Anvita Kale
The wind changed somewhere near Sangamner.
It was supposed to be a simple road trip — two nights at an eco-resort near Trimbak, a break from city noise, and an attempt to make memories. But the wind that crossed the ghats that morning smelled like dust, wet leaves, and something else Meera couldn’t name. She rolled down her window as their black Mahindra XUV curved along the old Nashik–Pune highway, her sari end fluttering like a tired flag. The car was filled with laughter and the crackle of a Bluetooth speaker, but Meera was silent.
“What’s wrong?” Vikrant asked, one hand on the steering, sunglasses reflecting dry hill slopes.
“Nothing. Just… I don’t like this stretch,” she said. “Feels different.”
Ria, in the backseat, rolled her eyes and turned up the volume on her phone. “Not the ‘vibes’ talk again, please.”
Ishaan sat quietly, his gaze fixed outside. “There’s a tree coming,” he whispered. “Big one.”
And then they saw it.
A monstrous old banyan tree, wide as a building, its roots tangled into the earth like veins, standing alone by the side of the road. No signs, no markers. Just the tree. As they passed it, the temperature dipped. All the car windows fogged for a second, even though it was barely November. The music glitched.
And Ishaan said, in the calmest voice:
“She’s waiting. In the ground.”
They laughed it off, as people do. But Meera didn’t. Her mother used to tell stories of Chalaba — a ghost who lured children to her roots. A woman who had once been wronged, burnt, and buried under the banyan by the villagers who feared her knowledge of herbs and blood. “She waits under banyan trees,” her mother would whisper. “She sings without a mouth. She wants your children.”
Meera shook the thought away.
They stopped at a roadside tea stall ten minutes later. It was one of those crumbling setups — a black kettle, two benches, flies dancing over sweet buns. The tea-seller was old, with a milky eye and a trembling hand. Vikrant asked for cutting chai. The man didn’t respond but stared at the car. At Ishaan.
“Don’t take the shortcut ahead,” he said. “The road past the canal… they’ve stopped updating it on the maps. GPS lies. You get stuck.”
“We’re fine, thanks,” Vikrant smiled, half-annoyed, half-amused. “We know the route.”
The old man leaned in closer to Meera. “People don’t come back the same from that path. Don’t let the child out if he hears singing. Don’t… let her see him.”
They left.
An hour later, just before the sun tilted west, the GPS rerouted them. “Traffic on NH60. Alternate route available. Save 25 minutes.”
It was the canal road.
Vikrant clicked ‘Accept.’
The shortcut was narrower, flanked by dry sugarcane fields and mango trees stripped bare. A small iron bridge creaked as they crossed it. The sky began to bruise into orange. Birds flew fast and low, fleeing something.
Then the fog arrived.
It came in sudden curls. First across the windshield. Then the mirrors. Then a thick white glove wrapping the entire car. Vikrant slowed to a crawl. The music cut off. The AC sputtered and died.
And Ishaan began to hum.
Not a child’s tune. Not something you’d hear in nursery rhymes. It was old. Ancient. No melody, only a low, pulsing sound like a woman weeping underwater.
“Ishaan!” Meera turned, alarmed.
He smiled, still looking outside. “She’s here.”
Ria pulled out her phone to record. “Okay what is this TikTok horror show happening right now—”
But her phone had shut down. No battery.
And then the car stopped.
Completely. Engine dead. Horn dead. Lights — gone.
They were in the middle of nowhere. No houses, no signs, no traffic. Just trees, fog, and silence.
“Okay. Don’t panic,” Vikrant said, unlocking his door. “I’ll check under the hood.”
“No,” Meera said quickly. “Don’t go out.”
But he was already stepping out. And as he did, a gust of wind tore across the road, so strong it slammed the door shut behind him. Vikrant stumbled forward, coughing.
And in that moment, under the banyan tree ten feet ahead, Meera saw her.
A woman — tall, wrapped in a white saree smeared with red, her hair covering her face. Her feet pointed backward.
She was standing still. But her head… was turning.
Inside the car, Ishaan had stopped humming. He was staring straight ahead, face blank.
“She’s hungry,” he said.
And then he opened the door and stepped out into the fog.
Meera screamed. Ria lunged to stop him but was too late. Ishaan ran toward the banyan tree.
The woman beneath it… opened her arms.
And the fog swallowed them both.
Meera’s scream shredded the fog.
She fumbled with the door, her fingers trembling, nails breaking against the plastic lock. “Ishaan!” she shrieked. “Vikrant! Get him!”
But the child was already lost to the mist, his small body swallowed up by something more ancient than the trees, more vicious than death. Ria sprang out behind her mother, barefoot on the rough tar, cold air lashing at her cheeks. “I can’t see him! Maa, I can’t—”
Vikrant stood frozen a few feet away, arms stiff by his side. He was facing the banyan tree. But not moving. As if something had locked his joints. His neck trembled, trying to turn. But his eyes remained fixed — wide, glassy, unblinking.
Meera ran toward him. She didn’t care about the fog. Or the myths. Her child had just walked into the arms of a nightmare, and she would tear the world apart to get him back. “Ishaan!” she called again, her voice cracking, no longer a scream but a mother’s plea. “Come back to me. Baby, please…”
No answer.
The woman beneath the banyan was gone.
So was Ishaan.
Only the banyan tree remained — monstrous and quiet, roots crawling like snakes across the red earth. There was a strange stillness under it. As if time didn’t pass there. As if things went in… but never came out.
Suddenly, Vikrant collapsed to his knees.
Meera caught him just before he hit the ground. “Vikrant! What happened? Did you see her?”
He looked at her with unfocused eyes. “She… she was humming. And then I saw… I saw something else.”
“What?”
“I saw Ishaan… but older. In a hospital bed. Tubes in his arm. He looked at me and said, ‘You left me, Baba.’”
Meera shivered. That was not memory. That was… a vision.
Ria stood by the tree now, flashlight from her phone flickering. “There’s something here,” she whispered. “Maa… there’s… it looks like a door.”
Meera and Vikrant rushed to her side.
It wasn’t a door.
It was a square slab of stone, half buried under the banyan’s tangled roots. Around its edges were red markings — not paint, not blood, something in between. The language was unfamiliar, almost tribal. The air around the stone felt colder. Denser. Heavy with the weight of forgotten names.
Vikrant crouched. “Don’t touch it,” Meera warned.
