Partha Deb
One
The jeep rattled along the muddy road, its tires groaning under the weight of city luggage packed high with gadgets, snacks, and books. Arjun Mehta, all of eleven and glowing with the defiance only a Mumbai boy could carry, pressed his face against the dusty window. Rain-patterned fog rolled across the hills like a slumbering beast. His parents had waved him off with hopeful smiles, convinced that a few weeks with his grandmother in the village of Nandpur would break his screen addiction. But as the trees closed in and the modern world blurred into mist and moss, Arjun’s curiosity was laced with annoyance. No internet, no TV, and no one his age. He sighed loudly, ignoring the driver’s mutter about children with no respect. As the road narrowed into a snake of gravel, the fog thickened until even the sun looked like a milky eye in the sky.
Nandpur announced itself not with a signboard, but the sudden stillness that silenced even the birds. The jeep ground to a halt in front of a moss-covered stone house that seemed more grown than built, hunched beneath the weight of ivy and years. Labanya Thakur, his grandmother, stood at the threshold in a red-bordered cotton saree, eyes sharp and welcoming. Her silver hair was tied back tight, and her thin frame carried both strength and age. She hugged Arjun tightly, sniffing the air around him like a mother animal. “You’ve lost a tooth, haven’t you?” she said suddenly, tapping his cheek. Arjun blinked. He had, just the day before. It was in his backpack, wrapped in tissue paper — a weird memento for reasons he couldn’t explain. “We must bury it before sundown,” Labanya added, her tone soft but urgent. “So the forest sleeps easy.”
That night, Arjun sat cross-legged on the bamboo cot in his room, a torchlight flickering by his pillow, the tooth still in its tissue. The house creaked around him, the forest whispering just beyond the thin wooden walls. He’d laughed at Daadi’s words, calling them village fairy tales. “Do I look like I believe in the Tooth Fairy’s evil cousin?” he had muttered, rolling his eyes. But now, the silence seemed to press in too tightly. He unfolded the tissue. It was just enamel and bone — smooth, bloodless, small. He turned it over in his palm, and for a moment, it felt warm. From the open window, something moved in the fog — a shifting shadow among the trees. Arjun quickly shut the window. He stuffed the tooth into his jeans pocket, too stubborn to give in, and lay down. As sleep began to pull him under, he thought he heard scratching at the door. Not loud. Just enough.
The next morning, the air was damp and sour. The crows didn’t caw, and the village children stared at him from a distance. A small girl with braided hair hissed, “He didn’t bury it,” before running off. Arjun’s brow furrowed. At breakfast, Labanya asked gently, “Did you take it to the woods, beta?” Arjun shrugged, stuffing parathas in his mouth. “I forgot,” he lied. Her expression didn’t change, but she placed her hand on his forehead for a second too long. Later that day, he wandered into the courtyard and found three small boys throwing pebbles into the well. One of them glanced at Arjun and said, “My cousin lost a tooth last month and didn’t bury it. Something came to his window. He had fever for a week.” Arjun rolled his eyes, but inside, he felt it — the chill that settled not on your skin, but in your spine. When he reached into his pocket that night, the tooth was gone.
Two
The mist seemed thicker the next morning, clinging to the skin like wet cotton. Arjun stepped outside to a village so silent it felt frozen in time. Smoke rose from the thatched rooftops in thin, ghostly trails. The children who used to chase each other down the lanes now stood in doorways, their eyes too wide, their chatter hushed. A boy barely older than Arjun hissed a warning under his breath as he passed: “She walks now.” Arjun rolled his eyes, irritated by how easily everyone believed these stories. Yet even he noticed the difference — how the birds no longer sang and even the dogs refused to bark after sunset.
