‘Dead Mango Trees Go to Heaven’

KJ Hannah Greenberg uses her trusty point-and-shoot camera to capture the order of G-d's universe, and Paint 3D to capture her personal chaos. Sometimes, it’s insufficient for her to sate herself by applying verbal whimsy to pastures where gelatinous wildebeests roam or fey hedgehogs play. Hannah’s poetry and art collections are: Miscellaneous Parlor Tricks (Seashell Books, 2024, Forthcoming), Word Magpie (Audience Askew, 2024), Subrogation (Seashell Books, 2023), and One-Handed Pianist (Hekate Publishing, 2021).

Dead Mango Trees Go to Heaven

I sat on the floor with my arms wrapped around my knees, feeling the coolness of the crimson tiles under my bare feet. Freshly sucked lychee seeds lay clustered atop a copy of Prothom Alo, the ink of its headlines oozing into the juices that dampened the front page. A slumberous silence blanketed the summer afternoon, perforated only by the television’s dim murmurs and the faint grating of a saw against wood.

“Can you come to lunch tomorrow, Ma?”

Her whisper of a voice almost melted into the rhythmic sawing outside. It was the first thing she had said aloud in some time.

“Yes, Nanu.” I hoisted myself off the floor, making my way to the adjoining kitchen. “Yes, I can.” Letting the lychee seeds slide off into the trash, I twisted the tap and let a smooth stream of water drum onto the steel sink. My palms lingered in its coolness, a brief respite from Khulna’s throbbing heat. The dark curls my grandmother had gifted my mother and my mother me clung to my forehead. I loved my hair, and I loved that I had gotten it from them. I didn’t know if I had ever told them that. But I had a feeling they knew.

As a child, I used to stoop by the door and peek in, hoping to catch a glimpse inside the bustling, steamy, seemingly cavernous kitchen, back when it had been the beating heart of my grandparents’ home. The whistling of Calcutta tea kettles and sizzling of over-easy eggs in the morning; the wispy tendrils of smoke reaching for the ceiling and scraping of knives against cutting boards that soundtracked the readying of a family meal; the hushed, giggling exchanges of local gossip as pots were scrubbed clean after dinner. Habib Uncle, a smiling man who always smelled of molasses and somewhat resembled Bob Dylan with a Khulna tan - and he leaned into it too, the fluffy-headed scamp, with his pearwood harmonica that he could barely even play - used to slip me orange slices whenever I had tried to peer in.

I could almost still hear it all, even as the sawing outside grew louder by the minute. The kettles from Calcutta had been long sold off. Habib Uncle had died of cirrhosis four years ago.

“Hot day, huh, Nanu?” I returned to the living room, two glasses of water in hand. My grandmother responded with a blink and a blank stare. Her hands gripped the sides of her wheelchair, the veins running up her forearms prominent and blue against her graying flesh. Her upper lip quivered ever so slightly, as if she was constantly teetering on the precipice of breaking into tears.

“See, I knew you should’ve let Umna Auntie help give you a bath this morning,” I chided her, placing one glass on the floor and the other on the table next to her. “Just let me know when you want some lunch, okay? I think the cabbage is almost ready.”

Her orna had slipped down her bony shoulders. Two decades ago, she would have playfully wrapped the same shawl around me as I giggled underneath its soft, checkered canopy of cloth. It had seemed gigantic back then, like I could get lost within its green and golden folds, enmeshed within its faint scent of citrus. Today, it could barely stay on her shrinking frame.

“Ma,” she said finally, speaking up a little over the sound of the sawing. “Can you come to lunch tomorrow?”

My grandmother’s Bangla was faint, fragmented, and faltering. She hesitated between words, her crinkling voice briefly trailing off before making its way back; with each pause, I could almost see her eyes dancing aimlessly across the floor, as if grappling for the direction her question had been heading in.

“Yes, Nanu. Of course I can.”

She seemed content for a little while.

“Ma,” she spoke again. “What is that sound?”

The caustic grinding of steel on wood had indeed grown more aggressive, as if repeatedly catching on something and tearing right through it. The sawing, once smooth and systematic, now sounded like an act of violence.

