The train jerked to a halt at a nameless station nestled between dense sal groves and silent hills. Ananya Sinha stepped down cautiously, dragging her suitcase over the uneven platform. The dusty signboard above her head read, barely legibly: Kandara Halt. The air smelled of wet earth, turmeric, and smoke — familiar yet strange.
She glanced at her phone. No signal. Typical.
A rusted jeep waited near the exit, just as the letter from Kandara Panchayat Samiti had described. Painted in faded green, it bore the name: “Kandara Gramin Vikas Kendra.” The driver, a leathery man with sunken eyes and a thick Odia accent, nodded wordlessly and gestured for her to get in.
As the vehicle rattled through mud paths and swaying bamboo, Ananya’s mind buzzed with excitement and unease. A research fellowship from Delhi University had landed her in this remote corner of Odisha — one month to study “oral narratives and folklore in tribal regions.” But what truly intrigued her was the village’s infamous secret: the whispering banyan.
The tree, according to obscure local blogs and one cryptic academic paper, was said to “murmur the names of the dead.” A tale too outlandish for most scholars, but too fascinating for someone like Ananya to ignore.
The sun was beginning to dip behind the forest as they reached Kandara village — a scatter of thatched huts, mud houses, and one ancient temple overgrown with moss. Eyes peered at her from behind windows and cow sheds. A woman crossed herself in some local gesture the moment Ananya stepped out. Children stopped playing and scampered inside. An old man near a hand pump muttered something under his breath and turned away.
Ananya wasn’t unused to rural India. But this wasn’t mere curiosity. This was fear.
She was led to a small, sparse guest room next to the Panchayat office. That night, as she unpacked her camera, recorder, and notebooks, the village fell into an eerie silence. No television. No temple bells. Not even crickets.
Then, a knock.
She opened the door to find an old woman in a faded red saree. Thin as a reed, eyes milky with cataract.
“You the tree-writer girl?” she asked in Hindi mixed with Odia.
Ananya nodded. “Yes. I’ve come to study the local stories. About the banyan.”
The woman didn’t enter. “They say the tree eats your name,” she said slowly. “Once it whispers it, you’re no longer yours. You belong to it.”
Ananya blinked. “What do you mean by that?”
The woman leaned closer. “You’ll see. Just don’t go near the tree during Amaavasya.”
And without another word, she turned and vanished into the night.
Ananya woke early and wandered the village with her camera. Most people ignored her. A few women shyly offered her rice water and salt. But whenever she asked about the banyan, voices dropped. Some pretended not to hear. Others warned her to stay away.
She finally found someone willing to talk — a schoolteacher named Samar Nayak, who invited her to sit beneath a neem tree near the school.
“You want stories?” he asked, pouring her chai. “We have plenty. Ghost brides. Talking jackals. Possessed wells. But the banyan… that’s not a story. It’s something else.”
Ananya leaned in, notebook ready.
“They say during the famine of 1866, many died under that tree. Mothers hanged their children first before taking their own lives. A wandering sadhu tried to bless the tree… he too died with a scream and his eyes open.”
Ananya scribbled furiously.
“But the real horror,” he whispered, “isn’t death. It’s that the tree speaks. It calls out names. People hear it in their dreams. Or while walking alone. And the ones whose names it calls… disappear.”
“Disappear?” she asked. “You mean they die?”
He shrugged. “Some vanish. Some go mad. Some are found wandering naked in the forest. One boy scratched his own name off every wall before jumping into a well. We don’t speak of it anymore.”
A cold breeze stirred the leaves.
Ananya looked towards the direction Samar pointed.
Far beyond the village, where the land turned swampy and trees grew tangled, stood the banyan. Barely visible through the mist, it looked massive — its roots like claws, branches drooping like broken arms. Even from here, it exuded menace.
She snapped a photo with her zoom lens.
“Don’t go alone,” Samar warned.
“I won’t,” she lied.
Back at her room, Ananya reviewed her notes and transferred photos to her laptop. One shot of the banyan looked odd. A faint, almost human shape near the trunk. She zoomed in. Just a shadow. Probably a trick of the light.
Still, her stomach churned.
She tried to sleep early, but the silence returned. Heavier tonight.
Around midnight, a soft rustle woke her.
Then a whisper.
Faint, like a sighing breath through leaves.
“…Ananya…”
She sat up straight, her heart hammering.
Was it the wind?
She stepped to the window. Nothing moved.
But the whisper came again.
This time clearer.
