Author Sumana Roy was taking care of her young niece and nephew in Siliguri, India while their mother had COVID. They were outside on the terrace, and the young people were helping their aunt water the plants that flourished there.

But then the little boy, Tuku, informs his aunt that he has just watered the pieces of dead trees that Roy has transported from various important places in her life, such as an old tea garden where her mother-in-law grew up.

Roy, worrying about the dead wood becoming moldy, demands to know why Tuku is watering dead trees.

“If I can water the living plants, why can’t I water the dead trees?” he asks.

The question leads the author on a contemplative journey on the visible and invisible, life and death. When she soaks chickpeas before cooking them, the little boy wants to know if the chickpeas were dead and would come back to life through their exposure to water.

When they are eating lunch, Tuku informs his aunt and sister, “A few hours later, when we were eating lunch, and one of us was giving him a sermon about the importance of eating vegetables, he said, “Why do the vegetables become invisible when they enter us?” And then, drinking from his glass of water, he added, “I’ve watered the plants inside me now.”

To the little boy, Tuku, there is a new kind of life, a new kind of possibility in what has been deemed lifeless. What is dry can possibly sprout new growth. Maybe it can even feed people. But whether watering a dead tree has any greater meaning or not, the act of tending to it marks a meaningful, even sacred, connection.

Read Sumana Roy’s enchanting essay in its entirety in Emergence Magazine.