Priyanka Banerjee
1
The newsroom was always a chaotic orchestra — ringing phones, furious typing, coffee-fueled conversations bouncing off walls lined with award certificates and framed newspaper clippings. But Aparna Banerjee thrived in this cacophony. She sat at her desk near the window, where the Kolkata rain tapped like a Morse code from the skies, sipping lukewarm black coffee and scanning through online news alerts.
She had a reputation — relentless, articulate, and unafraid. Whether it was child trafficking in Murshidabad or illegal sand mining in Birbhum, Aparna dove in headfirst. Her writing had teeth, and her fearlessness was her armor. She wasn’t one to flinch at superstitions or rural ghost stories. So when her editor, Rajiv Dutta, summoned her for a “sensitive” assignment involving tribal land conflict and a so-called haunted forest, she rolled her eyes before she even reached his cabin.
“Dandak Forest, Bastar district. You’ve heard of it?” Rajiv asked without looking up.
“Isn’t that the one with all the ghost stories? Van Devta and tribal curses? Yes, I’ve read the usual sensationalist bits. What’s the real story?” she asked, crossing her arms.
Rajiv leaned back, locking his fingers behind his head. “A tribal uprising has halted mining operations. Local villagers claim the forest is sacred and killing it brings death. But here’s the twist — two government officials have vanished in the last six months. The latest is Rakesh Batra, a forest officer. He was last seen entering the forest boundary. No trace since.”
Aparna’s journalistic instinct kicked in. “And the authorities?”
“Stonewalling. And the villagers won’t talk to any outsider — except one woman. A guide. Name’s Mahua. If anyone knows the truth, it’s her.”
“I’m going,” she said, already mentally packing.
Three days later, Aparna boarded the Howrah-Durg express, camera gear in one bag, notepads in another. Her mother called thrice before she reached Raipur, warning her not to go into forests alone, quoting TV serials and WhatsApp warnings.
By the time she reached Jagdalpur, the landscape had already shifted. Towering sal trees, red laterite soil, and a silence that swallowed even the hum of city life. A jeep waited for her, sent by the NGO facilitating her stay. The driver, Bhupen, was a quiet man who spoke only in gestures and occasionally hummed haunting tribal lullabies.
“Mahua will meet you at the guesthouse,” he said, eyes on the winding forest road.
The deeper they drove, the more withdrawn the landscape became. No billboards. No traffic. Just jungle — endless, alive, ancient.
Mahua was nothing like Aparna expected. She stood barefoot on the muddy courtyard of the tribal guesthouse, a slim woman in her forties with graying hair tied in a thick braid, skin darkened by the sun, and eyes sharp as broken glass.
“You’re the city woman?” she asked in halting Hindi.
“Yes. I’m Aparna. Journalist. From Kolkata.”
“You want to know about the Van Devta?” she asked, her voice low.
“I want to know the truth. About the forest. About the people who vanished.”
Mahua studied her for a moment, then said, “Then you must see it. But only till Baheli Creek. Beyond that is the fork. And beyond the fork… the forest remembers.”
That night, Aparna dined with some of the elders from the nearby tribal hamlets. Her Hindi and basic Chhattisgarhi helped bridge the language gap. They spoke in circles, never naming the entity in the forest directly.
“It is old,” said one.
“It watches,” said another.
“It mimics,” whispered a third. “Sometimes it walks like your brother. Or your mother. But it is not them.”
The stories would’ve made for great clickbait — spirits of dead children, men driven mad by dreams, trees that bled — but Aparna was looking for something deeper. She noticed the fear was real. Unpracticed. Not born from superstition alone.
That night, before going to bed, Mahua handed her a small pouch of salt and ash. “Keep it. For safety. If you hear your name in the dark, don’t answer.
Aparna prepared for the trek with meticulous detail — water, trail food, GPS, maps, notebooks, voice recorder, solar battery charger, a pepper spray, and of course, her camera. Mahua insisted they start early, before sunrise, and warned again: “Do not cross the banyan fork. That part of the forest is hungry.”
They left just as the first birds began to chirp. Aparna glanced once at her phone. No network. Just time, and the red bar of a draining battery.
With that, they walked into the belly of the green beast.
