The forest had become genuinely a forest.
Rama walked beneath canopy that six years ago had been open sky above knee-high saplings. The trees now stood fifteen to twenty meters in the older sections—the ones planted first, in Year 1's initial memorial planting, given the longest time to establish themselves. Newer sections, planted in subsequent years as the memorial's boundaries expanded to accommodate 694,000 names, showed younger growth, but even those had reached heights that provided real shade rather than merely symbolic coverage.
Birds moved through the upper branches with the particular unconcerned business of creatures that had claimed a habitat without knowing or caring what the habitat commemorated. Rama had noticed this in previous years and noticed it again now: the forest didn't perform memorial function consciously. It simply grew, and growing was itself the tribute—life persisting in a place death had claimed catastrophically six years prior.