But he did. Just a light brush of his fingertips.
The ground beneath them shuddered — barely, like a sigh from the earth. A crack split across the slab. And then, faint but unmistakable — a cry.
A child’s cry.
“Ishaan!” Meera dropped to her knees and pressed her ear to the stone. “He’s in there. Vikrant, he’s in there!”
“That’s impossible,” he whispered, but his voice was cracking now.
“There must be a passage — some cave beneath—”
“Not a cave,” said a voice behind them.
They turned.
The tea stall man stood at the edge of the fog, holding a wooden trident, his shadow stretching far behind him. “It’s not a cave. It’s a holding. A prison built by sadhus long ago to trap her. But it’s weakening. Your child has crossed into her realm.”
“Who are you?” Vikrant asked, rising. “Why are you following us?”
“She doesn’t let the living leave. I came to warn you. But the boy… he opened the path. She needs a child. Every generation. To keep her from decaying completely.”
Meera stepped toward him. “How do we get him back?”
The man didn’t answer immediately. His eye — the blind one — seemed to twitch. “There’s an old ritual. Dangerous. You’ll have to descend into her layer. Speak her name. Make a trade.”
“A trade?” Ria asked, voice sharp.
“Yes. She never takes without offering something in return. She’s a being of balance. She was once human.”
Vikrant was trembling now. “What do we offer?”
The man looked at Meera.
And that’s when she understood.
“She wants me,” Meera said.
The man didn’t nod. But his silence was an answer.
“I won’t let that happen,” Vikrant said. “There has to be another way.”
“There is,” the man said. “But it’s worse.”
Meera didn’t ask what “worse” meant. She already knew. Her son — her baby — was trapped in a space where time didn’t run. Where memories became real, and fear had teeth. The only way to bring him back was to enter that space. Offer herself. Or find the item Chalaba lost when she was cursed — her real name.
“Where can we find it?” Meera asked.
The old man pointed toward a small shrine a few hundred feet off the road. It was barely visible through the mist. A crumbling stone structure wrapped in red cloth, with oil lamps burning low. “It’s hidden in her naam-patra — her naming scroll. Only the true name can undo her grip.”
Ria was already running toward the shrine.
Meera followed.
Inside, the shrine stank of camphor and old milk. Bones lined the base. And in the center — a single scroll, tied with black thread.
Ria picked it up. The scroll was warm.
And pulsing.
“It’s alive,” she said.
Meera took it. The scroll resisted her touch, squirming slightly like a living thing. But she pressed it to her forehead and whispered, “I seek her name.”
The scroll unraveled on its own. The letters on the parchment shimmered — not ink, but something darker, fluid, metallic. It formed a single word.
“Bhadruvaa.”
The air around them split open.
A scream erupted from under the banyan — high, ancient, and furious. The tree shook. Roots twisted. The stone slab cracked again, this time splitting down the center, revealing a tunnel below.
A tunnel lined with red.
And from the depth, Ishaan’s voice.
“Maa?”
“Maa?”
The voice drifted from the tunnel like a fragile thread — wavering, uncertain, but unmistakably Ishaan’s. Meera didn’t hesitate. She stepped toward the cracked stone, her grip still tight around the scroll with the cursed name: Bhadruvaa.
Vikrant blocked her path. “No. Meera, wait. We don’t know what’s down there. This could be her trap.”
“It already is a trap,” she snapped. “Our son is inside it.”
Ria’s flashlight barely pierced the darkness of the exposed tunnel, which descended sharply under the banyan roots. The air inside smelled of damp soil, iron, and something older — something like rot and crushed flowers. The opening pulsed slightly, like a throat breathing.
The tea-seller stood nearby, his trident pressed into the earth. “Only one can enter,” he said grimly. “Her world reflects the heart of the one who dares to cross. If two go, the vision collapses. You’ll both be lost.”
“Then I’m going,” Meera said. “It has to be me. She wants me.”
Vikrant tried to protest, but his voice cracked. He had always been the skeptic — dismissing legends as cultural clutter, raising their children on facts and logic. But nothing about this road, this fog, this entity fit into reason. And Meera, the daughter of a Marathi folk healer, the granddaughter of a midwife who’d whispered spells into birth water — she understood the stakes in her bones.
“Take this,” the tea-seller said, handing her a small pouch filled with black ash. “Circle it around your feet when you find him. Speak her name — only once. If you say it twice, she’ll know you’re afraid. And she’ll feed on it.”
Meera gave Vikrant and Ria one long look — not goodbye, but promise — and then she stepped into the hole.
The descent was fast, steep, and soundless.
The tunnel bent and turned like a coiling serpent. It wasn’t made of stone or soil, but a kind of living flesh — like muscle laced with veins that pulsed with faint reddish light. Meera kept moving, one hand trailing along the slick wall for balance. Her breath fogged the air.
Then she reached it.
A chamber.
At first, it looked like an ancient womb — wide, round, enclosed in banyan roots thick as limbs. In the middle, on a flat stone slab, lay Ishaan. Unmoving. His eyes open, but hollow, as if something inside him had been drained.
And standing behind him — her.
The woman beneath the banyan.
She was taller now, no longer just a shrouded ghost. Her form had taken on more shape — her white saree drifting like underwater silk, her hair floating as if in slow wind. But her face… still veiled by a shadow that moved on its own. And her feet were no longer touching the ground.
“I came for my son,” Meera said clearly.
The figure tilted her head. Then, she spoke — not in words, but in a gurgling language that entered Meera’s head like a memory. The voice was ancient, both beautiful and broken. And Meera understood it.
“You carry grief in your womb.
You carry guilt in your breath.
Why should I return what you gave so easily?”
“I didn’t give him to you,” Meera whispered, trembling. “You took him.”
“I took nothing.
He came willingly.
He heard my lullaby.”
And then Meera saw it.
On the chamber wall, a flickering image appeared — a scene from their home two years ago. Ishaan in bed, crying silently as his parents argued. Meera screaming at Vikrant. Vikrant throwing a glass. Ria shutting her door with headphones on.
“He called for you. You did not come.”
Tears slipped down Meera’s cheeks. “We were… broken. But we came back. We healed.”
“Too late.
Children remember absence louder than love.
He belongs to me now.”
Meera stepped forward. “You were once a mother too, weren’t you? That’s why you sing. That’s why you wait.”
The figure paused. The chamber pulsed with silence.
“I was Bhadruvaa.
