The Lalbagh Fort was five hundred years old, hidden amidst the banyan forest: two hundred years before the Shayfahan empire. It was from an age when the wars between kings from the north and the south raged for the land.

Incomplete and crumbling yet majestic nevertheless, the fort overlooked the Bayrun river, reflected in the murky waters. From a distance, it appeared to me like a looming melancholy creature bent with its head on its hand, staring down at its reflection in the river.

The banyan surrounding it was not truly a forest, but a massive tree that resembled many trees. For every branch that grew up to the skies, they reached downward to root into the ground again to create more trunks, over and over again like limbs seeking to walk along the ground, to explore its world. The banyan was not a tree that was content in being rooted to one spot — it itched to wander like an adventurous soul. And so it expanded into a civilization within itself, amassing fourteen thousand feet so thickly intertwined that it resembled an entire forest.

In the monsoon seasons when the lands east by the river flooded, the banyan trunks provided a bridge for the children who wandered out to play among the trees, lounging around and swinging our legs down from the thick trunks.

Qamarah and I went over tangled roots and vines along the ground. We could hear the murmur of the river growing closer, and glimpse the clay-red of the Lalbagh Fort peering through the foliage.

We crossed through the river, the water up to our elbows. The stream was swift, flowing west towards the Khardic Ocean. I felt the coolness of the pebbles along the bottom of the surface. Here, the river was shallower than towards the north where the fishermen waded out on their boats. I reveled in the rush of the water roaring in my ears.

The chirps of the birds sounded different on the other side of the river, hollowed among the thickets of brambles and overgrown vines. Wild and tangled, the vines crept up the walls of the clay-tinged red fort, along the turrets and through the crevices. Its towers on each side rose up above them.

We scrambled up over thorny grounds. Lichen and fungi grew over exposed rock around the steps leading to the fort, where the doorless entrance was overgrown with moss and vegetation. Light streamed in through a caved ceiling.

“No one goes inside the fort,” Qamarah whispered in awe, looking up at it. “Haniya says people disappear in there. That Fahrina comes to steal their souls.”

“Oh, those are just legends,” I said. “Nothing but superstition now.”

The daughter of a king in the early Harun Dynasty died at the fort during the last empire, Amma told me once while simmering a stew. It must have been one of her lamb stews, for I associated the story with the scent of lamb cooking slowly with poppy seeds.

Fahrina was a beloved daughter, loved by all. But one day when she was to be married, she rebelled against her father’s wishes and the ways of the royal palace. Cursed to spend her life in a tower as punishment, she was driven to madness. Some said the madness was a punishment from the gods.

But Fahrina did not survive long in the tower. When she died, the fort became a ruin – the fig tree in the garden, which was her favorite, shriveled away as if lamenting her death; the lemon tree could bear no more fruit, the lilacs wilted, and the halls of Lalbagh Fort became silenced. For when her father held the dead body of his daughter in his arms, lamenting the fate he had condemned her to, he cried out so loud that he no longer spoke after her death.

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With Fahrina’s death came the end of the Harun Dynasty. Invaded by northerns, the battle lost, Fahrina’s family and the royal household sought escape deep in the tunnels beneath the fort. But it was said they never found their way out.

After a century of wars, the fort collapsed in on itself, and the ruins stood overlooking the Bayrun River.

The curved doorway rose high over us. Our footsteps were muffled by layers of dust. Qamarah studied the structure of the dome above. “Such beautiful architecture, gone to waste. It’s not as grand as those in Khurshan and Isfahan like in my book. But I like its simplicity.”

Halls led out to vast empty rooms, rusted shields of iron adorning the walls. Broken tiles of cerulean and white ran along the ceiling of a hall. In a domed bathhouse, an opening rose above, light filtering in over steps leading to a masonry tank made of the same red brick as the fort, once long ago flowing with water.

“I wonder where the tunnels are,” I said.

“Perhaps in the night, you can hear Fahrina’s family,” whispered Qamarah. “I will race you to the end of that hall!” she called.

We reached a room with tall crumbling windows overlooking the hills at the borders of Bayrun, a village lying at the border. Beyond that, dense thickets of wild forest and marshland stretched far. “I think you can see the village of Thankar from here,” I murmured. Abba went to study the forest beyond Thankar, often seeking shelter in the village if dusk fell earlier before he could finish his work.

Qamarah sat in the middle of the floor and began searching her pockets for her pencil. On the cool dusty floor littered with leaves that had fluttered in through the uncovered windows, she began to sketch.

I went down through the halls, running my fingers along the walls.

Through the dining rooms and the den, I could hear the echoing laughter of children and mothers calling and families gathering. I could feel the grief as I stood there: palpable, a living thing. Even by that age, my powers were clear enough that I knew a place was not merely a collection of bricks and mortar, clay and wood. No, the stories within it seeped through the walls.

I reached a courtyard spread out to the other end of the ruins, shaded by a wide, towering cypress tree rising in the center.

I gazed up into the ancient intertwining trunk, long branches enfolded within each other in an intricate web.

I walked towards it. “We don’t think them intelligent — but how do you think the Prophet Solomon talked to all the creatures?” my mother Alsana would say. “The birds, the trees, all the creatures, they know.” She would enunciate the word as if the trees were listening to us, sensed our hands upon the trunk as we ran around playing, and felt our presence when we sat beneath its shade, on the tangled roots half-buried within the ground around us, earthworms in the dirt.

I placed a hand upon the trunk of the cypress.

And something imploded within me — lifting me up, above, away from the earth, the tree, everything — beyond the roots and the stars in the heavens.

I did not know, suddenly, where I was in time or space.

I was nowhere in time. There were no borders around me. I swam through a whiteness, swimming, swimming through something ancient, older than the ages of humanity on earth, to something soaring…

“What are you doing?” a voice came through the whiteness, and slowly I faded, landing on the earth by the edge of the cypress.

Qamarah was holding my arms, pulling me away. “You looked as if you were dying, like someone was poking you with a hot spear.”

I never again touched the cypress, but sometimes I would watch it from afar as we dawdled inside the room overlooking the hills over Bayrun. Down below in the courtyard it stood, mocking me. Are you afraid of what you will see?

***

The scratching of Qamarah’s pencil whisked this way and that. I started to bring my own calligraphy notebook.

As the sun beat down upon the fort and the afternoon winded away, a plume of smoke rose out over in the distance over Thankar. It grew into a weaving black ribbon until it shrouded the village-town.

“Qamarah!” I called. “Thankar…it’s burning.”

Qamarah rushed next to me, and we watched the smoke. Everything else was indistinguishable.

From the abandoned fort, we watched the village turn into ash before our eyes.

But we did not know, then, that it was only the beginning of the First Purge.