Determined to prove his point, Arjun ventured toward the woods with the intention of finding the spot everyone talked about — where the children were told to bury their teeth. The forest was thick with dew and heavy silence. Every branch looked like a reaching hand, every bush seemed to twitch in the corner of his eye. Still, he walked until he reached an old banyan tree surrounded by stones — tiny ones, arranged in rings, each with something small buried underneath. Arjun crouched and scraped at the soft soil with a twig. His fingers brushed against something hard — not a stone, but a small tooth, yellowed with age. There were dozens more.
Before he could dig further, a rustling made him freeze. A boy stood at the edge of the trees — silent, thin, his lips stitched shut with black thread. Arjun’s stomach dropped. The boy raised a trembling hand and pointed to the ground. Then he turned and vanished into the trees. Shaken, Arjun stumbled back toward the village, breathing hard. When he reached Daadi’s courtyard, she was already waiting for him with a warm towel and a look that said more than words. “Did you feel it? The breath of her dreams?” she asked. Arjun, pale and sweating, only nodded slightly.
That night, sleep came fitfully. In his dreams, Arjun was walking barefoot through the forest, the fog curling around him like fingers. Teeth hung from trees on red threads. A lullaby played in reverse, and a voice — his own — whispered, “I didn’t bury it.” Then, in the dream, he looked down — and saw his mouth bleeding, all his teeth falling out one by one into the soil, while someone, unseen, began laughing — a high, cracked sound that echoed long after he woke up, drenched in sweat, a single tooth — not his — lying on his pillow.
Three
The morning air in Nandpur felt thick with secrets. Arjun sat by the courtyard, watching a trail of ants disappear into a crack near the tulsi plant. Something in him felt different — as though the dream had opened a window in his mind that couldn’t be shut. Labanya handed him a brass cup of tulsi water. “Drink,” she said. “It clears what clouds you.” He sipped it slowly, the bitter taste grounding him, even as his thoughts wandered to the stitched-mouth boy and the banyan tree with its burial stones.
Later that day, Chanda — a thin, sharp-eyed girl Arjun had seen staring at him — approached without warning. “You don’t believe, do you?” she asked. Her voice was flat but not cruel. Arjun shrugged. “I believe I saw something,” he admitted. She nodded once, then beckoned him to follow. They walked through a narrow trail behind the schoolhouse to a place even more hidden than the banyan. There, under the exposed roots of a fallen sal tree, was a hollow space with scraps of faded cloth, buttons, broken dolls, and teeth. Some wrapped in turmeric cloth, others tied in string. “This is where she sleeps,” Chanda whispered. “Her dreams echo through these.”
As they crouched there, a soft groaning sound rose from the earth, like wind passing through a flute carved of bone. Arjun stiffened. From beneath one root, a finger-length crack in the dirt began to widen. The earth pulsed slightly. “Let’s go,” Chanda said, grabbing his hand. That night, Arjun asked Labanya about the place under the tree. Her face grew tight. “That is where she was buried. The witch. Burned alive by the villagers. They say she was a midwife who started stealing teeth from babies, claiming it gave her sight into death. They tied her to the tree and set fire. But her soul never left the soil.”
Arjun stayed awake deep into the night, turning the story over in his mind. He opened his notebook and sketched the stitched-mouth boy’s face, the tooth circles, the cracked root. Then, slowly, almost without thinking, he drew something else — a woman’s face, hollow-eyed, her mouth open and full of teeth. When he looked down, he saw a smear of blood on the paper. A fresh cut had opened on his finger. But he didn’t remember being hurt.
Four
The village’s silence had deepened. Even the wind avoided Nandpur’s narrow paths, and every home now burned neem leaves from dawn to dusk. Arjun noticed that his grandmother never left the house after sunset and hung an amulet wrapped in red thread above his door. On the third day of his stay, he spotted the stitched-mouth boy again — this time not near the woods, but crouching by the shrine of Kali near the well. The boy was Bhaskar, Chanda whispered later. He used to speak and laugh and play. Until the day he lost his tooth and never buried it. He vanished for two nights. When he came back, his mouth was sewn shut, and his eyes wouldn’t stop crying.