2
The forest swallowed them whole within the first hour. Aparna, used to the rhythms of urban chaos, now found herself recalibrating her senses — to birdsong, to leaf-rustle, to the unbroken hum of cicadas that rose and fell like breath. Mahua walked in silence, eyes scanning the canopy, the ground, and the wind, as if she was listening for something Aparna couldn’t hear.
Baheli Creek, their first stop, shimmered under a narrow beam of morning light. The water was glass-clear, flowing over smooth stones and ancient roots. Mahua paused here, filling her copper bottle and muttering a chant under her breath.
Aparna raised her camera. “May I?”
Mahua nodded but did not smile. Aparna clicked twice, and the images froze the serenity — until she noticed, on preview, that a third frame had appeared unbidden. A blur. A shape. Humanoid. Standing far behind Mahua.
She looked up. No one was there.
They continued onward. Hours passed.
They crossed a grove where red thread was tied around every tree — protection charms. Beyond that, a small clearing filled with the remains of broken idols. “This is where the loggers began their work,” Mahua explained. “They left in a hurry.”
“What scared them?”
“They heard music,” Mahua said. “Children singing. Then screams. Then silence.”
The forest grew thicker. No paths. Mahua led instinctively, and Aparna followed, ducking beneath creepers and stepping over roots that felt almost deliberate — like arms reaching to trip her.
Then they arrived.
The banyan fork.
It stood tall, ancient, its two trunks twisting upward like rival serpents. A circle of dark soil surrounded its base. No grass grew within it. Even the air changed — heavier, colder.
“This is the fork,” Mahua said. “We do not cross this.”
“But Rakesh Batra must have,” Aparna murmured.
Mahua nodded gravely. “Yes. And he did not return.”
Aparna approached it, drawn by a force she couldn’t name. There were marks on the bark. Human nails. Scratches. As if someone had tried to hold on.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll go. Alone.”
Mahua’s face darkened. “If you go, remember — do not answer when it calls you. It remembers every voice it has taken.”
That night, they camped near the creek. Mahua wouldn’t build a fire. “Smoke attracts the forest,” she warned.
Aparna lay in her tent, staring at the ceiling, recording voice notes.
“Day one. The villagers believe in an entity they call Van Devta. But this feels like something older. Something territorial. Mahua is calm, too calm. And the forest… feels like it’s watching me.”
She turned off the recorder.
Then, just as she began to drift into sleep, she heard it.
A voice. Faint. Deliberate.
“Aparna… come here.”
She froze.
It sounded like her mother.
But Aparna had been alone in the tent.
And her mother was five hundred kilometers away.
She clutched the pouch of salt, heart hammering.
The voice came again.
“Aparna… beta… don’t be afraid.”
It was not afraid. It was patient.
She whispered Mahua’s chant over and over until sleep finally came.
Outside her tent, the banyan leaves danced without wind.
3
Dawn arrived shrouded in mist. The trees breathed in silver threads of fog, and Aparna stood alone at the edge of the Banyan Fork. Mahua had not stirred from her mat, or perhaps pretended not to. Aparna took her silence as consent.
She tightened her backpack straps. Salt pouch in one pocket. Notebook tucked into her jacket. Voice recorder around her neck. Her camera slung tight. A faint chill kissed her neck as she stepped across the circle of dark soil, crossing the invisible line that separated the known from the unknowable.
The forest changed instantly.
The air grew thicker. Sounds dulled. Even birdsong vanished. Aparna kept walking, noting the transition in her notebook: “Tree density high. Light minimal. Smell — decay? No recent animal tracks.”
She followed what she thought was a path — a line of flattened leaves that seemed suspiciously deliberate. Every twenty steps, she left a yellow ribbon tied to a low branch. A breadcrumb trail. A journalist’s insurance.
Time slowed. Or sped. She couldn’t tell.
And then, she saw it — a rusted nameplate, half-buried under leaves.
Heart skipping, she photographed it. Nearby, scraps of a torn uniform fluttered against roots. She crouched, lifting one piece with her pen. Bloodstained.
Then came the whisper.
“Aparna…”
She spun around. Nothing. Only trees.
She walked faster.
She stumbled upon the ruins around noon — the remains of a camp. Two canvas tents rotting in the undergrowth. A steel trunk, open. A canteen, broken. Notes scattered across the floor of one tent. She gathered what was legible.
