Salim was seventy-four the first time anyone asked him why he did it, and his answer was so simple that the boy who asked went home confused.
The boy was twelve, and he had been watching Salim from the wall for half an hour — watching the old man kneel in the dust with a small spade, patting the earth around a sapling no taller than a broom handle, the way you might tuck a blanket around a sleeping child.
"Grandfather," the boy said, "that tree won't give mangoes for years."
"I know," Salim said.
"So why are you planting it? You'll be..." The boy stopped, because he had been raised politely, but Salim only laughed — a soft, dry sound like leaves rubbing together.
"Gone," Salim said kindly. "Yes. I will be gone. That's exactly why."
The boy, whose name was Daniyal, went home and told his mother the old man down the lane had gone strange in his old age. His mother smiled the way adults do when they don't have a better answer. And Salim went back to his saplings.
That was in March, and it had been Salim's ritual for nine years by then. Every spring, when the soil was still soft from the winter rains, he would walk the two miles from his little house to the river road — the long, empty stretch of dirt that ran from the village to the water — and plant mango saplings along its edges. He planted them in a careful line, ten paces apart, the way soldiers stand at attention. He watered each one from the river with a clay pitcher he carried on his shoulder, and he tied a strip of cloth around each thin trunk so the goats wouldn't chew them in the night.
He planted them for no one. That was the strange part. The river road belonged to no one, really — it was common land, a shortcut to the water, walked by farmers and children and the occasional tired donkey. Nobody had asked Salim to plant trees there. Nobody paid him. When the monsoon washed half of them away in his second year, he went back the following March and planted them again, without a word of complaint to anyone.
People said many things. That he was trying to earn a place in heaven. That he had made some promise to his dead wife. That grief had softened his mind. Salim heard none of it, or heard all of it and didn't care, and kept planting.
By the ninth spring — the spring Daniyal asked his question — there were more than two hundred trees along the river road. The oldest ones were taller than a man now, their branches spreading wide and generous over the dusty path, and in April they bloomed with tiny fragrant flowers that the bees fought over like a festival. The walk to the river, which had once been a hot, shade-less trudge, had become the coolest, prettiest stroll in the village. Women carried their laundry there just to enjoy it. Children raced each other down the dappled lane. Old men sat under the young trees with their newspapers, arguing about cricket in the shade of branches planted by the quiet old man who asked for nothing.
Salim never joined them. He would water his new saplings in the early morning and be gone before the sun was high, leaving no trace except wet earth and one more sapling standing in a neat row.
Daniyal grew up. He was a restless boy with a restless mind, and at nineteen he left the village for the city, for university, for a job with a glass desk and a humming air conditioner. He called his mother every Sunday. He sent money home. He forgot about the mango trees, the way young men forget the things they never thought to treasure.
Then came the summer Daniyal turned thirty-one.
It was the hottest summer anyone could remember. The city had run short of water by May, and by June the roads were shimmering with heat, and by July the heat had killed an old neighbor of Daniyal's — a widow who lived alone three doors down, found too late, her apartment closed against the air that had cooked it. Daniyal went to the funeral with a tight feeling in his chest that he couldn't name. He stood in the graveyard sweating through his shirt and thought, for no reason he could explain, about the river road.
Two weeks later he took the bus home. He hadn't been back in four years.
His mother met him at the door with tears and a plate of food, and he ate, and he slept the deep sleep of the returned, and the next morning, before the sun was up, he walked the road he had walked as a boy.
He stopped at the lane and stared.
The river road was unrecognizable. Where there had been dust and glare, there was now a tunnel of green — two hundred mango trees in full summer leaf, their branches woven overhead into a canopy so thick that the road beneath was cool and soft with shadow. And the trees were heavy with fruit. Hundreds of mangoes, fat and golden-green, hung within reach, scenting the air with sweetness. He saw a girl of maybe ten reach up and twist one free, laughing as its juice ran down her wrist. He saw an old man asleep on a bench that hadn't been there before, a folded cap over his face, snoring gently in the shade. He saw a young mother nursing her baby under a branch while her two boys fought over who got the biggest mango from the pile in her basket.
Daniyal stood in the middle of the road and felt his eyes fill with tears, and he was ashamed of it, and he couldn't stop it.
Because he remembered. He remembered the seventy-four-year-old man kneeling in the dust, patting earth around a sapling no taller than a broom handle, and saying, in that kind voice: I will be gone. That's exactly why.
Salim had died five years ago, in his sleep, in the winter. Daniyal had not come to the funeral. He had sent money. The village had buried Salim under the shade of his oldest tree — the one he had planted first, on the first March morning, nine years before Daniyal asked his question — and someone had carved his name into a stone. The stone was still there. Daniyal knelt beside it and read the name, and beneath it, words he had never seen before:
He planted for the ones he would never meet.
An old woman was watering a sapling further down the road — a new one, thin as a broom handle, with a strip of cloth tied around its trunk. Daniyal walked over to her. She straightened up with a hand on her back and smiled at him.
"Did you know him?" Daniyal asked.
"Everyone knew Salim," she said. "He planted my tree too." She nodded at a sapling near her feet. "I was one of the ones who thought he'd gone strange. Then the summer my husband died, I sat under his trees every day for a month, and I understood." She looked down the long green tunnel, at the children and the sleeping old man and the golden fruit hanging like lamps. "He wasn't planting trees, son. He was planting a promise."
"What promise?"
"That someone would think of strangers after he was gone." She picked up her clay pitcher. "So now I plant one every spring. And that girl's father plants one. And the schoolmaster. There's a whole row of us now." She smiled. "Salim's row."
Daniyal stayed until evening. He picked a mango — the first fruit from a tree planted before he was born, tended by a man who knew he would never taste it — and he ate it sitting under the branches, juice running down his chin, crying and laughing at the same time like a child.
Before he left for the city, he went to the market and bought a sapling. He planted it on the river road in the early morning, ten paces from the last one in line, patting the earth around it the way he had once watched Salim do. He watered it from the river with a clay pitcher he borrowed from the old woman. He tied a strip of cloth around its thin trunk so the goats wouldn't chew it in the night.
His hands were shaking a little. His hands were twenty years late. But the earth didn't care. The earth just took the sapling, and held it, and waited — the way the earth always waits for anyone willing to plant something for a future they won't live to see.
When Daniyal's mother asked him later what had come over him, why he had come home, he told her the truth.
"A man who will never eat a mango," he said, "planted two hundred of them for me. I had to come and say thank you."
He says it differently now, to anyone who will listen. He says it the way Salim said it, in that kind voice, as if it were the simplest thing in the world.
That's exactly why.