Malabika Roy
1
Dr. Madhurima Sen had never heard of Adiganahalli until the envelope arrived—unmarked, yellowing, and sealed with an old wax crest that had nearly dissolved into the paper itself. Inside was a legal note handwritten in Kannada, barely decipherable, informing her that a small parcel of ancestral land and an attached cottage had been passed down to her name through her maternal grandmother’s side. Curious more than anything else, Madhurima contacted the village registrar. The man on the phone sounded both surprised and reluctant. “You can come,” he had said slowly, “but don’t expect anyone to welcome you after dark.” For Madhurima, who had long stopped believing in the supernatural and held folklore at an arm’s length, this only piqued her scientific curiosity further. As an ethnobotanist working with IISc in Bengaluru, she’d grown disillusioned with urban academia—paperwork buried real knowledge, and politics overshadowed field work. She saw this unexpected inheritance as a rare chance to investigate untouched oral traditions, to step into a living myth. She packed lightly—field journal, digital recorder, her soil kit, and a copy of her grandmother’s diary which she’d never read fully, left buried under old saris and sealed memories. The journey was long, beginning with a rickety bus ride through the tumbling hills of Karnataka’s Malnad region, winding through mists, coffee plantations, and roads narrowing into paths. Her driver, a man with kind eyes and trembling hands, kept glancing at the sky as the afternoon thinned. “I’ll drop you at the temple crossroad,” he said. “I won’t go further after five.” She had laughed politely but noted the fear in his eyes. At the fork, he pointed toward a narrow trail shaded by an arched canopy of trees, almost as if the forest had grown a gateway for her alone. “Adiganahalli is that way. Walk straight. If you hear someone calling you from the forest, don’t answer. Not even if it sounds like your mother.” With that, he drove off, leaving Madhurima in the silence of tall grass and a heavy, watchful stillness.
The path to the village was oddly quiet—no birds, no insects, just the occasional rustle that always came from behind her. The forest felt not wild, but waiting. After an hour of walking, she reached the edge of Adiganahalli: a cluster of ancient red-roofed houses crouched around a dried-up lakebed, encircled by groves of neem, peepal, and, ominously, tamarind. There was something unsettling about the way the tamarind trees stood apart, like exiles that had grown old watching. Her cottage lay at the edge of the village, partially hidden by overgrown creepers and moss-draped stone walls. It looked like it hadn’t been lived in for decades. As she stepped inside, she was overwhelmed by the sharp, pungent scent of vetiver and burnt camphor, the kind used in rituals. The interior was modest—an oil lamp, brass utensils, a rusted cot, and a wall of shelves lined with faded books, one of which bore her grandmother’s initials. She lit a candle and stepped outside to explore. That’s when she saw it—directly behind her cottage stood a massive tamarind tree, its trunk thick and gnarled like arthritic limbs, its roots half-exposed as if clawing their way out of the earth. Stones were carefully placed around it in a circle—each one marked with vermilion and turmeric. Hanging from a low branch was an old copper bell, blackened with age. Strangely, the wind that rustled the leaves didn’t touch the bell. As dusk approached, she noticed something more eerie: the entire village began shutting down. Lamps were extinguished, windows bolted, doors sealed with threads of red and yellow. Children were ushered indoors, and no one made eye contact with her. Even the village dogs stopped barking, curling up into tight balls, tails over their eyes. She walked to the center of the village and found the tea shop boarded. The only person who acknowledged her was an old man sitting under a banyan tree, carving something into a block of sandalwood. “You shouldn’t have come alone,” he murmured without looking up. “When the sun sleeps, the tree wakes. Your blood might remember what your mind has forgotten.” She stepped back, unsure whether to laugh or take him seriously. That night, she locked the doors of her grandmother’s house and tried to sleep, but her dreams were filled with the sound of branches scratching glass, even though her windows were barred. In the dream, she stood in front of the tamarind tree, unable to move. A voice whispered her name, not once, but over and over—like it was trying to remind her how to say it the old way. “Madhurima… Amma’s daughter… the one who was promised…”
She woke at dawn with a jolt, her bedsheet twisted around her legs and her feet dirty—mud-caked, as if she’d walked barefoot through soil. But the door was still bolted from inside. Shaken but determined, she convinced herself it was just exhaustion and psychological projection—perhaps a reaction to all the local superstition. She began taking notes, documenting the plants around the village and preparing to interview the locals. Yet a strange undercurrent of avoidance permeated every conversation. The moment she mentioned tamarind, people changed the subject or walked away. Even children refused to play near the trees. Her scientific mind told her this was an ingrained taboo based on some forgotten agricultural reason—maybe the trees were once considered unlucky due to pest infestations or spiritual associations. But as she walked past the giant tamarind near her house each evening, she felt an inexplicable pull—like a thread wrapped around her ribs being tugged gently toward its roots. Something about the texture of the bark, the hollowness in the center, the way the wind seemed to die the moment she stepped under its shade—it all gnawed at her. That evening, as the sun dropped low and the forest outside turned to silhouette, she stood by the tree again. Her fingers reached out to touch its bark. Just before she could, a sudden gust of wind swept through, and the copper bell above let out a chime so sharp it pierced her ears. She staggered back, and in the silence that followed, she heard something she would never admit aloud for days: a faint humming from inside the tree, like someone breathing slowly… waiting.