“Day 5. The forest moves at night.” “Voices from the creek. Rakesh won’t stop talking to the trees.” “He says the forest wants stories.”
She shivered.
“Aparna…”
This time the voice was behind her.
She turned slowly.
There was a boy.
No more than ten. Naked. Mud-covered. Standing perfectly still. His eyes entirely black.
“Who are you?” Aparna asked.
The boy smiled. “You wrote about me once. You called me a ghost story.”
She stepped back.
The boy moved without moving — a flicker — and he was gone.
She ran. Hours passed. Aparna had lost her trail markers. Trees no longer stood still — they swayed subtly toward her. Shapes moved at the edge of her vision. A woman in white beside a tree. A goat with no eyes. Children singing in reverse.
Her recorder blinked.
Battery 9%.
She pressed record anyway.
“Dandak Forest. GPS signal lost. Hallucinations increasing. May not be hallucinations. Need to retrace steps.”
Then she noticed it: every tree trunk bore a face.
Not painted. Not carved.
Formed from knots and grains — angry, twisted faces. Screaming. Watching.
She stumbled back — and fell into water. It was the creek. But darker. Black water. Cold as ice. She dragged herself up to the bank, gasping.
She was not alone.
A figure sat across the creek. Back turned. Long hair. Draped in red.
Aparna called out, her voice trembling. “Hello? Are you—”
The woman turned.
No face. Only skin. Smooth. Blank.
Aparna screamed.
The forest answered.
Not with echoes — but with laughter. Dozens. Hundreds of voices. All saying one thing:
“Aparna.”
She ran. She didn’t know how long. The trees became tunnels. The sky a bruise. Her legs screamed. Her lungs burned.
Then she hit something — a wall of vines. She clawed through them, breaking into a grove.
In the center: a shrine. Made of bone.
Human femurs. Skulls. Arranged into a circle.
At the center of it — a tree stump. Blackened. Charred.
A child’s shoe sat on it.
She knelt, touched it — and heard everything.
Cries. Wails. Men screaming. Children laughing. A woman whispering prayers.
Then: “You came to tell our story. So listen.”
A thousand images assaulted her mind. Massacres. Tribals dragged from homes. Trees felled. Sacred groves burned. Offerings trampled.
Then darkness.
She awoke to Mahua’s face.
“Where—?”
“Shh. You crossed the fork. The forest let you come back. You should not be alive.”
Aparna was in a hut. Covered in salt. Her notebook gone. Camera broken.
Only the recorder survived. She pressed play.
Nothing.
Then — faintly — her own voice.
“I am Aparna. I came to tell the forest’s story.”
And then, not her voice.
“We told her ours.”
4
Aparna remained in the hut for two days, feverish and silent, as Mahua rubbed crushed neem leaves on her forehead and fed her bitter herbal decoctions. When she finally stirred, her first instinct was to reach for her camera, but it was gone—melted beyond repair, its lens cracked like a blind eye. Outside, the forest loomed darker, as if her trespass had offended it beyond forgiveness. Mahua sat beside her, weaving a garland of dried rudraksha and bone. “You saw the shrine,” she said without looking up. “They showed you their pain. Now you understand why we don’t let outsiders in.” Aparna nodded slowly, haunted. Her voice came out dry, papery: “Who built it?” Mahua’s answer was quieter than the wind: “We didn’t. The forest did. With what we left behind.” That night, Aparna stepped out and stood alone near the creek. The wind whispered in voices she now recognized—children, elders, men, women—voices of those lost to greed, buried beneath bulldozed soil, or burned in silence. She whispered a promise into the darkness: “I will write it all.”
The next morning, she asked Mahua to take her back to the shrine—this time with offerings. Mahua agreed, but warned, “It listens. Be careful what you promise.” They trekked in silence, salt tied around their wrists, as the forest seemed to part for them, guiding instead of threatening. The bone shrine looked untouched, but this time Aparna noticed faint etchings on the skulls—dates, tribal names, prayer scripts in Gondi. She knelt at the stump and placed her only possession—a page from her reporter’s notebook, upon which she had written, in bold ink: “We were here. We suffered. We remember.” As she rose, wind tore the note from the stump and scattered it through the trees, but Aparna didn’t chase it. She had offered her truth, and the forest had accepted it. From that moment, the silence that had once felt hostile now seemed to hold space for her. But as she and Mahua turned back, Aparna saw a new face forming in the bark of the banyan trunk—hers. It was smiling. And it was watching.
