katkari huts made from bamboo frames and plastered with mud and cow dung, roofed with karvi straw. They were arranged in a loose semicircle around a cleared area that served as common space: the place where food was prepared communally, where children played, where elders sat in the evenings and told stories that had been old when the Mughals were young.

A dog barked at their approach. Not aggressively — the bark of a dog fulfilling its contractual obligation to announce visitors while simultaneously communicating, through body language, that it would prefer to go back to sleep. Two children appeared from behind a hut, saw the strangers, and disappeared again with the high-speed teleportation that children in every village in India have mastered.

An old woman emerged from the nearest hut. She was small — perhaps five feet, perhaps less — with the wiry, compact body of a person who had spent seven decades walking hills and carrying loads and eating whatever the forest provided. Her face was a landscape: dark, weathered, lined with rivers of expression that told of seasons endured and children raised and forests walked. She wore a cotton sari — green, faded, wrapped in the style particular to the Katkari women, without a blouse, the way it had been done for centuries before modernity decided that bare shoulders were immodest.

She looked at them. Her eyes — dark, sharp, undimmed by age — moved from Nikhil to Vanya and back. She said something in Katkari — a dialect of Marathi so old and so distinct that even Nikhil, who spoke Marathi as a mother tongue, caught only fragments.

Vanya responded. In Katkari.

Nikhil stared. Vanya spoke Katkari. Of course she did. Three years in the forest, with the network carrying the sounds and rhythms and chemical signatures of the nearby human community — she had absorbed their language the way she had absorbed everything else. Through the trees.

The old woman's expression changed. The wariness that greets all outsiders — the wariness that centuries of exploitation by moneylenders, government officials, and well-meaning NGOs had baked into the DNA of tribal communities across India — softened. Not into trust. Into curiosity.

She spoke again. Longer this time. Vanya listened, nodded, replied. The exchange went on for several minutes — the old woman's voice rising and falling with the cadences of a language that had been spoken in these hills for millennia, Vanya's responses careful, respectful, using the honorifics that the Katkari language encoded differently from standard Marathi.

"Her name is Hirabai," Vanya said to Nikhil. "She's the settlement's eldest. She says she knows who you are. She knew your grandfather."

"Ajoba?"

"She says Baban vaidya used to come here. For medicines. He would walk from his farmhouse to this settlement — the same path we just walked — to collect plants that the Katkari women knew and he didn't. He would bring sugar and tea and cloth. He would sit where we're standing and talk to the elders about the devrai."

Nikhil felt something in his chest — not the network's signal, not the biochemical hum, but something older and simpler. The recognition that his grandfather's life had been larger than the family had known. That the old man who talked to trees had also talked to the people who lived among them.

"She wants to know why we're here," Vanya continued. "She wants to know if we've come about the water."

"The water?"

"Their spring has gone dry. The spring that fed this settlement — that has fed it for as long as anyone remembers — stopped flowing six months ago. They're carrying water from a stream two kilometres away. The children make the trip twice a day. The stream is seasonal — it'll dry up by April. After that, they don't know."

The water table. The resort. The borewells. The cone of depression that Bhaskar had mapped, extending five hundred metres in every direction. This settlement was within the cone. Their spring — fed by the same aquifer that fed the devrai — had been drained by the same pumps that were killing the banyan.

"Tell her we know about the water," Nikhil said. "Tell her it's the same problem that's affecting the devrai. Tell her — tell her about the borewells."

Vanya translated. Hirabai's expression didn't change — the face of a woman who had survived too much to waste energy on surprise. She spoke. Vanya translated.

"She says she knows about the borewells. She says the men went to the taluka office to complain. The taluka officer said the borewells are on private land and there is nothing to be done. She says the men went to the MLA's office. The MLA's assistant said the resort creates jobs and development and they should be grateful."

The familiar Indian story. The story of power and powerlessness, of development that develops some at the expense of others, of democracy that functions perfectly for those with resources and not at all for those without.

"Tell her about the trees," Nikhil said. "Tell her what we've found. The archive. The encoded knowledge."

Vanya hesitated. "Nikhil —"

"Tell her. This is their knowledge. Their ancestors put it there. They have every right to know."

