Bihar

Bodh Gaya is a small dusty town organised entirely around one event that happened around two and a half millennia ago: a former prince named Siddhartha, after years of austerity had failed him, accepted a bowl of kheer from a village woman named Sujata, crossed the river, sat down under a peepal tree, and stayed until he understood. The Mahabodhi temple rises over the spot (its tower rebuilt and restored across centuries, a UNESCO site) but the temple is honest about its own status: the main object of veneration is not inside it. It is beside it. The Bodhi tree, vast and propped and flagged with prayer cloth, is a direct descendant of the original: a cutting of the first tree was carried to Sri Lanka by Ashoka's own daughter, the nun Sanghamitta, in the third century BCE; that tree still lives at Anuradhapura, the oldest documented planted tree on Earth; and when Bodh Gaya's tree needed renewing, a cutting came home from the daughter's tree. The lineage is botanical and it is also, if you stand there long enough, unbearably moving, a family of trees keeping a promise across twenty-three centuries and one ocean.

I sat at the tree's enclosure for most of two days, which is what one does in Bodh Gaya; the town's entire etiquette is built around not disturbing people who are working on the same problem the prince worked on.