2
The morning light in Adiganahalli was like no other—filtered through a lattice of ancient leaves and mottled with dew, the sun itself felt uncertain, as though it had been warned not to shine too brightly. Madhurima stepped out of her grandmother’s house, clutching her worn leather journal and a flask of tea she brewed herself. She had barely slept. The memory of the bell’s chime echoed in her bones, and her muddy feet haunted her logic. Sleepwalking, she told herself. Stress-induced hallucinations. Anything but what it felt like: being summoned. Determined to regain control of her thoughts, she headed toward the village square. The people of Adiganahalli were already up, their chores begun in silence. Women washed clothes at the dried lakebed, children gathered firewood, and men returned from early farm work. Yet their movements were cautious, as if each action had an invisible boundary not to be crossed. The only place that seemed alive with sound was the small, crumbling schoolhouse painted in fading blue, where a young man scribbled Kannada alphabets on a chalkboard. He looked up, smiled gently, and introduced himself as Ravi Gowda, the schoolteacher. His presence was grounding—warm, articulate, and surprisingly modern. They spoke at length about village customs, but every time Madhurima mentioned the tamarind tree or asked why the village shuttered itself by dusk, Ravi’s tone shifted. “It’s tradition,” he said. “Old, old ways. My father said it’s not the dark we fear—it’s what comes walking behind it.” He paused before adding, “Even our shadows go quiet after sunset.” Intrigued, Madhurima tried to press further, but a group of elders watching from afar made Ravi change the subject. “Let’s talk plants instead,” he offered, smiling again, but his eyes betrayed unease.
Madhurima spent the rest of the day exploring the forest edges and documenting foliage. She discovered rare herbs like kadipatta, wild aloe, and a sprawling network of banyan roots that seemed to stretch far deeper than visible. But her focus kept returning to the tamarind trees—especially the one near her cottage. Unlike the others, it was surrounded by a deliberate ring of stones, each marked by faded symbols and dried turmeric. Around noon, she encountered Kamala, a robust midwife gathering herbs in silence. When Madhurima introduced herself and asked about the tamarind’s medicinal use, Kamala’s face darkened. “We don’t touch that fruit,” she said, eyes narrowed. “It doesn’t feed, it remembers.” She refused to say more but insisted on giving Madhurima a pouch of dried neem and garike hullu—sacred grass. “Keep this near your pillow,” Kamala muttered. “Not for you. For the thing that watches.” Confused and increasingly unsettled, Madhurima made notes but couldn’t shake the chill that came with those words. She returned home by late afternoon. The air had turned heavier, as though the sunlight was being siphoned from the earth. By 5 PM, a strange ritualistic quiet began to settle. One by one, homes locked themselves down—shutters drawn, doors sealed with lime and red thread, oil lamps blown out deliberately. Even the animals retreated; a pair of goats bleated nervously as a child tugged them into the shadows. When Madhurima stepped onto her porch with her camera, intending to film the phenomenon, she was met with a line of sightless doors. She knocked gently on a neighbor’s window. No response. A woman peeked out, just long enough to whisper, “Inside, Doctor. Now.” And then she vanished behind thick curtains.
The silence that fell over Adiganahalli after sunset was not just absence—it was absolute. No crickets, no frogs, not even the breeze moved. Madhurima sat in her cottage, every lamp lit, yet her skin crawled with the pressure of something just beyond comprehension. She turned on her digital recorder and left it on her windowsill, hoping to catch ambient forest sound for her notes. But the moment the clock struck 8:17 PM, the recorder fizzled and died. The flame of her lamp fluttered erratically, as if caught in a breath she couldn’t feel. She stared at the tamarind tree outside—now only a silhouette against the creeping black of the forest. Its branches swayed slightly, though the wind had long stopped. Then came the knock. Soft. Rhythmic. Like knuckles rapping gently against wood. It came from her back door, the one that opened toward the tree. Madhurima froze. It knocked again—three times. She held her breath, stepped forward, and whispered, “Who is it?” There was no answer. Instead, she heard a sound that made her blood curdle: her mother’s voice, faint but unmistakable, whispering in Bengali, “Madhuri, open the door. Don’t leave me out here.” Her heart pounded. Her mother had been dead for years. “Go away,” she whispered, voice trembling. But the knock continued, soft and persistent, until she backed away into the shadows of her kitchen. When it finally stopped, she dared a look out the back window. No one. Only the tree, swaying slightly, and the bell hanging from its lowest branch—still motionless despite the unseen wind. That night, she dreamt of walking again. Barefoot. Toward the tree. In the dream, she wasn’t alone—around her stood faceless women in white saris, chanting in a language she had never heard, yet somehow understood. When she woke up in a cold sweat, her feet were dirty again. And this time, beside her bed lay a single tamarind pod, shriveled and split open, its seeds glistening… as if freshly plucked.