Bhaskar’s mother had stitched his lips herself, saying it was the only way to keep the whispers out — the ones that made him talk in his sleep in voices that weren’t his own. Chanda took Arjun to Bhaskar’s house. There, Bhaskar sat rocking back and forth, his stitched lips moving as though trying to form words. His walls were covered in charcoal drawings — eyes, mouths, trees with hands, and something that looked like a cave filled with teeth. One drawing showed a girl with no mouth and hollow eyes holding a thread that stretched across children’s throats.
As they left, Bhaskar grabbed Arjun’s wrist and pressed something into his hand. A small pouch made of dried leaves. Inside was a single baby tooth — not Bhaskar’s. Arjun asked Daadi about it, and she turned pale. “That is not a gift. That’s a warning,” she said. “It means the debt has passed to you. You have to offer her something — or she’ll take it.” That night, Arjun dreamt he was in Bhaskar’s house again, but everything was reversed. The walls bled drawings. A mouth stitched with roots whispered through thread: “You cannot close what was never opened right.”
He awoke with the pouch clenched in his fist and a faint taste of iron on his tongue. His lips weren’t stitched — but they hurt as if they had been pulled taut all night. Outside his window, a faint giggle echoed, fading into the trees.
Five
The Hollow Girl came with the third night’s fog — a girl no one remembered, yet everyone feared. Arjun first saw her near the dried-up riverbed behind the mango grove. She stood barefoot in the cracked mud, her shadow cast long despite the clouded sky. Her eyes were black wells, and her mouth was an empty space, smooth skin where lips should have been. Chanda whispered her name as if speaking it summoned her. “That’s Lila. She was born without a voice, but her silence sang to the dead.” According to village whispers, Lila had once followed the Tooth Witch’s song into the forest and returned changed. Now, she wandered in the space between dream and dusk, a harbinger of the witch’s awakening.
Arjun watched her from a distance, frozen by the way her limbs moved like wind through water, too fluid, too deliberate. That night, he woke from a dream where Lila stood beside his bed, pointing at his jaw. His teeth vibrated like tuning forks. In his dream-journal, he drew a picture of her, but when he woke up, it was already there — drawn in charcoal he didn’t remember using. Daadi looked at it and nodded gravely. “She’s come back to warn. Or to choose.” The village elders now met secretly in the grain hall, preparing salt lines and neem bonfires. But the children spoke of Lila in hushed awe — they said she could walk through doors and ride the fog.
One evening, Lila entered the school. The blackboard filled with a chalky scream no one heard but all felt — their teeth ached, and the lights flickered. She drew symbols — spirals, jaws, closed eyes. Bhaskar fainted. Arjun traced one spiral with his finger, and his vision blurred. He saw the past — Lila sitting on the Tooth Witch’s lap, offering a basket of teeth as though they were flowers. Then the fire. Then the burial. And Lila, swallowed by the roots. Arjun staggered back. Chanda helped him up, her voice shaking. “She’s not a ghost. She’s a memory that walks.”
That night, Arjun buried one of his old baby teeth near the riverbed, wrapped in red cloth and turmeric, just as Daadi had instructed. He whispered a promise into the earth: “I see you, Lila. I remember.” The fog receded slightly the next morning. For the first time in days, the birds sang — but only briefly. When Arjun returned to the burial spot, the cloth was gone, and in its place lay a smooth stone carved with the shape of a closed mouth. The Hollow Girl was not gone. She had merely accepted his vow.
