It has been 18 months in the making, but I can feel the novel coming together. The third draft is underway and recent work has involved the painful cull of my first chapter (too laboured), weaving some of that chapter’s better bits into later narrative, and replacing it with a new prologue (below). Any views on the new prologue are welcomed!

[Prologue]

A monk draped in ochre swept the earth surrounding the ancient fig, the gentle rush of the broom providing comfort in the pink dawn. At the centre of the temple complex, the tree, broad and gnarled, stretched its twisted branches and roots. Prayer flags on white rope draped around the tree’s girth and lotus flowers lay at the feet of the jumbled trunk. Once his task was done, the elderly monk gathered the offerings and moved them out of harm’s way while the breeze played among the leaves above.

The ceremony by which four cuttings were to be taken from the old fig would begin at dusk. Nascent, healthy branches no more than a few inches long would be selected by the head of their order, cut from the tree and planted in clay pots painted the colours of the compass. In time, the cuttings would take root and start their separate journeys across the land. The Bodhi tree had brought the monastery, and the community it served, good fortune; it was hoped its progeny would also bless the temples for which they were destined.

The night’s gifts of leaves, twigs and dead cicadas brushed aside, the monk allowed himself a few moments of stillness. This was his time, after first prayers and before work began in earnest, when he was alone with the great tree. For most, the tree was an unchanging presence at the centre of temple life and a towering symbol to be revered. He remembered entering the courtyard as a novice, a child of five years rescued from the streets by a kindly, old face, and seeing the tree for the first time. In that moment the tree grew until he was aware of nothing else in the world; it was the start of something new, something good. From that day they were silent companions, and as time turned the monk observed changes in the tree no one else was able to see. When the winds rose, as they often did, the tree held itself close so as not to surrender its thick leaves. In his tenth year, a great fire scorched the temple reducing everything that wasn’t stone to ash, yet the tree survived: its bark was soaked although no one had thought to water it. The survival was proclaimed a miracle, but the monk believed something different.

On the morning before the cutting ceremony, the tree appeared taller and fuller, its leaves bristled with static, and the branches that now hung within easy reach had been inaccessible just the day before. When the leader of their order came to cleave specimens from the tree, his choice had already been decided. A bell tolled from within the shadows calling the monk away from his task. After he disappeared through a dark doorway, macaques of various sizes tumbled across the courtyard to investigate whether he’d left anything worth collecting behind. Above them, the tree’s leaves and limbs shook in the wind. The ancient fig started its life as a sapling full of promise planted in foreign soil. Now it was time for another journey to begin.