It is your forest, isn’t it.

The golden langur whispered this to the baby whose delicate hands clasped the bright golden fur of her body. Words whispered from deepest black lips to the blackest ears nestled in the white fur of her son, catching the early light, illuminating the first turn of his fur from cream to gilt.

It was dawn in the canopy and the time for gathering had come. The langur, her fur so soft and glowing it seemed to cast a halo around her, extended one arm toward a cluster of sal leaves, just within her reach. Her fingers, black like her face, like the face of her baby, like the faces of her family, her troop. Black like a moonless night in the canopy, her sure fingers gently pressed the leaves in the cluster to find the youngest and tenderest. She plucked them and brought them, not to her own lips, but to her baby. Turned up in her pinched fingers like a bouquet.

She watched as his eyes gazed at the leaves and then as one hand let loose the fur on her flank and accepted them. He looked up at her and into her eyes and the leaves went into his mouth. The taste of young green registered on his face and spread like growing daylight. The mother remembered then, her first leaves. The sweetness. The feeling of their fibers crushed in her teeth. The thought that came next. More.

The air was damp and pulsed with the urgent chirps of parakeets and the hum of dragonflies. A tiger beetle crawled along the limb where the langur was settled and she watched as its iridescence flashed in the shifting light of the canopy. She thought perhaps she should snatch it and eat it, but her baby was nestled against her, murmuring quietly, and she thought instead to let the beetle go. The uppermost part of the crown was green and supple and it gently swayed, casting the beetle in shadow and then back to the glow of the sun. The langur’s troop was scattered in the same tree, all moving into wakefulness. She looked to the next branch and saw her brother and two others rise, ready to leap into the day’s foraging.

Come. She whispered to the top of her baby’s head. We gather.

The langur loved the canopy, and the canopy was the whole world.

Mornings. The earth was damp. The scent of the soil below on the forest floor wound around the trunks of the trees like ribbons spun in the air. The langur breathed in the scent of the minerals. Of decaying leaves. Of the droppings of other animals. The husks of dead insects.

All of it bound together by the moisture around them, and she was embraced by the mystery of all that lay below her.

And yet, she didn’t really know it. Not the soil. Not the way it could feel under the press of her feet. Not the decay that fed the forest.

What did she know?

The bee-eaters. The points of their beaks plucking buzzing insects out of the sky. The leaves in her tree spreading out before her in layers. Spiraling out before her on the branches that twisted under her grip as she wandered their length. Leaves pliant under her hand.

She knew the fruit of each tree. When to leave it. When to take it. The feel of the stone of the pit in her mouth. Rolling it with her tongue. Peeling back the skin and husks, and gnawing the flesh and seeds with her teeth.

The blossoms. More tender than the fruit, the way the petals were so delicate they almost dissolved against her tongue.

What is the canopy?

It is the whole world.

And what is the center of the world? For the langur it was her baby.

The next day when the forage began, the langur saw that the fruits in the okshi tree had been picked over. She led her baby out on a limb into the sun so she could groom him and wait for the others to decide if they would stay for a while or move on through the canopy. When he turned his face up toward her and she gazed into his eyes, a deep brown like the seeds of her trees, she marveled at his pale golden fur that fanned out from his face in silk-spun tufts, like rays of a small sun there in her arms. She plucked a bright orange blossom from a twig overhead and held it out to him. His tiny fingers clasped the flower and stared at it intently. He looked up at her and she motioned to her mouth, and he understood. The langur gathered leaves for herself from the twigs just overhead. Not too young, but tender enough.

Nearby the others began winding their way among the branches of the canopy. As they gathered in small grooming clusters, nestled in the crooks of branches, they let their tails hang, flipping rhythmically at the end. Other babies dangled playfully from clusters of leaves. When they wandered along the beams, she watched as their golden tails curved patterns among the green of the crowns. One of the others came to crouch beside her and the langur felt the delicate precision of her companion’s fingers combing through the fur on her back and she started to wonder where they would all go now that the fruit was spent.

They had seen that the canopy was interrupted. There was a sal tree that was only a short distance away, and they had all seen it. Had seen the fruit weighing down its branches. But it was too far for them to leap. Down below, in that other world, a road had been laid to cut through the forest. And now there was a broad chasm between the two crowns. Unfamiliar sounds and smells drifted up from it and dissipated among the leaves.

But they couldn’t stay in one small grove forever.

But they couldn’t stay in one small grove forever. They would have to cross to the rest of the canopy somehow. There had been rumors from other troops that they had discovered a way to cross. Not a new tree, they said. Not a vine either, although it was something like a tangle of vines, they said. Something placed by those that lived below. Those that used the road. The langur wasn’t sure what to make of these rumors, but a young one from her own troop had found something on the next tree over and they were considering crossing it today.

The langur clasped her baby to her and followed the others along the branches of this okshi tree they had called home. Then one by one they leapt nimbly into the next tree. They all followed the young one to the edge of the crown and there it was. A curious thing stretching and suspended in the air. It was made of something that was like sticks and yet was not sticks at all, arranged evenly in a row of short parallel pieces. All of the pieces were held together by strange vine, rigid yet pliable, and cool to the touch. From beginning to end it reached from the cluster of okshi trees to a copse of sal trees across the road.