3
By morning, the tamarind pod was gone. Madhurima didn’t remember moving it, but the muddy footprint leading from her bed to the veranda suggested otherwise. Still, she refused to let fear dictate her purpose. Dressed in a khadi kurta and field boots, she packed her soil testing kit and hiked toward the grove behind her cottage. The tamarind tree stood tall, ancient and gnarled, its branches curling like veins across the sky. This time, she came closer than before. The stones encircling the trunk were etched with deeper patterns than she had realized—triangles within triangles, ringed with fading red. In one gap between roots, she noticed a deep fissure, like an open mouth carved by time. Despite everything, her curiosity burned brighter than her caution. She unrolled her gloves and reached in to collect bark shavings and soil samples. The moment her scalpel touched the bark, a gust of wind swept through the grove, and though all the surrounding trees bent to it, the tamarind remained still—rigid and watching. Then came the sound. Not from the forest, but from the tree itself: a slow, rhythmic creaking, almost like a breath being drawn in through dry lungs. It was so faint, she might have dismissed it, but something inside her trembled, not from fear, but from familiarity—as if the tree were exhaling a name it remembered. She sealed the samples in her vial and stepped back, her head suddenly throbbing. Behind her, the forest had grown darker. And for the briefest second, she thought she saw a woman standing among the trees, her face obscured by long black hair, one hand stretched toward the tamarind trunk. When Madhurima blinked, the woman was gone, and a soft rustling filled the air—not from leaves, but like pages being turned rapidly in the distance.
Later, in the cramped storage shed of her cottage, she ran preliminary tests on the samples. The results were baffling. The soil was unnaturally sterile—no microbial presence, no organic movement, no fungal residue. The bark had a chemical signature she couldn’t place—resinous, but laced with something ancient, perhaps alkaloid-rich or even hallucinogenic. She couldn’t decide if the anomaly was natural or… designed. Sitting there, frowning over her readings, she opened her grandmother’s old journal again, flipping through pages of illegible notes and pressed leaves. Near the center, she found a brittle page folded twice over. Inside was a charcoal sketch of the same tamarind tree—except in the drawing, the trunk was hollow, and from it emerged a face. A woman’s. Eyes shut, mouth sewn, with markings down her neck resembling serpent scales. Below the drawing was a note written in Bengali: “If you hear her name whispered, it means she’s listening again.” Madhurima’s hands trembled. She felt heat in her ears and a faint humming in her head, like the onset of a migraine, though it felt more like a frequency only she could hear. She stepped outside to breathe and saw Ravi approaching, holding a bundle of freshly cut neem branches. “Thought you could use some cleansing leaves,” he said with a half-smile. She laughed weakly and invited him in. Over tea, she tried to explain the strange results of her tests, but Ravi didn’t engage. Instead, he asked, “Do you believe memory can live in trees?” She hesitated. “Like rings and growth patterns?” “No,” he said softly. “Like sorrow. Like a scream that gets trapped in wood.” Madhurima didn’t answer. Her grandmother’s sketch burned in her mind. As Ravi left, he paused at the doorstep and looked toward the tree. “We don’t speak its name,” he murmured. “But if you must… call her Nagarani.”
That night, she couldn’t resist. Just before dusk, she set up her camera to film the tamarind tree, hoping to capture the bell or movement from her dreams. At 7:59 PM, the screen showed nothing but stillness. At 8:17 exactly, the footage turned to static—violent, shrieking static. She tried another device. The same. Frustrated and disturbed, she stepped out onto the veranda and whispered the name Ravi had said. “Nagarani.” The trees rustled instantly. A gust rose from nowhere, and the copper bell above the tree let out one deep, agonizing chime. Then silence. The air turned thick, electric. And then she heard it: a voice—low, feminine, and soaked in longing—speaking from within the tree: “Madhurima… you’ve come back to me.” She stumbled backward. The world around her tilted. Shadows stretched longer than they should. As she collapsed inside her doorway, the last thing she saw was a pair of pale feet, bare and standing just beyond the stones around the tree, toes half-sunken in soil. Her head throbbed with images not her own: temples in ruins, snakes coiled around lamps, women chanting in circles, and her own face, marked with vermilion and ash. When she awoke near dawn, lying on her floor, her hands were stained with red. Not blood—kumkum. And next to her sat a single folded piece of bark. It bore the imprint of a tongue.