They burned my children in front of me for being born under the wrong moon.
I died with their names in my mouth.”
“And now you punish other mothers?” Meera’s voice was steel. “Do you think grief makes you righteous?”
“Grief makes me hungry.”
Meera opened the pouch. She drew a quick circle of black ash around Ishaan’s body, her fingers shaking but precise. The moment the circle closed, the ground shuddered. The figure screamed — not from her mouth, but from the air around her, from the walls, from the blood-like roots above.
Meera stepped inside the circle and lifted Ishaan’s head into her lap. “Baby,” she whispered. “Come back. I’m here now.”
Ishaan’s lips trembled. His eyes fluttered.
The figure tried to cross the ash, but her form convulsed. Meera clutched the scroll and shouted:
“Bhadruvaa!”
A silence fell.
Then a wind — hot, furious, spinning inside the chamber. The roots twisted violently. The air turned red.
Bhadruvaa screamed again, this time with agony. Her form collapsed into ash and black mist, circling the chamber like a storm trying to escape its bottle.
Ishaan gasped.
“Maa?”
Meera sobbed. “Yes, yes baby, I’m here.”
He blinked. His voice was hoarse. “I saw her. She told me I was forgotten. That I could be her child instead. I almost said yes.”
Meera kissed his forehead. “Never again.”
The storm above them shrieked one last time — and then collapsed into silence. The chamber trembled. Cracks spread along the ceiling.
“She’s trying to bring it down,” Meera whispered. “Hold on to me.”
She clutched Ishaan close and closed her eyes.
A flash of red light — then everything went dark.
They woke up on the road.
Right beside the banyan.
No fog. No cracked stone. No tunnel. Just Vikrant holding them both, crying into Meera’s hair. Ria kneeling beside Ishaan, clutching his hand.
“You were gone for seconds,” Vikrant said between sobs. “Just seconds. And then… you were back.”
Meera looked at the tree.
It was now scorched black. Hollow. Silent.
And inside her blouse, the scroll had turned to dust.
They didn’t speak for the next hour.
The car had restarted without effort, as if the breakdown had never happened. The GPS recalibrated to the main road. The shortcut disappeared from the map entirely. But the silence that settled inside the car was not relief. It was a silence full of ghosts.
Ishaan slept, his head on Meera’s lap, fingers curled around her dupatta like a child afraid of being left again. Ria sat beside him, eyes red but dry, earbuds plugged in but no music playing. Vikrant drove slowly, eyes fixed on the road ahead, his knuckles white on the steering.
The banyan tree was gone. Not cut or felled — simply vanished. As if it had never stood there at all. In its place was a shallow crater, rimmed with charred roots and a few burnt bones.
“What just happened back there?” Vikrant finally whispered.
Meera looked down at Ishaan. His breathing had steadied, but a faint red mark had appeared on his neck — the imprint of a thumb. A ghost’s grip.
“It was real,” she said. “Not a hallucination. Not a myth. Her name had power. And once I used it, she was forced back into the ground.”
“But for how long?” Ria murmured.
No one answered.
They reached the resort just after dusk. It was pretty in the way most forest resorts were — too curated, too neat to be natural. Brick cottages with fairy lights, eco-lanterns swinging gently outside each room, and a smiling receptionist who handed them welcome drinks.
Meera couldn’t drink hers. Her hands were still shaking.
Inside their cottage, Meera bathed Ishaan, scrubbing away every trace of cold and fog and shadow. He didn’t protest. Just sat there quietly, his back to her, staring at the tiled wall. “Maa,” he said once, “do ghosts feel lonely?”
She wrapped him in a towel and held him close. “Yes,” she whispered. “That’s why they whisper.”
That night, they all slept in the same room — Ria on one side, Meera and Ishaan in the middle, and Vikrant on the other. The lamps were left on. Not one of them said the word Chalaba again.
But even with the light, Meera couldn’t sleep.
At midnight, she woke to the sound of bells.
Tiny bells, like the ones tied to the ankles of temple dancers. She sat up, heart pounding.
The bells came from outside.
She reached for her phone. 12:03 a.m.
Quietly, she got out of bed, pulled on a shawl, and opened the cottage door.
The night was still. Too still. The forest edge beyond the cottages looked darker than it should have. Like it was holding its breath.
And then — she saw them.
Children.
Dozens of them.
They stood in a semi-circle at the edge of the resort boundary, right where the forest began. Barefoot. Wearing old-fashioned clothes. Some of them looked barely five, others twelve or thirteen. Their skin was ashen. Their eyes… hollow.
Meera couldn’t breathe.
One of them stepped forward. A girl in a torn frock, hair braided with red threads. She raised a hand and pointed.
Not at Meera.
At the cottage.
At Ishaan.
“No,” Meera whispered. “He’s not yours.”
The girl opened her mouth — wide, unnaturally wide — and let out a shriek that wasn’t a sound but a feeling. Like sorrow crashing into rage. Like abandonment given voice.
The lights across the resort flickered.
Behind Meera, Ishaan sat up in bed, eyes wide.
“She found me again,” he said softly.
The next morning, Vikrant was on the phone with the resort manager, demanding CCTV footage, checking for nearby hospitals, calling friends in Pune who might have heard of similar phenomena. He needed data, logic, explanation. But there was none.
Ria, meanwhile, was scrolling through forums and Reddit threads, finding scattered mentions of the woman near Ghulewadi, the shortcut with no return, the banyan children.
“She’s not gone,” Ria said quietly. “She’s broken. But she’s not gone. She was trapped under that banyan. But now the tree is dead.”
Meera already knew.
She’d seen it in the eyes of the ghost children last night. They were the ones she had stolen over the decades — some willingly, some lured, some taken in fury. And now they were unmoored, free, rootless.
“She’s looking for a new anchor,” Meera said. “A new body. A new tree. Something to bind herself to.”
“Can she do that?” Vikrant asked.
“If someone calls her.”
Ria looked up. “Like summoning?”
Meera nodded. “Or praying.”
They looked at Ishaan. He was drawing something with a black crayon on hotel stationery. Circles. Roots. A face without eyes.
“She left something in him,” Meera said.
They left the resort by afternoon.
But the air felt wrong again as they neared the same stretch of highway. Meera clutched the steering wheel now — she’d insisted on driving — and kept her eyes fixed forward.
Then Ria’s phone buzzed.
A single notification from an unknown number.