“…Ananya…”
Her name.
***
The next morning, Ananya woke to the distant sound of temple bells and the clatter of aluminum buckets near the hand pump. Birds chirped, dogs barked, and for a moment, it felt like the world had returned to normal.
Except it hadn’t.
The whisper from the night before still echoed in her ears. Her name, carried on the wind, soft and cold as fog.
She dismissed it as a dream. Maybe she’d imagined it. Sleep paralysis? Or stress? She’d read about researchers in isolation experiencing auditory hallucinations.
Still, her breath caught as she passed the window and saw the banyan in the distance, its thick branches unmoving despite the breeze.
A few hours later, she visited Samar Nayak again at the village school. The children had gathered under a mango tree for lessons, scribbling in old exercise books as he read aloud.
“Sleep well last night?” he asked with a knowing smile.
“Barely,” she muttered.
She considered telling him about the whisper. But something inside her hesitated. She didn’t want to sound foolish — not yet.
Instead, she changed the subject.
“Can you take me to the banyan? Just once. During the day.”
His smile vanished. “I wouldn’t go there even in daylight.”
“But I’m documenting folklore. I can’t write about something I haven’t seen.”
Samar paused. Then he exhaled. “There’s someone who can take you. But he won’t talk much. And you should never stray from his side.”
By afternoon, Ananya found herself following a barefoot man with long matted hair and a silent gait. His name was Gajanan, the village’s so-called “Tree Keeper”. A man who, according to Samar, had lived in Kandara his entire life but spoke to almost no one.
He carried a bundle of dried neem twigs and a slingshot for scaring off snakes. His eyes were pale brown, almost amber, and they never blinked for long.
The path to the banyan took them deep into the jungle, far beyond the grazing grounds. The underbrush thickened, vines curled like fingers, and the air grew musty.
And then — they arrived.
The banyan stood like a fortress. Ancient, monstrous. Its roots hung like ropes, some as thick as a man’s waist. The trunk was gnarled, with hollows deep enough to hide a person. Its shadow covered the forest floor like a stain.
Ananya raised her camera.
“No.” Gajanan’s voice was hoarse but firm.
“Why not?”
“The tree remembers faces. It forgets none.”
She lowered her lens.
“I just want to record it.”
He shook his head. “Recording is also remembering.”
She took out her notebook instead and began sketching.
There were markings on the tree — carvings in a language she couldn’t decipher. Circles. Spirals. Shapes like eyes.
“Who made these?”
Gajanan didn’t answer.
Instead, he bent down, scattered the neem twigs in a circle around her feet, and muttered something that sounded like a chant.
“Stay inside the circle,” he said.
She nodded, suddenly unsure of herself.
For twenty minutes, she observed the tree — took notes on its structure, the temperature drop around it, the complete absence of birdsong near its roots.
Then, from the corner of her eye, she saw movement.
A child.
A small boy, maybe six or seven, standing at the far end of the clearing. No shirt, dark shorts. He didn’t belong to her party.
“Hello?” she called out, stepping slightly forward.
The boy didn’t respond.
She moved toward him.
Gajanan grabbed her arm with surprising strength. “No.”
“But it’s a child—”
“There is no child.”
She looked again.
The boy was gone.
There had been no sound of running, no broken leaves, no footprints.
Her skin crawled.
“Time to go,” Gajanan said.
She didn’t argue.
Back in the village, shaken and silent, Ananya returned to the Panchayat guest house. As she poured herself water from the brass lota, a young man stood waiting near the gate.
He wore a white shirt and glasses, and looked more modern than most villagers.
“Are you the researcher?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I’m Naresh. I used to live here. My uncle says you’re writing about the banyan.”
She hesitated. “That’s right.”
“I need to tell you something. Can we walk?”
They strolled toward the edge of the village, near the turmeric fields. Naresh lit a bidi and spoke slowly.
“My cousin Sanjay disappeared two years ago. We were playing hide and seek one evening. He went near the banyan. Just the edge. And then—gone.”
“No one saw anything?”
“No. The next morning, someone found his slipper… tangled in a root.”
Ananya shivered. “Did you report it?”
“To whom?” he laughed bitterly. “The police come here once a year. The villagers said the tree ‘took him’. My uncle said the tree called his name three nights in a row.”
Ananya stopped walking.
“That’s what it does, doesn’t it?” she said. “It whispers.”
Naresh looked at her sharply. “You heard it too.”
She didn’t answer.