4
The imprint of the tongue on the bark haunted her. Madhurima stared at it for hours, turning it over in her hands, examining the ridges and moisture-preserved texture that should have dried out overnight. It hadn’t. She sealed it in a specimen bag and documented the incident, though her hands trembled as she wrote. There was a strange heaviness in her chest—a quiet pressure, as if a truth she had long suppressed was now crawling back into her bones. The villagers avoided her all day. At the lakebed, the washerwomen turned away when she approached. At the market square, the fruit-seller simply pointed to the sky and muttered, “Stay indoors tonight, madam. The roots will move.” Only Kamala, the midwife, approached her near dusk with a brass bowl filled with turmeric-water and garike hullu. “Bathe your feet before sleep,” Kamala instructed. “And leave the bowl under the tamarind.” When Madhurima asked why, Kamala’s eyes grew sharp. “Because the tree is no longer testing you. It’s remembering you. The offering will help you remember it gently.” These words followed her through the day, gnawing at her thoughts. In the evening, she opened her grandmother’s journal again. Between two blank pages, she discovered a brittle leaf pressed inside—a tamarind leaf, discolored and cracked. Beneath it, a single line written in smudged Bengali: “Some roots run through time. Not earth.” Her breath hitched. A foggy image surfaced in her mind—of her as a child, hiding beneath a staircase, hearing her grandmother chant in a strange tongue while placing a bowl of milk near a tree she thought she dreamed. Had it really happened? She couldn’t say. But that night, she did as Kamala instructed. She bathed her feet, placed the bowl under the tree, and stood there in silence as the light disappeared. For the first time, she didn’t flinch when the wind began to whisper her name.
Sleep came violently. She was pulled into a dream that didn’t feel like a dream at all. She stood at the edge of a crumbling temple, moonlight pouring through cracks in its dome. Inside, women in red veils stood in a circle, chanting in a dialect that burned in her ears. One woman turned—her face was identical to Madhurima’s, only older, lined with grief and ritual scars. The woman stepped toward her and said, “You should not have returned unfinished.” Madhurima tried to ask who she was, but the woman placed a finger on her lips and whispered, “The roots remember what blood forgets.” And then the earth cracked beneath them. Tamarind roots, thick and pulsing, pushed up through stone and coiled around her ankles. She screamed but no sound came. A voice—ancient, serpent-smooth—entered her mind: “You left me in stone. You will return in flesh.” When she awoke, she found herself lying in the backyard near the tree. Her nails were caked with dirt, and a shallow hole had been dug into the earth—by her own hands. Inside the hole was an object wrapped in red thread. Carefully, with breath caught in her throat, she unwrapped it. A decaying bangle. Brass. Her grandmother’s. She recognized it instantly—the same one her mother said had been buried with Nani when she died. She staggered backward, bile rising in her throat. Something had exhumed it. Or perhaps… she had. And the tree had shown her how.
Later that day, she confronted Shankaranna, the silent elder who always carved sandalwood beneath the banyan. He did not look surprised when she showed him the bangle. “The land never let her leave,” he said softly. “She ran away from the rite before it was done. But trees don’t forget daughters. Especially ones born of oath-breaking.” Madhurima demanded answers. Shankaranna sighed and gestured for her to sit. He told her that long ago, during the Chalukya reign, a serpent priestess known as Nagarani performed rituals that merged memory, soul, and root. Her cult was feared and worshipped in equal parts. When she was betrayed by the king’s men and buried alive inside the oldest tamarind tree, a curse was born: every few generations, a daughter of her bloodline would be called back to complete the circle. Her grandmother had been one such daughter. She fled the village, broke the link—but bloodlines, he said, were not chains easily cut. Madhurima sat still, her fingers pressed into the brass bangle as if it might bite her. “And me?” she asked. Shankaranna did not answer directly. He only looked toward the tamarind and said, “When the roots remember, the ground will open again. And you’ll see what you buried before you were born.” As she walked back, the bangle burned hot in her palm, and the ground beneath her hummed like a drum being beaten from below. That night, she placed the bangle beside her grandmother’s journal and whispered into the silence, “I’m listening.” Outside, the bell on the tamarind tree rang once, without wind. The roots, once still, began to breathe.
5
The days became slower. Heavier. Time in Adiganahalli didn’t tick anymore—it coiled. Madhurima felt it in her skin, in the way her thoughts became dense and difficult to hold, like water slipping through cupped palms. She spent hours staring into the bark fissures of the tamarind tree, convinced she saw movement, an eye here, a flick of shadow there. The bangle sat on her study table, unmoving but somehow always positioned differently than before. She documented everything, though her journal entries had grown fragmented—half thoughts, fading logic. One afternoon, she caught her own reflection in the bathroom mirror and froze. Her eyes looked wrong—not just tired, but older, deeper, like they belonged to someone else. When she blinked, the reflection didn’t. She recoiled. That night, she opened her grandmother’s journal again, and as she turned the pages, her hands began to tremble. In the center fold, newly appeared, was a drawing she hadn’t seen before: a woman standing under a tree, her back turned, with serpents coiling up her spine. Across the bottom, in a new hand, were the words: “The tree sees through her now.” Madhurima slammed the journal shut and turned toward the door—only to find it ajar. She hadn’t left it open.