The young one was the first to clamber onto the ladder and scamper across. But the langur’s brother and some others from their troop were more hesitant. They looked at each other, trying to understand what this meant. Some began screeching as the bravest of them touched the rungs and tested the ladder by shaking it gently. Then more of them took one or two tentative steps out onto the rungs and then dashed back to the familiarity of the branches. But eventually they all crossed. And then it was only the langur and her baby who were left behind. Carefully, she ventured onto the ladder, gripping the rungs first with her hands, and then her feet. Her baby clung to her torso tightly.

It felt strange, the ladder. The rungs were lifeless and stiff. There was none of the suppleness of the tree branches. No warmth coursing through them. It was hard to trust it.

And she was afraid.

At the fourth rung she froze. Unsure if she should keep going or turn back. And when she paused, when her body turned rigid, her baby began to shriek. Great terrified screams that echoed throughout the canopy. And she knew she had to stop. She would have to find another way.

On the other side, her troop watched her. They paced back and forth among the branches. Two of them approached the ladder to return to her, but she made her way back into the canopy before they began to cross.

As she wound back through the branches of the okshi trees, she plucked flowers and passed them to her baby who quietly ate them while clinging to her. When she reached their home tree, she descended to the floor of the forest. Here where she knew nothing. Here in a place that was outside her entire world. Here where the unfamiliar things of forest floor and human-made road collided.

Across the road was a sal tree. A few branches hung over the road and a round brown fruit had fallen and rolled to the center. The langur hesitated just a moment before stepping on to the pavement. Its surface felt strange against her feet. But she thought of her baby. His mouth full of blossoms. His eyes yearning for fruit, and the hesitation passed. She stepped forward, her hand reaching toward it. Her fingers closed around it when the vibration of the road began. It grew until it rattled her bones and she stilled. Not daring to turn or move at all until the shaking passed. A sound rushed at her. And the smell of oil. The clattering of metal. And she turned.

Her spirit was yanked by some unseen but benevolent claw and placed gently at the side of the road.

She was gone from her body when the truck hit her. Her spirit was yanked by some unseen but benevolent claw and placed gently at the side of the road. But she could see. She saw the wheel crush her. How the driver didn’t notice. How her lifeless body was turned by the wheel and contorted into an unrecognizable shape. The fruit had rolled out of her hand and the langur watched as her baby, who had been watching from the base of the tree where she left him, ran toward her body. He paused at the fruit, reached for a moment, and then recoiled before touching it. He moved instead to her body. First, he gripped her fur and tried to cling to her body, as if by embracing her he could push her to wake and carry them both up to the canopy together again.

But she didn’t move and so he began to cry. Pitiful little squeaks that she used to hear from him if she climbed too far out along a branch. He used to be afraid when he could feel them wobble under her feet.

The langur tried to call out to him from the side of the road, but her spirit voice couldn’t reach his ears. It just dissolved into the wind that drifted up to the canopy. She watched, helpless, as her baby shook her body. Then, desperate when she didn’t respond, he ran to the fruit in the road and brought it back to her, pressing its skin to her lifeless mouth. When her body did not eat, her baby pried open the husk with his tiny fingers, chewed a small piece and wailing louder, tried to feed it to her as if she was the infant.

“That small one cannot hear you,” said a voice above her.

The langur looked up and saw a hoolock gibbon nestled in the crook of two branches above her. She was standing next to the sal tree and hadn’t moved since she’d seen her body crushed. She was afraid to leave it; her body. And also, afraid to leave her baby.

She looked at the gibbon again. His fur was as black as her face. Patches of white were dashed above each of his eyes and it made her look again and again at his face as though his eyes had already promised something to her.

“Come up here,” he said as he beckoned to her. He hung lazily off the branch. One arm was clinging to it while the other swung down to summon her. To what she did not know. To some uncertain future.

“My baby,” she said, unable to say more. Unsure of how to explain his mouth full of blossoms earlier in the day. His anguish at this last bite of fruit. How he was her first, and now only, baby. How not so long ago she had been a baby too. How she wasn’t so far from the memory of clinging to her own mother’s fur. All of this contained in what little she could say.

“You must leave him here to live,” said the hoolock. He reached out to her again, their hands clasped together, and he swung her up beside him. He smelled of newly fallen rain. “We will climb.” He reached up to a knot in the trunk and began to climb the tree, which seemed larger and older than the langur had realized. She hesitated and looked back at her own crumpled form in the road, with her son crouched beside her. Already his fur looked brighter than her own. Something had happened to it. Some tarnish had descended on her body when the life left it. And yet her baby still shook it, whimpering, hoping it would wake, that she would be returned to it, and she would carry him up into the trees again.

“He feels that I have left him,” she said. “He’s been separated from the others and now I’m gone from him.”

The hoolock was silent. He watched her, knowing that this was some vine she must untangle on her own.

