The sacred grove

At a Glance

• Central figures: Kalu Bhil, a hunter and headman of a forest settlement near the Aravalli foothills; Vanrai Mata, the grove goddess who guards the boundary between human land and wild land; and a bhopa (priest-healer) called Deva, who reads the signs left by the goddess.
• Setting: A Bhil settlement in the scrub forests of the southern Aravallis, in what is now the border country between Rajasthan and Gujarat; the story belongs to the oral tradition of the Bhil people, the largest Adivasi group in western India.
• The turn: Kalu’s eldest son cuts a khejri tree inside the sacred grove to build a cattle pen, and the grove answers with silence - the spring beneath it stops flowing.
• The outcome: Kalu must enter the grove alone to make restitution, offering his bow - the weapon that feeds his family - to Vanrai Mata’s stone, and the water returns, but changed.
• The legacy: The grove stands untouched. The Bhil settlements around it maintain the prohibition on cutting within the boundary stones, and Kalu’s bow remains where he left it, rusted into the earth beside the goddess stone.

The spring had been running since before anyone could say when. It came out from under a flat rock at the center of the grove, pooled in a depression worn smooth by decades of women filling clay pots, and ran downhill through the settlement in a channel no wider than a man’s forearm. The grove stood on a low ridge above the houses - thirty or forty trees, mostly khejri and ber and a few old neem whose roots gripped the red laterite like fingers. At the center, where the spring surfaced, there was a stone daubed in vermillion and sindoor. No carving on it. No inscription. Just the red mark and the marigolds someone replaced every few days, and a clay lamp that burned through the night when the bhopa Deva remembered to fill it.

Kalu Bhil had grown up knowing the boundary. His mother had shown him the stones that marked where the grove began - rough, undressed rocks set into the ground at intervals, each one smeared with turmeric paste that had long since faded to a dull stain. Inside the stones, nothing was cut. Nothing was taken. You could walk through, but you did not break a branch. You did not pull a root. The animals that sheltered in the grove - the spotted deer, the langur, the peafowl - were not hunted there. They were the goddess’s, and the goddess did not share.

The Khejri

Kalu’s eldest son was called Bhura. He was strong in the arms and slow in the head, which is a combination that causes trouble in any settlement. Bhura’s cattle had multiplied - four cows, then six, then nine - and the thorn-fence pen behind his house was falling apart. He needed posts. He needed them thick and straight, and the best khejri wood grew inside the grove, where the trees had never been thinned and the trunks rose clean and tall.

Bhura did not ask his father. He did not consult Deva. He went up the ridge before dawn with his axe and cut a khejri tree that stood just inside the boundary stones. He dragged it down, stripped it, and set the posts before anyone woke. The stump he left was pale and wet, sap still beading at the cut.

By midday the spring had stopped.

The women noticed first. They went up with their pots and found the pool drained to mud, the rock dry, the channel below it empty. They came back down and told Deva, and Deva climbed the ridge and saw the stump.

He did not shout. He sat beside the goddess stone for a long time, then came down and found Kalu.

Deva’s Silence

Deva was not a dramatic man. He wore a white cloth and carried a copper vessel and knew which plants stopped fever and which ones brought it. He had inherited the bhopa’s knowledge from his father, who had inherited it from his father, who had been taught by a woman whose name no one remembered. He did not perform for audiences. When he spoke, it was to the point.

The tree is cut. The water is gone. Vanrai Mata has closed the spring.

Kalu looked at him. Kalu looked at Bhura, who was standing by his new cattle pen looking like a man who has just understood something too late.

What does she want?

Deva shook his head.

I don’t know what she wants. I know what she has taken. The water. Go and ask her yourself.

Kalu’s Bow

Kalu was a hunter. His bow was Bhil-made - bamboo and sinew, strung with twisted gut, oiled and cared for and restrung every season. It was the thing that put meat on the fire. It was also, in the Bhil way, the mark of a man. Bhil warriors carried bows. Bhil heroes in the old songs carried bows. The bow was the first gift a father made for a son, and the last thing placed on a man’s pyre when he died. To be without your bow was to be diminished.

Kalu went up the ridge alone. He carried the bow and a quiver with three arrows and a garland of marigolds he had taken from his wife’s doorway offering. He passed the boundary stones. He walked through the grove in the late afternoon light, the dry leaves loud under his feet, and came to the goddess stone.

The pool was cracked mud. The flat rock was dry. The stump of Bhura’s khejri stood a few paces away, already darkening.

Kalu laid the marigolds on the stone. He stood for a while. Then he unstrung his bow and placed it across the stone, and set the three arrows beside it.

He did not speak. There was nothing to say that the gesture did not say. He had come to pay for what his son had taken, and he paid with the thing that cost him most.

He walked back down the ridge without the bow.

The Water Returns

In the morning the women went up and found the pool full. The spring ran clear and cold over the flat rock and down the channel. The mud had been washed away. The marigolds on the stone were fresh, though no one had replaced them.

The bow was still there. It lay across the stone where Kalu had placed it, but it looked different - the bamboo had darkened, and the sinew had stiffened as though it had been there for years, not hours. Deva went up and looked at it and said nothing. He did not touch it.

The water that came back was colder than before. The women said it tasted of iron, or of stone, or of something they could not name. It was good water. It was clean. But it was not the same water.

Kalu never made another bow. He fished after that, and set snares, and his younger sons hunted for the family. He was not ashamed. He had paid what was asked, or what he guessed was asked, and the settlement had water again.

The Boundary Stones

Bhura’s cattle pen still stands, or the posts of it do. The khejri posts lasted decades - the wood was that good. But no one in the settlement cut inside the grove again. The boundary stones were re-marked with fresh turmeric every year after that, and Deva taught his son to check the marks at each season’s turn. The grove grew denser. The khejri that Bhura had cut sent up shoots from the root, and two new trunks rose where one had stood.

Kalu’s bow rusted into the earth beside the goddess stone. The bamboo rotted. The sinew dissolved. The iron arrowheads sank into the soil and left rust stains on the rock that looked, if you wanted them to, like the fingers of a hand pressed flat against the surface. Deva’s grandson says they are still visible. The spring still runs. The grove still stands, though the forest around it has been thinned by roads and goat-grazing and the slow creep of settlement. The grove holds because the prohibition holds, and the prohibition holds because the water holds, and somewhere under the flat rock the spring keeps running, cold and iron-tasting and not quite the same as it was before Bhura swung his axe.