“I hear it sometimes,” he continued. “In my dreams. The same voice. Always soft. Always saying one name. Not mine.”
“What name?”
Naresh’s face turned pale.
“Yours.”
Ananya couldn’t sleep. She lay in bed, the lantern flickering shadows across the mud walls. Her camera sat on the desk beside her — unused. The sketches from earlier now looked like runes.
She forced herself to write, to document everything — the child at the tree, the warning from Gajanan, the name whispered in Naresh’s dream.
Just as she dipped the pen again into her ink pot, the wind rose.
Leaves rustled outside. The windows creaked.
And then —
“…Ananya…”
Clearer than ever before.
Not from the forest.
Not from the wind.
From inside the room.
She turned slowly.
A shadow stood in the corner, just beside the lantern’s light.
Small.
Like a child.
It raised its arm slowly.
Pointed at her.
And whispered, barely audible:
“One night left.”
***
Ananya barely slept that night.
When morning came, she found her notebook open on the desk, pages flapping in the breeze — except there was no breeze. A faint smell of damp earth clung to her bedsheets. Stranger still, her ink pen was resting in her hand, though she had no memory of picking it up.
She ran to the bathroom and splashed her face with cold water.
One night left.
That’s what the boy-shadow had said.
Was it a hallucination? A dream? Or had she truly seen something that didn’t belong to the waking world?
She had come here for folklore, but folklore was supposed to be stories — echoes of the past. This felt dangerously alive.
Later that morning, she called a meeting at the Panchayat office. Only three villagers showed up: Gajanan, the silent tree keeper; Samar Nayak, the schoolteacher; and the old woman who had warned her on the first day — Sulochana Dasi.
“I need the truth,” Ananya began. “Not folk tales. Not warnings. I need to know what happened here.”
Samar glanced at the others, then nodded. “You’re owed that much.”
He placed a dusty file on the table — old, yellowed, and tied with black thread.
“What is this?”
“The last survey done in Kandara. 1982. Anthropological Department of Odisha. A team of five researchers came to record tribal folklore. They stayed for twelve days.”
“And?”
“On the thirteenth day, three of them vanished.”
Ananya’s blood ran cold.
“No traces. No footprints. Their belongings were still in the hut. The remaining two were found wandering near the swamp. One was speaking in tongues. The other… had carved spirals into his own arms.”
“Dear god…”
“The report was sealed. Declared inconclusive. No one from the department came again.”
“And the banyan?”
Sulochana spoke up. “The tree has memory. It does not forget faces once seen. It knows who you are. It chooses.”
Gajanan nodded. “The whispers are names. The names of those it has marked. Once your name is heard three times…”
“You’re taken,” Ananya finished, her voice barely above a whisper.
She stood up, heart pounding. “I heard it twice. Once near the window. Once in my room.”
Samar leaned forward. “Then tonight is your last chance.”
“To do what?”
“To break it. Or leave before it calls again.”
Samar handed her another paper — brittle and handwritten.
“Years ago, a sadhu tried to cleanse the banyan. He was the first to call it by its real name — Bhu-Rakshaka, the Earth Guardian turned vengeful. He said the tree had been fed too much pain. That the souls it swallowed gave it power.”
Ananya scanned the note. There was a ritual described — a reverse binding — one that needed fire, salt, and blood.
“No one has ever dared try,” Samar said. “It demands an offering.”
“What kind?”
Gajanan looked up for the first time.
“Yours.”
That afternoon, Ananya sat alone on the schoolhouse steps, weighing her choices. She could leave — take the next train and never return. Forget the banyan. Forget the whispers.
But her heart refused.
She was not just a researcher now. She was part of the story. And if she ran, it would chase her. Like it did the others.
She returned to her room and packed a bag — salt, matches, camphor, a small knife.
Then she wrote a letter. A simple one, addressed to her sister back in Kolkata.
“If anything happens to me, tell them I wasn’t mad. Tell them the tree remembers.”
That night, the moon was a thin white scratch across the sky.
She lit three camphor tablets in a tin plate and stepped toward the path leading to the banyan. Gajanan waited there silently, holding a bundle of twigs and a torch. He wouldn’t come all the way, but he’d guide her halfway.
As they approached the banyan’s clearing, the silence returned — thick, pressing, complete. Even the crickets had fled.
He stopped near a broken milestone and handed her the torch. “Circle yourself with salt. Stand still. Speak the tree’s name.”
“Bhu-Rakshaka?”
He nodded once.
She stepped into the clearing.