That evening, Ravi came to check on her. He looked drawn, like he hadn’t slept in days. “The villagers are talking,” he said gently. “They think you’ve awakened it. The bell rang twice last night. That hasn’t happened since your grandmother’s time.” He hesitated before adding, “And some say they’ve seen you… walking at night. But not like you.” Madhurima’s voice was barely audible. “I don’t remember leaving the house.” Ravi reached into his satchel and handed her a folded printout—an ancient scroll translated during a temple excavation in Hampi. It described a ritual called Naag Vismriti—“the Serpent’s Memory.” It involved the transference of ancestral trauma through chosen daughters to preserve “the continuity of loss.” The drawing in the scroll matched the markings on the bangle. “You’re being made a vessel,” he whispered. “For something that remembers pain better than time.” That night, determined to confront whatever held her, she placed the bangle on her wrist. As soon as it clicked shut, her vision blurred. The walls of her cottage shifted—the paint peeled back to reveal stone carvings, the air turned humid and metallic, and in the mirror across the room, she saw her reflection blink slowly… and smile. But her lips hadn’t moved. Her limbs stiffened. Her breath came shallow. The bangle grew hot on her skin. Her reflection stepped forward. “Do you know what you took from me?” it asked, voice slithering through her skull like oil. “Now, you must carry it back.”
What followed was not sleep. It was an unmooring. Madhurima’s mind was dragged into visions not entirely hers: torches flickering inside an underground sanctum, chants echoing off stone walls, and a woman with long black hair weaving through serpents in a temple that pulsed with living roots. The woman wore her face but bore different eyes—eyes filled with vengeance, love, betrayal. The visions came as pulses, each one louder, heavier. Nagarani’s life unfurled inside her—abandonment by her own people, her transformation into a keeper of forbidden knowledge, her burial alive by those afraid of her power. Madhurima woke screaming, clawing at her wrist, trying to remove the bangle. Blood pooled beneath it. Outside, the bell tolled again. Twice. She staggered outside, barefoot, drawn to the tree. Lightning cracked above the forest, though no clouds loomed. The tamarind tree was lit faintly from within, its trunk glowing like a womb about to burst. And there, between two roots, was a hollow that hadn’t been there before—an opening pulsing with breath. She stepped closer and saw, deep inside, a pair of yellow eyes staring back. Not just watching. Recognizing. Nagarani wasn’t just possessing her. She was preparing her. For what—Madhurima still didn’t know. But the tree now pulsed to her heartbeat, and when she turned away from it, the roots moved to follow. That night, a line was crossed—not in blood, not in bark, but in the quiet consent of her soul to be seen by something that never forgot.
6
The following morning arrived with an eerie stillness. The birdsong that usually broke the dawn was absent, replaced by a thick silence that pressed against the cottage walls like fog. Madhurima rose with heavy limbs, as if sleep had thickened her blood. The bangle still clung to her wrist, cool now but stained faintly with dried blood. She dared not remove it, sensing that severing it now would be more than symbolic—it would be defiance. She brewed tea absent-mindedly, her gaze fixed on the tamarind tree that seemed, more than ever, to lean toward the house. The hollow in its trunk, where she had seen those eyes, remained dark now, but its presence pulsed like an organ. Her journal lay open to a page she didn’t remember writing. The words, written in fluid Bengali that wasn’t hers, read: “You were born from flight. Now, return as flame.” She took the journal and marched to Shankaranna’s porch, her breath shallow and shoulders squared. “Tell me everything,” she demanded. The old man didn’t argue. Instead, he lit a small lamp and gestured for her to sit. “Your grandmother was meant to be the vessel. She ran before the final rite—just before the body of Nagarani fully rooted. They called it off. Buried the knowledge. But the curse is like the roots of that tree—it sleeps deep. You, child, are the echo that woke it.” Madhurima clenched her fists. “Why me?” Shankaranna looked at her, and for the first time, sadness crept into his eyes. “Because you carry her name. Because you were born when the bell rang three times. Because you look just like her.” He handed her an old photograph—sepia-toned, curling at the edges. It was of a young woman standing in front of the tamarind tree, her face solemn, her wrists marked with symbols. The woman was her grandmother. The child in her arms wore a brass bangle. That child was Madhurima.
The day passed in flashes. Kamala visited and offered her silence—just a knowing look and a bundle of herbs she refused to name. Ravi stopped by, worry carved deep in his brow. “You need to leave,” he said quietly, gripping her hands. “I can take you tonight. I’ll arrange a jeep. You don’t owe this place your life.” Madhurima almost agreed. Her bones ached with fear. But something older than fear held her back. She walked back into her grandmother’s house and opened a floor panel beneath the kitchen table—a spot her dreams had shown her. Beneath the floor lay a small wooden box, lacquered and sealed with dried tamarind leaves. Inside, she found items that made her skin crawl: a blood-soaked thread, a crumbling parchment with serpent sigils, and a piece of fabric torn from her grandmother’s wedding sari, folded around what looked like a molted snake’s skin. The parchment detailed a ritual—half in Sanskrit, half in an older script. It spoke of the Vansha Bandhan—the Blood Binding. A rite to complete the serpent’s memory through rebirth. It required three elements: remembrance, vessel, and witness. “The vessel has returned,” the parchment read. “The witness sleeps beneath the earth.” That night, she sat on her veranda and watched the stars fade. The air grew thick. The forest began to move—slowly, subtly, as though inhaling. And just as she was about to retreat inside, she heard it. A hissing voice, not from outside, but within her: “Blood does not forget what the mind buries. You are mine, born of broken vows.”