“He still hears her. The lullaby hasn’t ended.”
She showed it to Meera.
Then Ishaan whispered: “Do you hear it, Maa?”
And Meera did.
A faint tune — no words, just a soft rise and fall, like a woman humming through earth and stone. She slammed the brakes.
They were nowhere near the banyan’s crater. But the road had changed again.
It was darker. And it smelled… like burnt milk.
Like grief made real.
“We can’t go home,” Meera said. “Not yet.”
“Then where do we go?” Vikrant asked.
“To where it began,” she said.
That evening, they reached Meera’s ancestral village — a small hamlet tucked near the base of the Sahyadris, untouched by malls, highways, or cellphone towers. It was here, as a child, that Meera had first heard of Chalaba from her grandmother. A woman feared and worshipped in equal measure. A protector, a destroyer, a spirit born from injustice.
They met Ajji, Meera’s great-aunt, now ninety and nearly blind.
“I heard her name,” Ajji whispered when Meera told her. “Bhadruvaa. You woke her. You didn’t banish her, child. You named her.”
“I had no choice,” Meera said.
“No,” Ajji nodded. “But now she is loose. And she’ll want to root again. She’ll find another banyan. Another child.”
“Can we trap her again?”
Ajji’s smile was slow, sad. “Yes. But only with her own grief.”
“What do you mean?”
“You must return what she lost.”
Meera remembered the shrine. The scroll. The story.
“She lost her children,” she whispered.
Ajji nodded. “You must find their bones.”
“And if I do?”
“Then you bury them. With her name. Under a new tree. Willingly.”
“And if I don’t?”
Ajji touched Ishaan’s forehead gently. “Then she will take him. And every child after.”
The air in Meera’s village was heavier than she remembered.
As night fell, the mustard fields around the old courtyard shimmered silver under moonlight. But there was no breeze, no sound of crickets. Just a stillness, dense as smoke, as if the soil itself was holding its breath. The villagers hadn’t asked why Meera and her family had arrived unannounced after so many years. But they watched with quiet eyes—especially the old ones. They knew something had come with her.
Inside the mud-brick house, Ajji lit three oil lamps and placed them in a triangle on the kitchen floor. Ishaan sat in the center, cross-legged, still drawing. He hadn’t spoken since the highway. Not even to Meera. His sketches were turning darker—trees growing out of eyes, women with veils covering mouths stitched shut, infants sleeping in pits.
Ajji examined them. “He’s connected now. The veil is thinner for him. If she speaks again, he may not resist next time.”
Meera rubbed her temples. “You said we need her children’s remains. Where are they?”
Ajji looked up at the soot-black ceiling. “The river took them.”
“Which river?”
Ajji’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Godavari.”
Meera froze.
The Godavari flowed just beyond the village, wide and slow, weaving past temples and stone ghats. It had flooded thirty years ago, swallowing shrines and banyan groves alike. It was said that before that flood, Bhadruvaa had been buried beside the river, her children laid at her feet in urns of ash and bone.
“But if the flood took them…” Meera began.
“They can be summoned,” Ajji said. “Ash leaves traces. Bone remembers.”
Ria, who’d been silently scrolling her phone, asked, “Are you saying we have to raise their remains from the river?”
“Yes,” Ajji said. “Through a calling rite. But not here. You must go to where the old banyan once stood—before the highway came.”
Vikrant frowned. “You mean the first tree?”
Ajji nodded. “The original anchor.”
The next morning, they followed the river.
Not on highways, but on foot, guided by Ajji’s directions—through abandoned cart paths, over paddy ridges, past termite hills that looked disturbingly like faces frozen mid-scream. Ishaan walked in silence, holding Ria’s hand. The further they walked, the colder the sun became, until by noon, the sky had gone from gold to an unsettling grey.
They reached a broken temple near the river’s bend—its shikhara crumbled, idols beheaded by time. Just beyond it stood another banyan. Smaller than the first, but thicker at the roots, its branches spreading like a wounded hand over the riverbank.
“This is the place,” Meera whispered.
Ria opened her backpack, pulling out the items Ajji had prepared: three sticks of dried vetiver, a bowl of turmeric water, and a vial of Meera’s blood.
“We’ll need a fire circle,” she said. “And silence.”
They set the objects down under the banyan’s largest root, which looked almost sculpted — like a spine turned to wood. Meera pricked her thumb and let the blood drip into the turmeric water. Ria lit the vetiver. Its bitter smoke curled into the air, painting strange figures in the rising mist.
Then Meera spoke, voice steady.
“I call on the lost.
Children of fire and curse.
Ash of the unborn, bone of the stolen.
Return to the mother who waits.”
The wind changed.
The river hissed.
Ishaan gasped.
The ground beneath the banyan shook—lightly at first, then with more force, as if something was moving beneath the roots. The soil cracked. Water bubbled up, not from the river but from under the tree itself.
And then… a sound.
Not crying.
Not screaming.
Laughing.
A child’s laugh, multiplied. Dozens of voices giggling, echoing, bouncing from tree to sky and back again.
Ria stumbled backward. “They’re here.”
The roots parted.
And from the earth, three small clay pots rose, bound in black thread, etched with old symbols. Bone dust seeped from the cracks.
“These are hers,” Meera whispered.
But even as she reached forward, the laughter changed.
It twisted.
Became mocking.
Menacing.
The wind howled—and the tree bled.
From where the pots had risen, a black liquid oozed up the trunk, seeping from knots in the bark like tar. Faces began forming in the bark—screaming faces. Children. Women. One of them looked like Meera.
“She knows we have them,” Vikrant said.
“We have to bury them,” Meera said. “Now. Under a new tree. With her name.”
“There’s a peepul tree back near Ajji’s pond,” Ria said, checking the map. “It’s young. Still growing.”
Meera nodded. “That will do.”
By sundown, they returned to Ajji’s house and made preparations.
The peepul tree was just behind the house, by the old pond where Meera used to bathe as a girl. Ajji dug a shallow pit near its base. Meera laid down the three urns, each carefully wrapped in white cloth. She poured the rest of her blood over the soil.
And then, with the last sliver of sunlight on her face, she spoke:
“Bhadruvaa.
Here lie your children.
Ash to rest. Bone to root.
Sleep now.
No more hunger.
No more song.”
The wind stilled.
The lamps flickered once, then steadied.
The pond shimmered—and then cleared, its surface reflecting nothing but sky and tree.