5
On the third night, a strange wind stirred the leaves, not from above but from beneath the forest floor—as if something ancient was exhaling after a long sleep. Aparna woke with a jolt, heart pounding, to find Mahua already outside, drawing a thick circle of salt around their hut. “The line is thinning,” she murmured. “They are restless.” Aparna, clutching her voice recorder like a talisman, watched in uneasy silence. That evening, Mahua explained the Salt Line, a tradition older than memory, used not just for protection but for communication—with the forgotten, the betrayed, the dead. “They can’t cross salt,” she whispered, “but they can whisper through it.” As darkness fell, the salt circle glowed faintly, and voices began to rise—chanting, weeping, and one voice clearer than the rest. It was a child, speaking in broken Hindi: “Find my name. I am still here.” Aparna’s skin prickled cold. Her mind flashed back to the child at the creek, the one with mud-slick skin and black eyes. She had thought it a vision. Now she realized it was a message.
Determined, Aparna scoured Mahua’s hut at dawn, searching the old woman’s preserved scrolls and records, finally uncovering a brittle parchment that listed the names of villagers who had disappeared during a mining clearance twenty years ago. Most names were smudged or erased, but one stood out in crimson ink: “Chotu, son of Malti”—a name marked with a child’s drawing of a tree beside a skull. Aparna’s breath caught. She returned to the forest alone, salt in hand, and followed the creek backward until she reached a place where the trees formed a perfect circle around a pond. The air hung still, expectant. She knelt and called out: “Chotu, son of Malti.” For a moment, silence. Then, a hand reached out from the water—tiny, pale, and trembling. Aparna didn’t move. The hand placed a pebble at the pond’s edge, then sank slowly. The pebble was etched with a single word: “Thanks.” Aparna wept, not out of fear, but for all the names that would never be called. Behind her, the wind shifted. The forest, it seemed, had begun to trust her.
6
The forest seemed to breathe differently now. Aparna noticed it in the way the branches no longer clawed at her when she passed, how the birds resumed their songs in short, cautious intervals, and even how her own steps no longer echoed like an intruder’s. Mahua watched from the doorway as Aparna packed her satchel — this time with intention, not desperation. The notebook was fresh, its pages crisp and empty, waiting to be filled not with reports but with reckonings. “There is one more place,” Mahua said, her voice dry like brittle roots. “It is the tree where stories are born. Where they listen, record, and sometimes… change.” Aparna nodded. She understood now that the forest didn’t need her validation — it needed remembrance. The trail to the Story Tree was unmarked, hidden between illusion and memory. Mahua led the way until they reached a field of ash — grey, wide, and unnatural. Nothing grew there, not even weeds. In its center stood a single sal tree, tall and hollow, its bark split into patterns like ancient script. Charred bones were embedded at the base — ribs, femurs, skull fragments — like offerings baked into the roots. Aparna approached, hearing faint murmurs growing louder with every step, until the air itself vibrated with old grief.
She sat before the tree as Mahua began to chant, a low rhythmic hum that stirred the dead leaves. From the hollow trunk, wind emerged — hot and twisting — and Aparna closed her eyes as visions rushed her mind. She saw a time before the forest burned, when tribal children danced in the clearing and elders recited tales of the forest spirits. Then came the bulldozers, the machines, the men with fire and metal. Trees fell like screams, and the forest wept. In the tree’s memories, Aparna saw herself too — a woman from the city with a press ID, once hungry for exposure, now yearning for atonement. She opened her notebook and began to write—not reports, but eulogies. For the trees. For the lost. For Chotu. For Rakesh Batra. For the nameless ones. As she wrote, the murmurs calmed. The wind softened. The forest listened. Mahua placed a single rudraksha bead at the base of the tree, whispering, “Let her speak for you now.” The bark glowed faintly where Aparna’s fingers brushed it. And somewhere deeper, beneath the soil and beyond the roots, something shifted—uncoiling like an old beast slowly waking, not with anger, but relief. As Aparna closed her notebook and looked up, the branches of the Story Tree rustled—not with wind, but with words.