Six
The morning broke not with the chirping of birds, but with the frantic cries of a mother whose child had woken up screaming. Arjun rushed outside with Daadi to find a crowd gathered near the temple steps, where little Harshu, barely six, held his jaw and wept. His mouth was bleeding, but the elders gasped not because of injury — they found an extra tooth in his hand, a tooth far too large for a child. The village pradhan declared it a bad omen. That day, every child was called to the temple courtyard. Arjun and Chanda stood to the side as one by one, children were asked to show their mouths. Many wept. Several had toothaches. One girl vomited — three milk teeth that weren’t hers. In the stillness that followed, someone began to hum a tune — a lullaby — and the adults froze. No one had taught that lullaby in generations. It belonged to the Tooth Witch.
That night, every house burned incense, but the fog came down harder. Arjun tried to sleep but awoke to hear something strange — his teeth were chattering, not from fear, but from some strange resonance. He turned and found his notebook open, a drawing he hadn’t made now filling the page: a shrine built of jaws, with children kneeling around it. Daadi burst into the room and smeared ash on his forehead, chanting a prayer in a language he didn’t recognize. “It’s begun,” she whispered. “She is singing again.” As they stepped outside, they saw strange marks on the walls — curved scratches like crescent moons. The air throbbed faintly. That morning, two cows were found with their jaws split open, yet no blood spilled. Arjun began to hear whispers when he passed the old schoolhouse — whispers in children’s voices, calling him by name.
The pradhan called a meeting at the panchayat hut, but few turned up. Fear had rooted the village into isolation. When Inspector Dey arrived from the district town — a skeptical man with no room for superstition — he laughed at the villagers’ concerns. “Teeth don’t sing,” he said. “And witches don’t wake from lullabies.” He warned them against fearmongering and dismissed the stories. That night, his jeep’s engine was found still idling by the main gate, but the man himself had vanished. His cap was discovered in the woods, resting atop a pile of uprooted milk teeth. Arjun knew now: it was never about belief. It was about payment. The witch was awake, and she was reclaiming what was hers.
Chanda, desperate, asked her grandmother about the real history. The old woman finally admitted the truth: the Tooth Witch wasn’t always a witch. She had once been a healer, a midwife named Gomti, who treated the sick and guided births. But when children in the village began dying with smiles frozen on their faces, the villagers turned on her. They accused her of feeding on the purity of milk teeth to keep herself alive. They buried her alive, mouth sewn shut with her own rituals. Now, her spirit returned not to haunt — but to collect. Arjun stared at the village map that Bhaskar had drawn — every tree, every well, every burial circle. And right at the center, beneath the roots of the oldest neem tree, was a symbol shaped like an open mouth. Arjun closed the notebook, and for the first time, began to believe she wasn’t taking vengeance — she was restoring a promise made long ago and broken in fear.
Seven
The whispers grew louder each night, no longer content to remain in dreams. Arjun found himself speaking them aloud in sleep, waking with the taste of soil in his mouth and streaks of ash on his pillow. Daadi’s protective rituals were growing weaker, and the neem branches she hung above the door wilted within hours. Something had shifted — as if the forest no longer cared to hide. Children began disappearing in fragments: first voices, then shadows, and finally, whole bodies. One morning, the village woke to find every chalkboard in the school etched with a spiral and one sentence: “You owed her silence — you gave her screams.”
Desperate, Arjun, Chanda, and Bhaskar descended into the forgotten cellar beneath the grain hall, where the oldest ledgers and family scrolls were stored. There, hidden behind rotting sacks, they found a tattered red book. It wasn’t written in ink, but in crushed roots and milk — the diary of Gomti, the Tooth Witch herself. Her writings revealed truths no villager had spoken aloud: she was not the first, merely the latest. The cycle began generations ago — every century, the forest chose a girl whose teeth could echo into the future. Lila had been one. Now, the time had turned again. And Gomti’s final entry ended with a command: “Plant her voice where the banyan weeps.”