A breath passed through the air. Not wind. Not voice. But something like a sigh. A release.
And Meera knew.
The binding had worked.
That night, Meera sat with Ajji on the verandah.
“She’ll sleep now,” Ajji said. “Not forever. But long enough. Long enough for Ishaan to grow.”
Meera sipped warm water, her hands finally steady. “And when she wakes?”
Ajji smiled faintly. “She will remember your name. Not with hate. But with peace.”
Inside, Ishaan finally slept like a child.
No humming.
No visions.
Just breath, soft and slow.
And for the first time in days, Meera allowed herself to close her eyes too.
But deep below the peepul roots, something still pulsed faintly.
Not evil.
Not rage.
Just memory.
The days that followed passed like water — slow, quiet, almost too peaceful. The storm had broken, the ritual completed, and Bhadruvaa had returned to the soil with her children.
Meera and Vikrant stayed in the village longer than planned. Ishaan smiled again. Ria stopped waking up with scratches on her arms. No more nightmares. No more fog. The banyan tree was just a story again, nothing more.
And yet, Meera couldn’t forget the sound that echoed from the earth when she laid the urns beneath the peepul tree. That final sigh — soft, warm, almost grateful.
But not final.
Something lingered.
On the fifth day, just before dawn, Meera stepped out for water from the courtyard pump. As she leaned into the creaking iron lever, she heard footsteps. Not hurried or heavy. Childlike. Barefoot on cracked earth.
She turned.
No one.
But in the dust — fresh prints.
Small feet.
Leading away from the peepul tree.
She followed them.
They stopped at the edge of the pond. A single hibiscus flower floated there — red as fire, petals curling inward. Meera knelt, reached in, and plucked it gently.
Beneath it, something shimmered for just a second.
A golden anklet.
Meera gasped. Not because it was eerie — but because she recognized it.
It had belonged to her sister.
A sister who had drowned in that very pond, thirty years ago, chasing a falling kite. A tragedy they never spoke of. A memory sealed tight.
She had been only six.
“Chhoti?” Meera whispered.
The pond offered no answer.
But later that day, Ajji came to her quietly and said, “The ones we bury with memory often return with memory.”
That evening, Ria found something strange in her phone gallery.
She had been deleting photos to make space — pictures from the trip, the fog, the tree. She came across a folder she didn’t remember creating, titled “Otherside.”
Inside were six photos. All grainy. All taken in the span of three minutes.
The first showed Ishaan asleep under the banyan.
The second showed Meera kneeling in the ash circle.
The third… was from inside the chamber. The ghost children. All of them. Staring directly at the camera.
But the fourth photo made her scream.
It showed her own face — eyes rolled back, mouth open, hand reaching toward something unseen.
Ria hadn’t been inside the chamber.
But the photo said otherwise.
The fifth photo showed Bhadruvaa.
Fully formed. Eyes open. Mouth sealed. Yet, somehow, she was smiling.
The sixth photo was black.
Just one word written across it in flickering white letters:
“She remembers.”
Vikrant wanted to leave.
“We’ve done what we had to do. We saved Ishaan. We finished the ritual. Let’s go back to Pune. Pretend we’re normal again.”
But Meera shook her head. “Something’s not done.”
“She’s buried—”
“No. She’s listening.”
Ajji, who had been watching quietly from the window, finally spoke.
“She’s not waiting to rise again. She’s waiting to speak.”
“To who?” Vikrant asked.
Ajji looked at Meera.
“She chose you,” she said. “Because you saw her. Not just as a spirit. But as a mother.”
Meera sat down slowly. “What does she want?”
Ajji folded her hands on her lap. “She wants her story told.”
That night, Meera sat alone by the peepul tree.
She brought nothing with her. No incense, no thread, no protection. Just a notebook and a pen.
The tree stood still in the moonlight, its branches gently brushing the air.
“I’m here,” Meera whispered.
Nothing happened at first.
Then the roots began to hum.
Not a voice.
Not a song.
But a vibration. Like the tree remembering.
Meera pressed the pen to the page and began to write.
Her name was Bhadruvaa.
She lived in a village swallowed by the Godavari, where people feared women who bled without shame and healed without permission.
They said she touched herbs like a witch.
That her sons were born under eclipses.
That her body bore no husband’s name.
So they branded her.
Burnt her home.
Took her children.
Buried her alive.
As Meera wrote, the air grew heavy.
The pen moved faster.
But she did not die.
She clung to the earth.
Made a lullaby of grief.
Became a shadow to mothers who forgot.
A hunger to children who hurt.
Not for revenge.
For memory.
When she finished, Meera looked up.
And Bhadruvaa stood across the tree.
Not veiled. Not monstrous.
Just a woman.
A mother in white.
Face open, quiet. Not smiling. Not weeping. Just there.
And then, slowly, she faded.
The peepul tree let out a breath.
And Meera knew the story had been heard.
Two weeks later, they returned to Pune.
Life crept back in. Routines. Traffic. School uniforms. Morning chai.
Ishaan didn’t speak of the tree again. But sometimes, when he passed a banyan, he’d touch the trunk gently — like greeting an old friend.
Ria sent the six photos to a private encrypted drive and deleted them from her phone. She started keeping a dream journal. All her recent dreams had the same setting: a forest lit by oil lamps, and a voice humming from the roots.
Vikrant didn’t talk about it at all. But he began sitting with Ishaan more. Reading. Playing. Listening. As if making up for something he hadn’t known he’d lost.
Meera?
She finished writing the full story. A manuscript titled The Woman Beneath the Banyan.
Not as fiction.
As testimony.
A few publishers called it “too folkloric.” One editor called it “psychological horror disguised as myth.”
But one small publisher in Nashik replied with a single line:
“We’ve been waiting for her story.”
The publisher’s office sat behind an old rice mill in Nashik, its signboard faded by sun and soot: Agni Books – Since 1956. A single fan whirred lazily overhead as Meera sat across from a bespectacled man with turmeric-stained fingers and a slow, knowing smile.
“She chose you,” he said, flipping through her manuscript. “You can feel it in the pages.”
“I didn’t write it,” Meera admitted. “She did. Through me.”
The man didn’t blink. “Good. Because this isn’t fiction. This is offering.”
He reached into a drawer and pulled out a cloth-wrapped bundle. With reverence, he untied it, revealing a palm-leaf manuscript, its edges brittle with time.
