The landslide had taken everything.

Gaura stood at the edge of what had once been a pine forest on the slope above her village in the Pithoragarh district of Uttarakhand. She was thirteen, with calloused hands and a thick braid that reached her waist. Below her, the hillside was a wound — bare brown earth scored with deep gashes where the rain had clawed away trees, soil, stones, everything. The monsoon had come harder than anyone remembered, and in a single night the mountain had shrugged off its forest like a man shrugging off a wet shawl.

Three houses at the bottom of the slope were gone. The families had been moved to the school. The government had promised money that had not arrived. The village headman said the hillside would take forty years to recover.

Gaura's mother, Basanti, was a member of the Maiti movement — the tradition started by Kalyan Singh Rawat in which families plant trees at the time of a girl's birth and the girl tends them as they grow. Gaura had her own tree, a deodar, that had survived the landslide because it stood on higher ground. She had named it when she was three. She could not remember the name now, but the tree was there, still standing, which felt like enough.

Basanti appeared beside her with a bundle of oak saplings wrapped in wet burlap. Each one was barely the length of Gaura's forearm — thin, pale-rooted, trembling in the wind.

"We plant today," Basanti said.

Gaura looked at the devastated slope. "Amma, there must be a hundred trees missing. We have twelve saplings."

"Then we plant twelve."

"But that won't fix it."

Basanti knelt and began digging a hole in the wet earth with a short-handled spade, working it into the ground with the practiced rhythm of a woman who had planted trees since she was Gaura's age. She did not look up.

"In the Gita," Basanti said, "Krishna tells Arjuna that on this path, no effort is ever lost. No beginning goes to waste. Even a little — even one sapling — protects from great fear." She set the first sapling in its hole, packed the soil around its roots, and pressed down firmly. The little tree stood crooked in the wind, barely knee-high, absurdly small against the vast brown emptiness of the slope.

"This one will hold a handful of soil in place," Basanti said. "By next monsoon, its roots will grip. In five years, a bird will nest in it. In twenty years, a child will sit in its shade. And the slope will not slide again, because one woman and one girl did not wait for the hundred to begin."

Gaura took a sapling. She dug a hole. She planted it. Then another. Then another. By evening, twelve thin saplings stood in a wavering line across the wounded hillside, small as prayers, alive as anything.