The langur looked around and saw the red-pink sal flowers scattered here and there on the ground at the edge of the road. She climbed down again and quietly gathered some in her arms, carefully choosing the most beautiful and unbruised of the blossoms. Then she stepped into the road, toward her son, and what she once was.

She stood for a moment, staring at him. He looked up from her body and it felt as though he saw her in that moment. He was staring so intently. Bright eyes in a curious face. And yet he already looked solemn, as though he knew he was alone now and must survive on his own. But when she reached a hand toward him, he didn’t reach back, and instead turned his head to the sky. And so it was. This world was not hers anymore.

When her baby saw the flower fall, he walked tentatively to it and reached out to pick it up.

She chose a flower and placed it on her own body, placed it with the petals opening to the sky, placed it so the fragrance would drift up to her baby. When he saw it, he reached toward it slowly, pinching a petal between his tiny black fingers. She stepped back toward the sal tree and placed another flower on the ground near her head. When her baby saw the flower fall, he walked tentatively to it and reached out to pick it up. And the langur placed another flower, and yet another. Building a delicate trail of petals leading her baby out of the road and toward the cluster of trees where she knew their troop had settled. When she heard their whooping in the trees, she saw him look up toward the canopy. The troop’s golden bodies wove in and out among the branches. Several of them had settled to rest and let their tails hang down lazily. He placed a palm on the trunk of the sal, their new tree, and then began his climb on his own, without her for the first time.

Alone she returned to the tree where the hoolock was waiting.

“I will come now,” she said.

And the langur followed the hoolock up the old sal tree. First the sturdy lower branches. Then into a burst of leaves as though this tree had never been battered by the world but had lived in an abundance of gentle sun forever.

The langur waited for the hoolock to stop, for him to choose a place to rest, but at each opportunity, he kept climbing.

“Where are we going?” asked the langur, but the hoolock said nothing. She followed his feet through branches and leaves that became denser and denser until she was afraid that she would be suffocated by such abundant green. And then her fear gave way to longing when she remembered that she had already died and left her baby alone, far below.

And then the rustling above her stopped and she felt the hoolock pull her through the last crush of leaves to a beautiful clear and open sky.

“Here,” he said. “Here is the last part of the journey.”

Above them stretched a vast network of roots spreading out above the forest.

“What is it?” asked the langur.

“This is the last place we climb,” said the hoolock. He reached up and swung into the roots and the langur followed him. Together they wound their way up and through to the wide trunk of a tree that was suspended in the sky.

The langur marveled at the wood of the trunk. How its surface reminded her of a great twisted rope. The hoolock, not far ahead of her, climbed higher and higher until he reached the crook of a wide bough that split from the trunk. The hoolock paused and looked down at the langur. “Come,” he beckoned, reaching a hand toward her.

The langur felt that it was this moment, and not the collision with the truck, in which death had come. Here, where she clung to the trunk of this curious tree, suspended in the air. Her hand gripped a knot in the wood. She felt the bark beneath her toes. The wood was fragrant in a way that was so familiar, and yet she couldn’t place it in her memory. Could not match it to any of the trees she had known and loved before.

If she climbed down now and wound her way back through the roots, she would return to the trees she knew. To the forest where her baby remained. Not whole, but at least home.

But if she followed the hoolock onto the bough, ventured in among the leaves of this unusual tree, she would enter another canopy. And what was a canopy but another world?

It contained the leaves and branches of all of the trees she had ever known.

“Come,” the hoolock said again, his hand still stretched toward her. His face hovered above her and was half obscured by shifting shadows as a breeze ran through the leaves above her. The shadows moved, and in his eyes, she saw an image of herself clinging to the tree. She watched her image climb the trunk and choose a limb to explore, and as this other self ascended the tree, the image in the hoolock’s eyes grew to reveal the scope of its canopy. Its limbs twisted and spread and filled the sky. It contained the leaves and branches of all of the trees she had ever known. It was abundant with the ripe fruits she remembered. Its blossoms appeared in perpetual full bloom and it teemed with the birds and insects of her forest. Nightjars and swifts and bee-eaters flitted in and out of the foliage. She almost heard the flutter of their wings. Butterflies wove in patterns against the blue. Faces peered out from the canopy. A Bengal fox hung a paw over the edge of the branch it napped on idly. Snakes twined themselves around narrow tree limbs. And she saw the faces of langurs and hoolocks she had known before. Faces last seen lifeless by the side of the same road where she had lingered for fruit.

So this, she understood, is what happens.

The langur reached up to the hoolock’s hand and clasped his fingers.

And it was her baby clinging to her fur, fruit in his mouth.

And it was her baby suckling at her breast.

And it was the tch tch tch of his heartbeat, the hummingbird twin of her own heart inside her before he was born.

And it was her in the canopy swinging wide to grasp the ripest fruit.

And it was her fur turning from cream to gold.

And it was the tuft of her own mother’s fur twined in her fingers.

And it was her first fruit and tender leaves.

And it was a sharp intake of breath as she met the world, as her heart beat out in the world, as she opened her eyes to the world, the canopy, for the very first time.

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