They ventured into the forest as dusk fell, guided by the sound of distant lullabies played backward. Bhaskar, who hadn’t spoken in weeks, began humming. His stitches had loosened. The trees leaned closer with every step, and the fog became luminous, pulsing like breath. Near the weeping banyan, they found a hollow sealed with rows of teeth — not scattered, but arranged in words they could not read. Chanda placed her palm on the bark and began to sing — a tune she didn’t know she remembered. The air trembled. The soil cracked. A mouth formed in the tree’s roots, whispering not with sound but with wind. And from its depths, a voice rose — not Lila’s, not Gomti’s, but the Voice of the Forest — older than both.
It told them the truth: the teeth were never currency — they were keys. Every milk tooth, buried properly, locked away one nightmare from the waking world. But Arjun’s defiance had opened a gate too wide. Now, to seal it, a tooth must be willingly offered — not of milk, but of memory. Arjun stepped forward. He reached into his mouth and pulled free a tooth that hadn’t been loose. Pain tore through him, but the air calmed. The tree accepted the gift. Fog lifted slightly from the village. Birds returned. But as they turned to leave, Bhaskar whispered his first full sentence: “One tooth is not enough.” Behind them, the banyan tree wept blood.
Eight
The banyan tree bled long into the night, its roots pulsing like veins beneath the earth. Arjun, barely conscious from the pain of the offered tooth, leaned against Chanda as the soil around them heaved. The spiral carved from teeth slowly closed, yet something remained unquiet. Bhaskar stood still, eyes glazed, muttering names in reverse — names of children long dead. Then the ground cracked with a roar. From beneath the banyan, a staircase revealed itself — made of bone-white stone, slick with sap, winding into darkness. Daadi had warned of places that the forest itself hid, where time folded and truths screamed. But now they had no choice.
With lanterns flickering and breath held, the trio descended. Each step echoed a heartbeat. At the bottom lay a vast cavern beneath Nandpur, carved long before the village had a name. In the center stood a throne of molars and femurs, upon which sat a figure wrapped in roots — not Gomti, not Lila, but a form older still. Her eyes were hollow, yet they saw. Her mouth did not open, but her voice pierced their bones. “You unsealed the song,” she said, “Now you must carry the silence.” Around them, the walls pulsed with children’s faces trapped in bark — mouths open, eyes weeping sap. Arjun tried to speak but could not. His tongue felt coiled with thread.
The figure explained: each generation fed her hunger through ritual. The villagers had buried their fears, disguised in folklore — but fear does not rot, it waits. Lila had only been the last to bear it. Now, Arjun had made himself part of the binding. “Every tooth carries a name,” she said. “Every silence, a scream you must hold.” As punishment, Bhaskar’s stitches vanished, and he screamed once — a raw, endless cry that shook the chamber. With it, one face peeled from the wall and dissolved. A bargain. For each tooth returned, one soul would be released. But it required memory — and sacrifice.
Arjun reached into his satchel and found the drawings he’d made — visions he didn’t remember drawing. Each carried a tooth tucked inside. Chanda whispered a prayer as Arjun placed them one by one on the floor. For each, the figure wept red sap and the cavern grew quieter. When the last tooth was laid, the throne of bone cracked. The figure dissolved into fog, whispering, “The forest sleeps — until the next forgetting.” The cavern trembled. They ran, the staircase collapsing behind them. Back in Nandpur, morning broke. The banyan tree stood whole again. The fog had lifted. But behind their house, Arjun found a sprouting root — small, pale, with a single baby tooth curled like a seed at its tip.
Nine
A week passed in Nandpur, and though the sky was blue and birds sang again, a weight remained over the village. Children still whispered in their sleep, and a crow was found dead every morning with its beak sealed by spider silk. Arjun wandered with his notebook, tracing the symbols he once thought were imagination. Daadi watched him with quiet worry — not because the horror hadn’t passed, but because he had brought back part of it. “When you make a bargain with a spirit,” she said one night, “it never leaves empty-handed.” Arjun had started to forget things — faces, names, even how many teeth he’d once had. Chanda, too, bore strange signs. A new birthmark had appeared near her neck — the shape of a molar.