Sleep abandoned her. Or perhaps she abandoned sleep. She found herself pacing around the tree, barefoot, eyes wide, whispering incantations she didn’t know she knew. The tree responded—its roots shuddered, its branches leaned toward her like arms. She placed the brass bangle on the stone circle and watched it absorb into the soil. Her vision blurred. And then the memories returned—not hers, but ancestral. She saw her grandmother as a girl, weeping at the edge of a temple altar, forced to drink tamarind water laced with serpent blood. She saw the old rites, the priestesses, the betrayal of Nagarani by jealous temple scholars. She saw the night her mother fled the village, holding baby Madhurima, as the bell rang thrice and the tree howled in grief. All of it crashed into her like waves—overwhelming, undeniable. She fell to her knees and screamed—not in fear, but in fury. She had never chosen this, and yet the curse had chosen her. The tree responded by shedding leaves in a spiral, forming a perfect circle around her. In the center, the ground cracked slightly, and from it rose a hand—skeletal, adorned with a serpent ring. A whisper came from the earth: “Finish what she ran from. Or bury yourself beside her.” The ritual had begun. Whether she wanted it or not.
7
Rain began without clouds. Not a drizzle, not thunder—but a thick, silent downpour that soaked the earth like an old curse bleeding through fabric. Madhurima sat in the center of the tamarind grove, her hair plastered to her skull, her eyes unfocused. The hand that had risen the night before had vanished by morning, but the soil where it had reached remained disturbed—dark, soft, exhaling something old. The village was silent. Even Ravi didn’t come. She hadn’t seen Kamala or Shankaranna either. The bell hadn’t rung. It was as though the land itself was waiting for her next move. She knew now what had to be done. The Vansha Bandhan ritual was never completed. Her grandmother had fled after the first two phases—invocation and embodiment—but before the final offering: the sacrifice. That offering was meant to feed Nagarani’s spirit with remembrance so she could root herself into the body of her descendant. But when the sacrifice was denied, Nagarani went dormant. Restless. Furious. “She waited in the tree,” Madhurima whispered, her voice shaking. “Waited for the next daughter.” She returned to the hidden box beneath the floorboards. She hadn’t noticed it before, but tucked inside the parchment was a sealed envelope addressed to her. It was her grandmother’s handwriting—shaky, ink-smudged. The letter read: “If you are reading this, it means I have failed, and you have returned. I could not complete the rite. I tried to destroy the roots. I poisoned the earth with salt. I ran. But Nagarani does not forget. She called to your mother, but your mother resisted. Now it is you.” The letter ended with a single line scratched over and over: “Do not give her what she asks. The tree lies.”
The revelation shook her. Could it be possible that Nagarani was not a goddess, not a guardian, but something else—something ancient and parasitic, born not of devotion but vengeance? The village stories had always painted her in mystery, half-revered and half-feared. But her grandmother had tried to end the line, not preserve it. And yet… the tamarind tree had shown her visions. Faces. Voices. Memories. They felt real. Felt like her own. Was that illusion—or inheritance? The confusion split her spirit. That evening, she walked toward the temple ruins at the forest’s edge—led by dreams, not maps. The shrine, half-swallowed by vines and moss, still bore the serpent carvings and broken altars. She walked slowly, sensing the tremor of old rites in the soil beneath her feet. At the center stood a stone basin, blackened by ash and rust. As she approached, a sudden sound stopped her. A faint crying. A child’s. Echoing from deep inside the sanctum’s pit. Her heart pounded. She followed the sound, descending into the cracked floor until she reached a sealed chamber, its doorway blocked by a slab. Without understanding why, she pressed her palm to the stone. It shifted with surprising ease. The chamber inside was narrow and dark, walls marked with claw scratches, the floor etched with binding symbols. In the far corner sat a skeleton, draped in decayed red cloth. Around its neck was a pendant she recognized—her grandmother’s. Her knees buckled. But before she could grieve, the air turned sharp. From the wall behind the bones, a second skeleton leaned forward—a child’s. Its hand reached out toward the larger one, frozen in stone. Something had been buried alive. Something that had tried to escape.