“Nothing, nanu. Let’s turn this up.” I reached for the remote to the TV, a thick gray box that made everything on its fuzzy screen look like it was older than the country of Bangladesh. Not too tall a hurdle, given that most of the furniture in this house was. Heck, the house was considered old when my mother’s first cries bounced off its walls, and that was the year of the war. The television, five decades and the birth of a nation later, hadn’t budged. It was on this screen that my grandparents had listened to the midnight declaration of war as the first tanks began rolling down the street outside; had scanned maps and tracked the continuous fighting to determine when it was safe to get baby formula for my infant mother; had read the name of Nanu’s brother on a list of soldiers whose bodies had been identified; had watched as the first flag of independent Bangladesh was unfurled from rooftops nationwide. It was on this screen that my mother had grown up watching Bangla dubs of Star Trek and, thirty years later, I watched the English reruns. A series of framed photographs lining the top of the television, reaching across generations and the color spectrum, showed my grandmother, my mother, and me each in our early twenties. If the world around it had changed, the television certainly hadn’t noticed.

“How’s this, Nanu?” I asked, landing on a channel airing a wildlife documentary. I turned, and my grandmother’s eyes weren’t on the screen at all.

“I don’t like the sound, ma,” she whispered. Her gaze was fixed on me.

“Nanu -”

She lifted her hand off the arms of her seat, and I watched its slow, shaky climb to meet mine. The warmth of her colorless grasp was so startling that my wrist almost jerked back in reflex. The softness of her palm pressed my fingers into a fist and held it there.

“They’re cutting down the tree, Ma.”

The last time my grandmother had been able to hold my hand like this, she had still had her smile. It had been a crooked and toothy and pure smile, one that felt like the sun peeking through the clouds just to look at you. It had been a little lopsided to the left, just like mine and my mother’s.

“They’re cutting down your tree. You live there, Ma.”

But time had changed her face. Her skin sagged as if slowly melting off of her skeleton. Her eyes, perpetually glazed over in silent exhaustion, drifted to the floor even as she faced me. Her lips were pursed in a tight, thin line. 

“They have to, Nanu. They need the space.”

The sawing lacerated the air with its unruly, arrhythmic screeches. Barbaric sounds that could not and should not be natural.

“No,” she said simply, her voice strained and guttural. Her hand, clasped around my fist, shook to and fro. “No, it’s your tree, Ma.”

“It’s okay, Nanu.” I reached for her other hand, but she squeezed the arm of her wheelchair in a quivering grip that drained all color from her wrist. Her mouth crumpled, and she began blinking profusely. I grabbed her head and pressed it against my stomach just as she released her bated breath in a hauntingly unfamiliar cry, a sound I had never heard her make. An almost animal sound, wrenched from her lungs and strangled by heaving sobs. I slipped my fingers into her hair, staring at the wall as her face trembled against my ribs. “It’s alright.”

The sawing seemed to have grown deafening by now. It was impossibly loud and ridiculously close.

“Tell them to stop, Ma,” she begged, her words almost swallowed by choked whimpers. “You live there.”

I refused to take my eyes off the wall. She pulled aimlessly on the sides of my shirt as the sawing dug into our ears, refusing to subside.

“I don’t live there, Nanu. No one does.”

The sawing cut into my head, my neck, my chest, all tightening in convulsions of agony. I wrapped my arms around Nanu’s face. The blades couldn’t get to her.

“You live there, Ma.”

The horrible screeches crescendoed, enveloping us in the unforgiving wailing of a tree being gradually torn from limb to limb. The sawing was now screaming - piercing death cries that rattled the windows.

“Ma,” she uttered, but the rest of her words were cut off by a noiseless snap that plunged the world into momentary silence. For a vanishing moment, every sound stopped. The hollow, lifeless thud that came after sounded distant and decisive. 

I cradled my grandmother’s head, listening to the sobs of her soul seeping out of her body.

*

I sat on the soil with my arms wrapped around my knees, feeling the coolness of the grassy dirt under my bare feet. In the subdued moonlight, the garden looked black. The leafy canopy I used to disappear into had been razed, the ghosts of my childhood lurking among the headless stumps scattered around me. The winding gravel pathway my grandfather had carved with his bare hands now belonged to weeds, vines, and debris. The single lamppost in the dead center of the garden, the humming glow of which used to illuminate our walks here after big dinners, had melted into the dark.

Against the moonlight, the dead mango tree was a looming sentinel, a leafless cadaver towering above the other occupants of the garden. Its lower branches had been amputated, including the one that had been sawed off this afternoon, the husk of which looked like it had already begun its slow, rotting descent into the dirt. I hadn’t spoken to the developers in some time, but I figured the rest of the tree would be gone by the end of June. Half the garden already was.