The banyan looked larger now. Its branches moved slightly, though the air was still. Roots shifted like sleeping serpents.
She circled herself with salt. Lit the torch.
Then she said it.
“Bhu-Rakshaka.”
And waited.
The temperature dropped. Her breath fogged. The leaves rustled with intent.
Then—
“…Ananya…”
The final whisper.
It wasn’t from the forest. Not from the wind.
It came from the roots.
And then the earth beneath her feet began to tremble.
***
The ground quivered beneath Ananya’s feet like the heartbeat of some buried beast. Her torch flickered violently, casting spasms of shadow across the banyan’s enormous trunk. Roots coiled and shifted, pushing up through the earth, slow and deliberate — like fingers trying to rise from a grave.
She clutched the matchbox tighter. Around her, the salt circle had begun to thin — the grains sucked into the soil as if the earth itself hungered for her presence.
“Bhu-Rakshaka!” she called again, louder this time.
The whisper came in return.
“Ananya…”
But now it came from multiple directions — the tree, the soil, the canopy above, the hollow between the roots. Each one echoed her name like a forgotten lullaby.
You are marked.
She knelt quickly, sliced her fingertip with the ritual knife, and let three drops of blood fall onto the root closest to her.
The reaction was instant.
The tree shuddered.
Branches twisted. Leaves rained down, not green but blackened. One of the roots hissed as the blood soaked into it — and a terrible cry escaped the trunk. Not the wind. Not an animal.
A human scream — deep, ragged, and agonized.
Ananya stumbled backward. The fire on the torch blazed high. Then—
She saw them.
Emerging from the shadows between the roots were faces — eyes wide and skin pale, as if drained of life. Dozens of them. Children. Men. Women. Villagers. Strangers. Researchers.
One of them was a boy.
The same boy she had seen on Day One.
His mouth opened, but no words came out. Instead, a long, breathless wail filled the air, stretching impossibly.
Ananya stood frozen as ghostly arms reached toward her, grasping at the salt line — which sparked with invisible energy. The barrier held.
Then, from the depths of the tree, a shape began to emerge.
Not a person.
Not a creature.
Something in between.
It was tall, but hunched. Draped in bark and vines. Its face was bark, its eyes two knots of sap that glowed with a terrible light. Its arms were not arms, but branches, curling and cracking. It had a mouth — split across the trunk like a festering wound — and from it spilled a chorus of whispers:
“Leave… Or Offer… Leave… Or Stay…”
It was Bhu-Rakshaka.
Ananya’s heart pounded in her chest like thunder.
“I’ve come to break this,” she whispered.
“Then give… give…”
The air pressed down upon her, heavy and wet. Her lungs burned. Her blood screamed.
“What do you want?”
“Memory. Yours. In exchange for theirs.”
The spirits around her moaned. Hands reached out. Begging. Pleading. One by one, the ghostly images of the missing villagers turned to her — their eyes hollow, their mouths opening in silent screams.
She realized with dawning horror: they were trapped in the tree’s memory. Preserved. Imprisoned. Endlessly relived.
The tree didn’t just kill. It remembered forever.
And now, it wanted her memories — all of them.
Her childhood. Her mother’s laughter. Her sister’s wedding. Her first kiss. Her college days. Her identity.
To set the others free, she would have to become forgotten.
Not dead.
But lost.
She dropped to her knees.
Lit the camphor.
Sprinkled the last of the salt in a spiral around her.
And began to chant the sadhu’s curse in broken Sanskrit, tears running down her cheeks.
The spirits wailed louder.
The banyan twisted violently, shedding bark and sap in sticky torrents. The wind howled in reverse — drawing inward, sucking her voice, her warmth, her memories…
And then —
It stopped.
Everything stilled.
She opened her eyes.
The banyan stood silent.
Its branches now bare.
The roots had receded.
The spirits — all gone.
Even Bhu-Rakshaka had vanished.
Ananya was found by Gajanan at dawn, unconscious at the base of the tree. He carried her back to the village in silence.
She woke three days later in the schoolhouse, under Samar’s care.
“Do you remember?” he asked softly.
She blinked. “Remember what?”
He didn’t answer.
She remembered her name.
She remembered her mission.
But she couldn’t remember where she was from.
What her sister looked like.
Her childhood.
Her city.
It was all… gone.
As promised.
But in Kandara, the banyan tree stood still. Withered. Quiet.
No more whispers.
For now.