“Long before printing presses,” he said, “our ancestors wrote songs for spirits. Not to exorcise them. To give them a home. A name, a sound, a page. So they wouldn’t have to haunt us.”
Meera touched the ancient script. Its ink had faded into the leaves like memory into skin.
He leaned forward. “You’ve written her home. But there’s one more thing to do.”
“What?”
He closed her manuscript and smiled softly. “Take it to the place where she first wept. Let the story rest there.”
She nodded.
She already knew where that was.
Two days later, Meera stood at the bend of the Godavari, where the flooded ruins of the first banyan tree still whispered in the wind. The place had changed—less wild, more exposed—but the air held the same pause, as though time had learned to hesitate there.
She brought no offerings. Only a single printed copy of her manuscript.
Wrapped in white cotton.
She laid it gently on a flat stone near the roots of a neem tree growing close to where the banyan once stood.
Then she spoke.
“Bhadruvaa.
You are remembered.
You are written.
Sleep now, not in silence—
But in story.”
The river’s breeze picked up.
The pages fluttered.
And then, stillness.
As Meera turned to leave, she saw a child standing on the other side of the river.
Small. Barefoot. Face indistinct in the mist.
But she waved.
And Meera, without knowing why, waved back.
The child disappeared.
And a single hibiscus flower floated downstream.
Back in Pune, life wove itself back into the ordinary.
Mostly.
But on the night before Diwali, Meera was jolted awake by a scream.
It wasn’t Ishaan.
It was Ria.
Meera burst into her daughter’s room, where Ria sat up in bed, drenched in sweat, her phone glowing on the side table. “She’s not done,” Ria gasped.
Meera’s blood froze. “What did you see?”
Ria held out the phone.
There was a new video file. Dated just three minutes ago.
It showed a child—not Ishaan—a boy Meera didn’t recognize, sitting on the floor of a temple, eyes rolled back, whispering:
“She’s hungry again. The peepul is too young. She needs something older.”
Then the screen glitched, and a word flashed:
“Kalamb.”
Meera’s heart dropped.
Kalamb was a forgotten village north of Pune—where her great-grandmother had once lived. It was also the place her grandmother had whispered about in half-sentences and broken dreams. “Where the earth drank screams,” she’d said once in sleep.
“Why Kalamb?” Meera asked.
But Ria had already pulled up articles.
Mysterious child disappearance near Kalamb village.
Parents report visions of a veiled woman.
Ancient banyan tree collapses overnight—villagers claim to hear laughter beneath soil.
Meera stared at the screen. “She’s moving.”
“She wants a new home,” Ria whispered.
“No,” Meera corrected her. “She wants a witness.”
That night, Meera made her decision.
“I’m going to Kalamb.”
Vikrant was furious. “We’ve done enough. We almost lost Ishaan. We buried her children. You wrote her story.”
Meera turned to him, calm but resolute. “And now children are disappearing again. If I walk away now, what does that make me?”
Vikrant couldn’t answer.
Ria stood behind her. “I’m coming.”
“No,” Meera said. “You stay. Protect Ishaan. Keep him away from banyans, from lullabies, from anything that hums.”
Ria nodded slowly.
Meera turned to her husband. “She chose me once. Maybe she still listens to me.”
Kalamb was not on most maps. It appeared on old government records, its pin location slightly off. The road that led to it had not been tarred in decades. By the time Meera reached the edge of the village, the sky had turned a soft bruise-blue and dogs howled in the distance.
The village had no signboard. Only a crumbling temple, two thatched tea stalls, and one solitary banyan tree—colossal, gnarled, its roots exposed like veins.
And under it, candles.
Dozens.
Some half-melted. Some fresh.
Children’s slippers were scattered nearby. A few tiny bangles. A soft toy.
Meera approached the tree.
And she felt it at once.
The vibration.
Not violent. Not loud.
But there.
Persistent.
Grief made solid.
She sat beneath the tree and whispered, “I know what you’re doing. I know what you need.”
A wind stirred.
Leaves rustled.
From behind the tree, a girl stepped forward.
Maybe ten years old. Hair in braids. White dress. Anklets jingling softly.
She looked straight at Meera.
“You told her story,” the girl said.
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t tell all of it.”
“What did I miss?”
The girl’s voice was barely a breath.
“You never asked what she wanted.”
And then the earth cracked.
A deep, slow groan like a drumbeat from beneath.
The candles blew out.
The tree roots lifted, ever so slightly.
And the ground below turned soft, like skin before bleeding.
Meera stood, heart pounding.
“I’m listening now,” she said.
From the darkness below, a voice rose.
“Then come and see.”
The earth beneath Meera’s feet quivered—not like an earthquake, but like a heart remembering how to beat. The banyan tree creaked above her, its roots groaning as if stretching after centuries of slumber. The girl with the anklets was gone, vanished into the folds of night. And before Meera, the ground had opened.
A mouth in the soil.
Dark, narrow, pulsing with warmth.
Meera stepped forward.
She didn’t think. Didn’t calculate. Some deeper instinct had taken over—the same primal force that had led her into the cursed chamber weeks ago. She lowered herself onto her hands and knees and crawled into the fissure.
The world above folded shut.
Inside, the tunnel was nothing like the one beneath the first banyan.
This one was warmer, and it breathed. The walls were soft, damp, as though she were crawling through a living organism. Threads of red light pulsed along the ceiling like arteries. The air was filled with a low, rhythmic sound—duh-dum, duh-dum—like a heartbeat inside a womb.
As she crawled, the space opened wider. The red glow intensified, revealing a cavern unlike anything Meera had seen.
At its center stood a tree—not real, not metaphor—but an impossible formation of bones and roots, twisted into one being. The leaves were made of ash. And beneath it, a woman sat.
Bhadruvaa.
Fully formed. No veil. Her eyes were pale silver, as if filled with starlight. Her mouth was closed—not stitched anymore, just sealed by choice.
Her arms cradled nothing. But she rocked gently, as if holding something the world couldn’t see.
“You came,” she said.
Her voice was quiet thunder. Calm. Final.
“Yes,” Meera said.
“Why?”
“You called me.”
Bhadruvaa looked up, and for the first time, Meera saw the fullness of her face—not monstrous or spectral, but heartbreakingly human. There were burn scars down one side, old and textured, as if someone had poured boiling water along her jawline.
“You told part of my story,” Bhadruvaa said. “The world heard. The blood remembered.”