Madhurima staggered back into the open air. The rain had stopped. The bell rang once—faint, then again, louder. The tree had awakened. Back at the grove, the ground around the tamarind was splitting in lines like cracked clay. From those cracks rose fragments of cloth, bangles, even broken toys—offerings from other lives, buried generations ago. She fell to her knees, pressing her hands into the dirt, whispering, “What do you want?” The answer did not come in words but in feeling: hunger. The curse did not demand worship. It demanded continuity. The vessel had to willingly offer something of love—blood, memory, flesh. Only then could Nagarani take root again. But what if she refused? What if she chose a different path? Her mind reeled. Her grandmother had run. Her mother had suppressed. But Madhurima… she was both witness and vessel now. She stood and declared to the tree, “You will not use me to return. I carry the wound, not the knife.” The bell rang again. Then silence. But the wind picked up violently, swirling the leaves into a spiral. In the center, a single object lay: her grandmother’s anklet—once thought lost, now gleaming as if freshly worn. Her fingers touched it, and a voice hissed in her skull: “Then bleed what she could not.” That night, in the mirror, she saw her own reflection again—smiling faintly, eyes serpent-yellow. The offering had failed once. But Nagarani would not wait forever.
8
The village was different when she stepped out the next morning. It wasn’t in ruins, but it didn’t breathe either. There were no voices, no footsteps, no birdsong. A dreamlike hush coated everything, like the village had been sealed in amber. Madhurima walked its streets and saw that the people were there—but they weren’t moving. Kamala stood outside her hut, a basket of herbs in hand, eyes open but vacant. Shankaranna sat frozen mid-sandalwood carving, his fingers suspended in air. Even Ravi, standing beneath the banyan tree, didn’t blink when she whispered his name. “They’re watching through them,” she said aloud, though to whom she wasn’t sure. The village had become a waiting room for something vast and ancient. She turned and walked back to the grove. The tree stood taller than before, its leaves darker, denser, as if nourished by centuries of breath. The roots had pushed further out overnight, forming visible spirals around the circle of stone. At the center, the ground pulsed—slowly, like the rise and fall of a sleeping chest. When she stepped into the spiral, the air shifted. The bells overhead chimed once, then again. A third time. And in that moment, the ground beneath her gave way.
She didn’t fall far. Only enough to land in the cradle of a chamber that felt like it had been carved before memory. The space was circular, dimly lit by an unseen glow. The walls pulsed with ancient sigils—moving, breathing. At the center stood a stone basin shaped like an open mouth. Around it lay relics of the past—bracelets, bindis, shrouds, rusted blades. She stepped toward it, compelled, not by fear anymore, but by inevitability. The voice came again, but not from outside—it rose from her blood: “Complete it, and I will sleep again. Deny me, and I will feed until I find another.” Madhurima stood trembling. Her hands moved to the brass bangle she had tried to remove before, now glowing faintly. She understood then: she wasn’t meant to end the curse by escaping it—she was meant to rewrite it. To interrupt it. To become not the offering, but the wall that stops the serpent’s return. She took the anklet—the one left by the roots—and dropped it into the basin. The walls shrieked. Her skin stung with a thousand pinpricks as the chamber trembled. The tree above groaned, roots straining like veins beneath skin. “You reject blood?” the voice hissed. “You end the song of daughters?” “No,” Madhurima said calmly, “I am singing a new one.” She reached into her pocket and took out a vial—inside it, a mixture she’d prepared from the soil she’d tested days ago, laced with salt, sacred grass, and dried turmeric. She poured it over the basin. The chamber howled.
The sigils dimmed. The voice roared—first in fury, then in sorrow. The roots above withdrew, and with them, the bell broke free, crashing to the earth. Madhurima climbed out of the hollow as the tree convulsed, bark cracking, leaves falling in torrents. With a final shudder, the tamarind tree stilled. It didn’t fall, but its glow faded. The ground closed gently over the hollow. The spiral of roots retreated. The curse had not been erased—but it had been interrupted. At great cost. As she stumbled back toward the village, the people began to move again, slowly, as if waking from deep sleep. Ravi ran to her, confused and breathless. “Where were you? You vanished!” She looked at him with new eyes. “I went back. But I didn’t let her return.” Kamala approached, her expression unreadable. “Then you’ve broken it?” Madhurima shook her head. “No. But I’ve told it: not this time.” That night, she sat on her veranda, watching the wind play with fallen leaves. The tree was still standing—but no longer hungry. Its roots now remembered something new: a daughter who chose not to run, not to serve, but to stand. And for the first time since she arrived, the tamarind grove slept in silence.
9
The village resumed life—but not as before. The air felt lighter, yes, but also thinner, as if a vital part of Adiganahalli had been severed. No one spoke of the tree anymore. Ravi walked with her often, silently, never asking what had truly happened that night. Kamala kept her distance, as though unsure whether Madhurima had returned entirely human. The tamarind tree stood, barren now, stripped of its hunger, yet strangely dignified in defeat. Its bark bore the marks of something removed, like skin that had forgotten how to grow back. Madhurima, too, bore the signs—her dreams no longer belonged solely to her. She saw fragments of old rites, of women who had come before, of children buried in the wrong soil. Most nights, she woke gasping, fingers clutching her pillow like a rope from the past. One morning, she found a small brass bell on her doorstep, identical to the one that had fallen from the tree—but this one bore an inscription on its inside lip: “আবার ডাকবে—It will call again.” The message chilled her. Had she silenced the curse, or only sent it deeper into sleep?