Vanya turned to Hirabai and spoke. Not quickly — slowly, carefully, choosing words that the Katkari language could hold without distortion. She spoke about the devrai. About the network. About the trees that stored memories. About the ancestors' knowledge, encoded in roots and rings, waiting three thousand years to be read.

Hirabai listened. Her face did not change. When Vanya finished, the old woman was silent for a long time. The settlement sounds filled the gap — children's voices from behind the huts, a rooster that had misjudged the hour, the rhythmic thud of someone grinding grain.

Then Hirabai spoke. And as she spoke, something happened that Nikhil had not expected.

The trees responded.

The settlement was at the edge of the forest — secondary growth, young trees, thinned by logging. But the root network extended here — Bhaskar's radar had mapped it, a web of mycorrhizal connections stretching from the devrai's core outward for kilometres, attenuated but present, like the outer spiral of a galaxy. And as Hirabai spoke — her voice old and sure, carrying cadences that sounded like they had been passed down through generations unchanged — the network... activated.

Nikhil felt it through the ground. A pulse. A recognition signal. The network identifying something in Hirabai's voice — not the words, but the pattern, the rhythm, the frequency — and responding to it the way a lock responds to a key.

"She's singing," Vanya whispered. Her eyes were wide. Her hands, pressed against the earth where she sat, were trembling. "It's not just speech — it's a song. An old song. The kind the Katkari sing at the devrai ceremonies. And the network — Nikhil, the network is recognising it. It's an access code."

Hirabai continued. The song — because it was a song, now, the speech rhythms resolving into a melody that was ancient and simple and carried in its intervals the mathematical relationships that music shares with chemistry — rose from her small body with a force that seemed disproportionate to her size. The other settlement residents had appeared — women from the huts, men from the fields, children from their hiding places — and they stood and listened, not surprised, because they knew this song, had always known it, had heard their grandmothers sing it without understanding what it did.

The network opened.

Not the archive — something else. Something deeper. A layer beneath the archive, beneath the indexed human-encoded data, beneath even the trees' own four-hundred-year memory. A layer that the banyan's tutorial had not shown them, that the indexing system had not referenced, that had been sealed — protected, walled off, accessible only through the specific vocal-chemical key that Hirabai was providing.

Nikhil felt it as a vast space — the architectural metaphor was all his brain could manage — a vast underground cathedral of data, extending downward through the root network like an inverted mountain. The scope was — he couldn't measure it. The addressing tags were different here. Older. The encoding was denser, more complex, using molecular configurations he hadn't seen in the upper archive. And the data was not medicinal, not ecological, not practical.

It was narrative.

Stories. Thousands of them. Encoded over millennia by generations of Katkari and their predecessors — the even more ancient peoples who had lived in these hills before the Katkari, before the modern tribal classifications, before the names that contemporary India used. Their histories. Their cosmologies. Their understanding of the world, the forest, themselves. All of it, stored in a living medium that had preserved it through centuries of invasion, colonisation, deforestation, and neglect.

The Katkari's song was the password. And the archive it unlocked was not a database. It was a civilisation.

Hirabai stopped singing. The network held its breath — the data visible, accessible, waiting.

The old woman looked at Nikhil. Her eyes — sharp, ancient, carrying knowledge that predated science — held his for a long moment.

Then she spoke, and Vanya translated, and the words were:

"Baban vaidya told me, before he died, that someone would come. Someone from his family. Someone who could hear what we sing to the trees. He said to give them the song." She paused. "He said to tell them: the trees remember everything. Even the things we have forgotten. Even the things we were told to forget."

Nikhil knelt on the red earth of the Katkari settlement, barefoot, his hands on the ground, the network humming beneath him with the voices of three thousand years, and felt the weight of what had been entrusted to him settle on his shoulders like a mantle he had not asked for and could not refuse.

"We'll need your help," he said, looking at Hirabai. "To decode it. To understand it. To make sure it's preserved — not just in the trees, but in a form that survives even if the trees don't."

Vanya translated. Hirabai listened. Then she smiled — a smile that was missing teeth and full of something larger than warmth, something that had survived everything this country had thrown at its oldest people.

She said a word. Vanya translated it.

"Yes."

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