“But children are still vanishing,” Meera said. “You’re still taking them.”
“No,” she replied softly. “They’re coming on their own now.”
Meera stared.
“They come to escape what waits above,” Bhadruvaa continued. “Fathers who rage. Mothers who forget. Classrooms that bruise. Beds that creak at midnight. I offer them a silence no one else gives.”
“You offer them death.”
“I offer them peace.”
Meera’s voice trembled. “You’re not their mother.”
“I’m what’s left when mothers fail.”
Silence fell between them. Thick. Suffocating.
Then Meera stepped closer. “Then let me do what I failed to do. Let me carry them back.”
Bhadruvaa looked at her long and deep.
“They won’t come,” she said.
“Then take me instead.”
The chamber shuddered.
“Why?” Bhadruvaa asked.
“Because I understand now,” Meera whispered. “You weren’t a ghost. You were a woman who lost everything. And then they turned you into a story so they didn’t have to grieve you.”
Bhadruvaa’s eyes filled, not with tears, but with ash.
“And now?” she asked.
“Now you don’t have to hold them alone.”
Meera knelt before her.
“I’m here.”
A pause.
Then Bhadruvaa leaned forward and touched Meera’s forehead.
The moment her fingers met skin, Meera fell.
Not physically—but into vision.
She stood on scorched earth. Wind howled through broken huts. The sky bled orange. Before her, three charred bodies lay in a shallow pit. A woman stood beside them, her sari torn, her skin covered in soot.
It was her.
But also Meera.
The scene rippled.
Now she was in a temple courtyard. Women pointed. Men shouted. “She curses our crops!” “She touched the well!” “Her children mewl like jackals!”
Rocks were thrown.
She screamed.
Nobody listened.
Then darkness.
Then silence.
Then—a song.
Meera began to cry.
The visions dissolved.
She was back in the chamber.
Bhadruvaa was no longer in front of her.
But the bone-tree had changed.
It now cradled three glowing lights—faint, pulsing, like fireflies.
Children.
And at its base lay a fourth.
Small. Familiar.
“Ishaan?” Meera gasped, crawling forward.
But it wasn’t Ishaan.
It was a boy she didn’t know. Pale. Thin. He looked up at her with solemn eyes.
“I miss my mother,” he said.
“What’s your name?” Meera asked.
He whispered something.
And with that name, a wind howled through the chamber, swirling the ash-leaves, lifting the children’s lights toward the roof.
A shaft of golden light broke through.
A way out.
Meera held the boy’s hand.
One by one, the others came. Five. Ten. Fifteen.
All children.
Some crying.
Some silent.
But all real.
And all ready.
Meera led them upward.
Toward light.
She emerged from the fissure just before dawn.
The banyan still stood, but its bark had peeled like burnt skin. The candles at its base had gone cold.
A group of villagers had gathered.
And in their arms—children.
Real, living children.
Blinking in confusion. Holding tightly to Meera’s legs. Their faces pale but breathing.
Someone screamed.
Someone fell to their knees.
A mother sobbed, clutching a boy who hadn’t spoken in weeks.
“She brought them back!” someone cried.
“She went into the roots!”
And Meera stood there, dazed, her kurta covered in ash, her arms filled with the weight of children who no longer belonged to death.
And then—she fainted.
She woke three days later in a rural clinic.
Vikrant sat by her side, holding her hand. Tears ran down his cheeks before he even noticed she was awake.
“I thought we lost you,” he whispered.
“You almost did,” she said. Her voice was hoarse.
“Ishaan’s safe. He’s waiting.”
Ria appeared at the door, eyes wide. “The story’s spreading. Every local paper. Some national.”
“They’re calling you ‘The Root-Walker,’” Vikrant said with a wry smile.
“I don’t care what they call me,” Meera whispered.
“As long as the children stay above ground.”
Meera left the clinic with sunlight on her skin and a silence inside her that finally felt like peace, not absence. She had entered the roots, spoken with a spirit who had once been a woman, and returned with more than just answers—she had returned with the lost.
But peace, she quickly discovered, came at a cost.
Her name was now being whispered everywhere.
Local journalists waited outside the village temple with notebooks and cameras. Some called her a saint. Others, a witch. Conspiracy theorists had begun to speculate online—Mass hallucination in Kalamb? Biological weapons under the banyan? Cult activity in Western Maharashtra? She didn’t care for any of it. But what disturbed her was the pattern that followed.
Children from other villages began reporting visions.
Dreams of a woman in white, standing beside their beds.
Soft humming in classrooms.
Drawings of trees with eyes.
She hadn’t ended it.
She had only shifted the ground beneath it.
That night, Meera sat under the peepul tree behind Ajji’s house. Its leaves whispered softly, as if remembering the ash it had once swallowed.
Ajji came and sat beside her.
“I thought it was over,” Meera said.
Ajji chuckled. “Spirits don’t end. They sleep. They shift.”
“Then what did I do in Kalamb?”
“You opened a door,” Ajji replied, “and you helped some pass through it. That’s all any of us can do.”
“I saw so many children down there. More than the ones who came back.”
Ajji looked at her gently. “Not all are ready to return. Some were never lost. Just… hiding.”
Meera bowed her head. “She didn’t curse us. She carried us.”
“Yes,” Ajji whispered. “And now, she’s waiting for what’s next.”
A week later, a woman knocked on Meera’s door in Pune.
She was in her early fifties, in a pale green saree, eyes rimmed with exhaustion.
“Are you Meera Deshmukh?” she asked.
“Yes.”
The woman handed her a notebook. Worn, water-damaged, its cover peeling.
“My daughter was one of the children who returned in Kalamb,” the woman said. “She won’t speak of what happened. But she’s been drawing. Every night. Please—look.”
Meera opened the notebook.
Every page showed the same thing:
A banyan tree.
A woman standing beneath it.
And a black circle in the center of the ground.
But one image made Meera freeze.
It showed a girl kneeling. Not the ghost woman.
A living girl.
Eyes wide.
Hands pressed to the soil.
And below her, in the circle—something rising.
The woman whispered, “Is it still not over?”
Meera closed the book.
“No,” she said. “It’s changing.”
The next morning, Meera returned to Kalamb.
She stood where the banyan had cracked and healed.
It had begun to grow again—faster than nature allowed. Its bark was smooth now. New. But not pure. The sap smelled faintly of iron.