Months later, a visitor arrived at Kandara — a young girl with a DSLR camera and a curious mind.
She was told there was someone in the village who knew all the stories.
A woman who lived in a mud-brick house near the old school. A woman with a blank past but eyes full of knowledge.
They called her Didi.
She welcomed the girl with warm tea and a quiet smile.
“Are you the historian?” the girl asked.
“No,” Ananya replied softly. “I’m just someone the tree forgot to forget.”
And from far behind them, deep in the forest, the dead branches of the banyan rustled… just once.
***
The villagers said the forest had changed.
Birds returned. The fog cleared. Children played near the edge of the banyan grove once again — though never too close.
The once-whispering banyan tree stood still, skeletal, and eerily silent. No more voices. No shadows crawling behind the branches. No missing people.
It seemed the curse had lifted.
Yet deep in the soil, where roots wound like nerves and bones, something still pulsed.
Something watched.
Ananya’s New Life
Ananya, or the woman now known only as Didi, had become part of Kandara.
She no longer remembered her past. Not fully. Fragments came to her in dreams — a girl in a yellow dress, a typewriter, a rain-soaked platform. But they vanished by morning like dew.
She didn’t mind. Life here was simple. She taught children in the schoolhouse. Drew folk stories on the blackboard. Wrote with charcoal when pens ran dry.
The villagers respected her. Trusted her.
Feared her, a little.
Because the tree never whispered her name again.
But some nights, when the wind howled too long, or when lightning split the horizon, she would feel a tug — a pull from beneath — as though something old had her scent, her signature, even if it had let her go.
The Documentarian
One day, a documentary team from Bhubaneswar arrived.
They had heard rumors — about missing people, about rituals and haunted groves. An intern named Pritam, eager and skeptical, knocked on Ananya’s door with a microphone in hand.
“Didi,” he said politely, “they say you were part of what happened. That you saw the tree… awake.”
Ananya gave him tea.
And silence.
He pressed further. “Did it speak to you? Is it true you banished a demon?”
She smiled. “It wasn’t a demon. It was a memory. Starved, then overfed.”
Pritam blinked. “That doesn’t make sense.”
She tapped her temple. “Neither does memory. It’s a trick of roots. It grows underground. Quiet. Until it wants out.”
They laughed it off.
But when Pritam returned to his tent that night, he found strange drawings on his camera’s SD card — spirals, eyes, hands reaching up from tree trunks.
He swore he hadn’t filmed them.
A week later, two goats vanished near the old banyan. Their bloodied collars were found beside the dried roots.
Then a woodcutter fell ill — his speech slurring, his eyes twitching. He muttered in a strange dialect no one understood.
Ananya sat by his bed.
When she touched his wrist, he gasped — and whispered something only she could hear:
“It remembers you.”
She stumbled back.
The curse had never been lifted.
Only paused.
Like breath held before a scream.
The banyan no longer whispered names.
It whispered numbers.
Dates. Coordinates. Names not from the village, but from beyond.
Tourists.
Photographers.
Academics.
And one by one, those who tried to document the tree — who tried to explain it, label it, package it for media — began to suffer.
Their footage corrupted. Their audio files played reversed whispers. One researcher woke up to find banyan leaves in her hotel bed — even though she was 80 kilometers away from Kandara.
The tree had grown smarter.
It had learned.
Not every root grows downward.
Some crawl sideways.
Some go looking.
One night, Samar found a sealed envelope on his doorstep.
It was from Ananya.
Inside was a single line, hand-written in trembling ink:
“The tree doesn’t trap memories anymore. It plants them.”
He rushed to her house.
She was gone.
No note. No bags. No footprints.
Only a small circle of salt on her cot, and a diary filled with stories that no longer had endings.
Gajanan, now an old man, returned once more to the banyan clearing.
He found the roots regrown.
Thicker. Deeper.
And in the center of the tree trunk, a new knot had appeared — twisted and fresh.
It looked like a face.
A familiar one.
Eyes closed.
Mouth just starting to open.
At a busy publishing house in Park Street, a manuscript arrived without sender details.
Its title?
The Whispering Banyan
It was over 400 pages. Full of village legends, rituals, transcripts of lost surveys. Real names. GPS coordinates. Photos that had no metadata.
The editor, intrigued, began to read.
That night, he heard something from his apartment balcony.
A breeze, though the windows were shut.
A voice.
Not loud.
Not angry.
Just… curious.
It said:
“Hello…?”
Then, softly:
“Do you remember me?”
The End