The panchayat gathered to bless the banyan tree, unaware that beneath its roots still coiled the roots of memory. Bhaskar refused to speak again. Instead, he began drawing endlessly — images of mouths devouring sunlight, children with shadows for faces, and trees that whispered lullabies in dead dialects. Arjun tried to piece together meaning, but his own dreams were slipping into waking life. One night, a rhyme came to him, chanted by unseen children: “Bury the white / before the night / else she’ll come / and take a bite.” When he asked Daadi, she froze. “That rhyme,” she said, “was banned after the last disappearance — it summons her name.”
Unable to shake the sense of incompletion, Arjun asked Chanda to help him revisit the banyan. By torchlight, they dug near the sprouting root. What they found chilled them: the start of a jawbone, growing from the earth like a seedling. Within it lay a tooth not of a child, but a wolf — black, long, and sharp. “This isn’t over,” Chanda whispered. They returned to Daadi, who opened an old trunk and handed them a scroll sealed with wax and bone. “This is her contract,” she said. “Signed by the first villagers who bound her. It must be renewed — or rewritten.” Arjun read the faded words: The village shall feed her what is lost, and in return, she shall hold the silence.
With the contract in hand, Arjun, Chanda, and Bhaskar prepared for one final ritual. They would rewrite the bargain — not to erase the witch, but to give her form, a name, a voice to remember rather than fear. They mixed sap, milk, and ink, and wrote on bark beneath the banyan tree, with Bhaskar’s drawings encircling them. When the last word was etched, the tree shook once. From its trunk emerged a whisper — not a threat, but a song. A new lullaby. And in that moment, the fog did not rise — but folded itself into the ground like a blanket pulled over a sleeping child. Arjun smiled faintly, though one of his molars had turned to ash.
Ten
The fog no longer returned at dawn, and yet the village walked softer than before, as if stepping across memories not fully buried. The banyan tree had gone silent, its roots no longer pulsing, but its bark now bore a faint spiral — the new contract, living and breathing in silence. Arjun felt older. Not in years, but in the heaviness that rested behind his eyes. He still heard the lullaby sometimes, but it no longer chilled him; it reminded him that stories do not vanish — they transform. In the classroom, the children began to paint again. Birds returned in flocks. Even Bhaskar, though mostly quiet, smiled once at a picture of the Hollow Girl dancing in the mist.
One evening, Arjun walked alone to the edge of the forest and found a small circle of stones he hadn’t placed. In its center lay a single white tooth. No cloth. No turmeric. Just the offering, quiet and honest. He buried it without a word, pressing his palm to the earth. Something inside the woods shifted — not danger, but acknowledgment. The forest had not forgotten, but it had chosen to rest. Chanda later told him she’d dreamed of Gomti, sitting beneath the tree, combing Lila’s hair and singing softly. In her dream, neither looked at her — but both smiled.
As his final day in Nandpur arrived, Arjun packed his bag slowly. He left behind his notebook — now filled with spirals, songs, and symbols — hidden beneath the floorboards. “In case someone else needs to remember,” he told Daadi, who simply nodded. At the edge of the village, the jeep waited. Fog curled in the far distance, but it stayed there. As the jeep rolled forward, Arjun looked back one last time. The banyan stood still. But from its highest branch, something glimmered — a thread, red and golden, wrapped around a single tooth that never fell.
In the years to come, the tale of the Tooth Witch would be told differently. Not with fear, but with reverence. Children still buried their milk teeth in the forest — not to appease a monster, but to honor a protector of memory. Arjun grew older, but sometimes, when he bit too hard into something, he’d taste sap. He would smile then, remembering the girl without a mouth, the boy with the stitched lips, the woman of roots, and the silence that taught them how to speak. Because in the end, the forest does not forget. It waits — not to punish, but to remind — that every story begins with something lost, and ends with something found.
-End-