At its base, villagers had started placing offerings: milk, rice, turmeric. And in the hollow where Meera had emerged, someone had painted a sign:
“Maai ke aangan. Do not disturb.”
(The Mother’s Courtyard.)
Meera sat beneath it again.
No prayers this time. No fire. Just a listening heart.
“Bhadruvaa,” she said. “Are you still here?”
The wind didn’t rise.
But a single leaf detached and floated gently down—landing on her lap.
And in that leaf, she saw it.
A memory not hers.
A village long gone.
A woman walking alone at dusk.
Children laughing.
Then silence.
Then fire.
Then a lullaby.
And then—a promise.
“If no one remembers me as a mother,
Let them remember me as the last voice their children heard
Before the world forgot how to love.”
Meera wept.
Not because she was afraid.
Because she understood.
She pulled out her phone and began typing.
A new manuscript. A new title.
Not The Woman Beneath the Banyan.
But—
“Bhadruvaa: The One Who Stayed.”
It wouldn’t be horror.
It would be history.
Weeks passed.
Then a month.
And the dreams stopped.
Children began to sleep peacefully.
No new disappearances were reported.
The Kalamb banyan grew—but no longer hummed.
Meera’s book was published with a limited print. No press tours. No headlines. Just word of mouth. A few teachers kept it in libraries. A few mothers read it under blankets. Some cried.
And in a forest near Trimbak, a new banyan sapling sprouted.
One day, Ishaan saw it on a walk and ran to it without fear.
He placed a single hibiscus flower at its base.
Then turned to Meera and said, “She’s not sad anymore.”
“How do you know?”
“She told me.”
“She speaks to you still?”
Ishaan smiled. “No. She thanked me. Then left.”
Meera bent down beside him.
“And what did you say?”
He grinned.
“I said, come back only if you miss us. Not if you’re lonely.”
Meera nodded.
Because that’s what it always had been about.
Not vengeance.
Not curses.
Just the ache of being forgotten.
On the first day of summer, Meera returned to the peepul tree one last time. The same one where Bhadruvaa’s children had been laid to rest in silence. It had grown taller since winter. Its leaves broader, greener. But the earth beneath still carried that sacred weight — the knowledge that grief, when named, could become something gentler.
She wasn’t alone this time.
With her stood Vikrant, now calmer, changed in small but real ways. Ishaan, holding a brass bell, skipping between shadows and sun. And Ria, a camera slung across her shoulder, documenting not for social media, but for remembrance.
They stood in a loose circle around the tree.
Ajji, frail and nearly blind now, sat on a low stool nearby, whispering a mantra Meera hadn’t heard since childhood. One meant not to banish, but to honor.
This wasn’t a ritual.
It was closure.
Meera stepped forward and buried the final object beneath the tree — a small scroll wrapped in red cloth, no longer Bhadruvaa’s original naam-patra, but something new: a re-telling, a naming, a truth.
On the scroll’s outside was written in Marathi:
“मुलं ऐकतात. पण आईंच्या मौनाला नाही समजत.”
Children listen. But they do not understand a mother’s silence.
She covered it with earth.
And the wind rose, only slightly, as if nodding.
Then stilled.
That evening, they sat in the courtyard, drinking lemon water and talking in low, easy voices. For the first time in months, the sun seemed just like the sun — no symbols, no signs.
“I still don’t understand everything,” Vikrant said, watching Ishaan sleep on Meera’s lap. “I’m a man of science. I always thought ghosts were… leftover electricity. Trauma encoded in memory.”
“And now?” Meera asked.
He smiled faintly. “Now I think ghosts are just… people whose stories were interrupted.”
Ria chimed in. “I think some ghosts just want to be footnotes in someone else’s book.”
Ajji chuckled. “And some want sequels.”
Meera didn’t laugh. She sat quietly, watching the sky shift from gold to grey-blue. “She isn’t gone,” she said finally.
They waited.
“She’s become part of the land. Part of every banyan where a mother weeps. She doesn’t need to haunt anymore. Because now, she’s been heard.”
No one argued.
Two months later, Meera stood on a small stage at a literary festival in Nashik. Not a major one. Just a circle of readers, students, and quiet seekers. The tent smelled of books and incense.
She didn’t speak about spirits.
Or rituals.
She read from her new book, Bhadruvaa: The One Who Stayed.
And when she finished, a boy in the front row — maybe ten, maybe twelve — raised his hand.
“Is Bhadruvaa real?” he asked.
Meera looked into his eyes.
And told him the truth.
“Yes. But not the way you think. She’s not a witch or a ghost. She’s a memory that refuses to be erased. She’s every mother who lost and was never allowed to grieve. Every child who disappeared and was never searched for.”
The boy blinked. “So… will she come again?”
“If she’s needed,” Meera said gently. “Yes.”
That night, Meera walked alone near the ghats of the Godavari, a place where waters had once swallowed pain and secrets. The river moved slow, heavy with monsoon memory. She stood near the bank and opened her notebook, writing one final line.
“Not all hauntings are horrors.
Some are invitations to remember.”
She looked up.
And for a moment — just a flicker — she saw a woman across the river, barefoot, veiled, a hibiscus behind her ear.
But she didn’t walk toward Meera.
She turned and disappeared into the forest of banyans beyond.
Where she belonged.
Back in Pune, life clicked gently into place.
Ria enrolled in a university course on folklore and feminist literature. She no longer feared trees — she sat under them to write.
Ishaan began drawing again — bright things now. Rivers. Leaves. Smiling women in white.
Vikrant spoke less, but when he did, it mattered.
Meera wrote, but slower now. With more silence between her words. She taught small workshops in schools — not on horror or myth, but on listening. To voices we bury. To stories we dismiss. To lullabies forgotten.
And every now and then, she would receive a letter.
Sometimes from a mother.
Sometimes from a child.
All of them began the same way:
“I saw her too…”
But none ended in fear.
Only in relief.
In recognition.
And in the slow blooming of memory — like a tree, born from ash.
Years later, a banyan tree in a distant village is struck by lightning.
It splits open, and inside, villagers find not rot or decay — but a tiny clay urn, intact.
They bury it beneath a new sapling, whispering a name they don’t remember learning.
But the tree grows fast.
And its roots run deep.
Children play in its shade.
And sometimes, when the wind is soft…
They hear a lullaby.
But they’re not afraid.
Because someone long ago, wrote her name in the earth.
And gave her peace.
END
Thank you for reading.
—Anvita Kale