Even in the dark, I could see the shallow, grainy patch in front of the tree where my mother’s grave had been. We had been given about a month to exhume her remains before the developers began their work. If we had known we would have to sell the property so much sooner than expected, maybe we wouldn’t have buried her here in the first place, although that wasn’t a very productive train of thought at this point. I wished we could’ve kept her here longer. At least until she had seeped into the soil and there was nothing left to dig up and haul to a cemetery she had never set a living foot in. For what it was worth, she had been buried at the base of the tree for most of Nanu’s decline, so she hadn’t had to see the worst of it. She had left under the impression that her own mother still knew who she was.

The sandy patch seemed bizarrely small, like a grave for a child. How my mother had ever slept there was beyond me. I almost felt the need to apologize for the discomfort. Sorry, Ma, we should’ve dug a bigger hole. But I liked to believe that for her, it was like coming home. She was, after all, back under the tree whose branches she used to swing from as a child, her little feet scraping the very same dirt and soil. My grandfather used to talk about the tree as if it were the house’s sibling - “They grew up like this,” he would say, holding up two fingers pressed firmly together - and it felt only right to call it family. My mother had been buried with family.

I lay my hand where she had been. I wish I could say I felt something - some warmth, some stirring, a disembodied heart beating deep in the dirt - but the ground was cold, dry, and dead. As if no one had ever been there at all.

I’ll be back, Ma. I didn’t know if I said that aloud. But I had a feeling she knew.

The house was dark apart from a single window illuminated by rapid flickers of color. As I slipped into the living room, leaving the door ajar behind me, the murmurs of the television were almost imperceptible. Nanu sat in her rocking chair as it rolled to and fro with rhythmic groans, her head bobbing along with it. Her chest ballooned with each sharp breath and sank with each whistling exhale. Nanu’s dozing face was cast in the alternating green, orange, and pink of the television’s pale glow. The February issue of Prothom Alo, the same edition she read every day, had slipped out of her fingers and lay face down on the floor.

I sat down next to her, her hand dangling inches from my face. The television was on the same news channel she used to watch with my grandfather every night until one of them was snoring away. My mother used to tell me how she wasn’t supposed to watch the news until she was older, and how this had only encouraged her to sneak in and watch from the floor whenever both of them had dozed off. She now watched me do the same from her picture on top of the television, tucked in between her mother and daughter. In the room’s dimness, one could be forgiven for thinking we were the same young woman who had been excused from ageing for half a century. Our flowing black curls framed our angular faces and rested on our shoulders, slightly pinched together the same way. Although I had seen neither in a long time, our smiles looked the same, too: the toothy grin that was a little lopsided to the left.

“Ma.”

The snoring had stopped. Nanu’s hands stirred next to my face. 

“Go back to sleep, Nanu. I’m sorry.” I rose to leave. She raised her hand, stretching out her empty palm, and I paused. 

“Have you had dinner, Ma?” Her voice was low and groggy.

“Yes, Nanu.”

“Will you sleep soon?”

“Yes, Nanu.”

She fell silent. Her palm was quivering. She looked at her outstretched hand for a moment, then raised her head, meeting my eyes. I placed my hand in hers, and she closed her fingers around it. 

“Do you know my name, Nanu?”

She continued staring at my hand in hers. Her orna had once again slipped down her shoulders. In the fleeting colors of the television, she looked white, then red, then green. Her brow creased as she seemed to study the top of my hand, running her thumb gently along my skin.

It’s okay. I didn’t know if I said that aloud. But I had a feeling she knew.

“Ma,” she spoke finally. “Can you come to lunch tomorrow?”

She opened up her fingers. My hand didn’t budge. I wanted to soak in the warmth of her palm for as long as time would allow. 

“Yes, Nanu. Of course I can.”

From my angle, it was hard to tell, but it almost looked as if she smiled. It was a little lopsided to the left.

Adeeb Chowdhury is a 22-year-old aspiring writer from Chittagong, Bangladesh. He is a graduate of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, where his written works of fiction and nonfiction have received the 2023 Feinberg Undergraduate Research Prize, 2024 Skopp Award on the Holocaust, 2024 North Star’s Best Nonfiction Writing Award, 2024 James Augustus Wilson Award on an African-American Topic, among others. His personal essays and nonfiction papers have been selected for preservation on the SUNY Open Access Repository (SOAR), a collection of notable work by students and faculty. He has also written extensively for publications such as Brown History Magazine, Pluto Literary Magazine, and Shuddhashar Publishing House, which received the 2016 Jeri Laber International Freedom to Publish Award from the Association of American Publishers. Adeeb works as an investment advisor representative in Binghamton, New York and is also a weightlifting enthusiast.