Determined to understand, she began to trace the history of the curse itself. She visited the nearby town’s archival museum, where her grandmother had once worked. There, hidden in a brittle file marked “Pre-Chalukyan Folk Rites,” she discovered an inked manuscript that had never been digitized. It described a forest ritual of the Naag Jaagran—a serpent-awakening practice said to have been outlawed by kings for invoking entities that could alter bloodlines through memory rather than birth. The manuscript mentioned a sacred tree—“the tamarind that bleeds”—and a woman known only as “the second mouth,” whose role was not to worship but to remember in silence, to serve as the bell that rang when no one was watching. Madhurima’s breath caught. She had rung that bell, not through metal, but through defiance. Her voice had echoed backward through centuries of silence. The manuscript warned of a final price: “Should the vessel survive but not surrender, she will carry the echo until another hears.” That night, she dreamt of a girl in a modern school uniform, sitting under a tree in another village, hearing her name whispered in the wind. When the girl looked up, her eyes were the same pale yellow Madhurima once saw in the mirror. The echo travels.
The next evening, while preparing to leave the village, Madhurima walked one final time to the grove. She knelt at the edge of the stone circle—not in worship, but recognition. The tree was still. She placed the bell at its base, without attachment. As she turned to go, the wind stirred gently. The bell did not ring. But as she crossed the threshold of the grove’s boundary, she heard something else—a slow, rhythmic breath, like lungs remembering how to inhale. It didn’t frighten her. It saddened her. Because she knew now: the curse had never been personal. It was pattern. Memory passed not in hate, but in unfinished story. She had not ended it. She had only rewritten one chapter. And somewhere, someday, the bell would ring again—not to punish, but to remind. As she boarded the jeep with Ravi and looked back, a single tamarind leaf landed on her shoulder. She didn’t brush it away. She tucked it inside her grandmother’s journal. And when she closed her eyes, the voice came again—not Nagarani’s, but her own, across time, whispering: “Remember me gently. And let the tree sleep.”
10
Months passed. Adiganahalli fell back into rhythm, as it always did. Monsoons came and left their scent in the earth, mangoes ripened, weddings filled the temple grounds with songs. Outsiders stopped asking questions, and the tamarind grove once again became just another place for shade and children’s dares. But for Madhurima, the silence was never complete. She had returned to Kolkata, to a modest teaching post at a botany college, yet the air in her apartment always smelled faintly of soil after dusk. She had told no one the full truth—not Ravi, not Kamala, not even the university archivists who pored over her field reports with fascination. Her dreams had shifted; not horrifying, but strangely instructional. She saw images of rituals altered, rewritten. In one dream, a child placed a bell into a bowl of turmeric and buried it laughing. In another, a young woman planted a tamarind sapling in sand—and it didn’t bleed. She had changed something fundamental. Not eradicated, no. But diverted. And though she didn’t admit it aloud, she still woke at 8:17 PM every evening without fail, breath held, waiting for that sound—the one the tree had once made when it remembered her name.
She kept the journal. The bell remained wrapped in red cloth, sealed inside an iron box. Occasionally, she would take it out and turn it over in her palm. It never rang. But it always felt warm. On the night of her 33rd birthday—the age her grandmother had been during the failed rite—Madhurima lit a lamp beside a small potted tamarind plant on her balcony and whispered, “Sleep easy.” For the first time in years, she slept without dreams. The next day, she found a letter slipped under her door. It was unsigned. Inside was a photograph, old and slightly blurred, showing a group of young girls at a village school. In the background, under a tree that was unmistakably the Adiganahalli tamarind, one girl stood slightly apart. Her eyes were pale, watching the camera directly. On the back of the photo were three words: “She has heard.” Madhurima’s hands trembled as she held it. She folded the photo gently, placed it inside her grandmother’s journal, and did not speak of it again. But that night, she took the iron box, walked to the Hooghly’s edge, and released the bell into the river, wrapped in cloth, as her grandmother once had. It sank with barely a ripple. But as she turned away, the air grew very still. No wind. Just the rustle of leaves from a tamarind tree that had never been planted there.
And so, the curse was not broken. Not truly. But it was changed. Bent into a shape that could be carried, not just feared. In the village, the tamarind tree stood quiet, but now its roots reached not for vengeance—but memory. A different kind of offering. In time, it became a tree of stories, of warnings, of whispered inheritance. Girls no longer feared it. Some even tied red threads to its trunk in prayer. And once, just once, during a school play near the grove, a small child swore she heard a woman laugh softly from the hollow of the tree. When asked what the laugh had said, the girl replied, “She said… not yet.” Somewhere in Kolkata, Madhurima continued her quiet life. But once every year, on the night of the serpent moon, she lit two lamps: one for herself, and one for Nagarani—the woman beneath the roots, the goddess who was not a goddess, the echo who became a warning. And above the tree in Adiganahalli, the copper bell—now cracked but hanging—sometimes swayed in windless air. It never rang. Not loudly. But if you stood close enough, and still enough, you might hear it whisper:
“Some trees don’t forget. They just wait.”
The End