7
The forest had accepted Aparna, but now it asked for something more. As the sun dipped behind the dense sal trees, Mahua spoke of a path no outsider had ever returned from — the Last Crossing. “It lies beyond the northern ridge,” she said, “where no map dares reach. It’s where stories become fate.” Aparna listened, not with fear but resolve. The story was no longer about discovery — it was about inheritance. She carried only the essentials: the salt pouch, the notebook, and one matchbox Mahua pressed into her palm without a word. As she walked, the trees thinned until the forest seemed to recoil, revealing a canyon veiled in fog. She descended into it, the air growing dense with memory. Every step felt like sinking into history, and the wind was thick with whispers, not all welcoming. Shadows followed her, elongated and hunched. A temple ruin lay at the canyon floor, its stone idols broken, their faces eroded beyond divinity. On the altar lay an object untouched by time — her lost camera, somehow whole again. She lifted it, clicked the shutter, and heard not a snap but a scream — a child’s, distant and desperate. Aparna turned to find the boy again: Chotu, staring at her not with fear, but finality. “They’re not done with you,” he said.
The canyon trembled, and from the broken earth rose figures of ash and smoke — spectral echoes of those massacred, each holding fragments of themselves: a mother with charred bangles, a man clutching severed roots, a girl with her throat slit. They formed a circle around Aparna. She stood frozen until one stepped forward — Rakesh Batra, the vanished forest officer. “I was the first to write. But I wrote with fear. You write with truth,” he said, voice cracked like dry bark. He handed her a rusted pen and motioned to the temple wall. She etched one word: “Witness.” The ground stilled. The apparitions bowed, not in servitude, but gratitude, and vanished into wind. The canyon lightened. When Aparna climbed out, morning had returned. Mahua waited near the ridge, holding out a glass of water. “You came back,” she said, tears in her eyes. “They let you go.” Aparna looked behind — the forest canopy shimmered gold, as if exhaling. The path had changed, but not closed. She was no longer a reporter. She was a keeper. A living archive. And the forest would remember her name.
8
The forest was no longer a stranger. Aparna walked with quiet reverence, her soles brushing the moss as if not to disturb the slumbering memories beneath. The birdsong that once fell silent at her approach now echoed through the canopy, not in fear but recognition. She passed the stream where Chotu had once appeared, now flowing clear and slow, with offerings of wildflowers resting gently on its surface. When she returned to Mahua’s hut, the old woman was gone. In her place lay a woven satchel, filled with rudraksha beads, a hand-drawn map, and a note in Gondi script that simply read: “Tell them what cannot be forgotten.” Aparna sat by the fire pit as twilight bled into dusk, and wrote — not for her editor, not for the world, but for the forest. Her notebook was filled with names, memories, lost songs, and truths that had been buried too long beneath corporate reports and redacted government files. She titled the collection: “Whispers of the Dandak.” As she placed the notebook into the satchel, the wind lifted gently, as if to carry her words across branches, valleys, and time itself.
Months later, back in Delhi, Aparna stood at a modest press conference held in a university auditorium, her once-sensationalist newsroom having passed on the story with a scoff. “Ghosts and tribal myths don’t sell,” they had said. But Aparna didn’t need their validation anymore. She read from her notebook, her voice calm and unwavering, as images of the bone shrine, the salt line, and the Story Tree flickered across the projector. In the audience sat researchers, activists, a few indifferent journalists, and an old man whose eyes welled up when she mentioned Rakesh Batra. After her reading, there was a long pause — not of confusion, but of weight. And then applause. Not thunderous, but steady. Outside the hall, rain began to fall softly, the first rain of the season. Aparna looked up at the clouds and whispered, “I returned.” Somewhere, deep in Chhattisgarh, the Dandak forest stirred, its leaves rustling not with warning, but with memory. The story had been told. And it would never be silenced again.
***
It had been nearly a year since Aparna Roy had returned from the Dandak. The city had changed in subtle ways—more buildings, fewer trees, new faces, louder traffic—but she felt more alien in its rhythm now than ever before. She still lived in the same modest apartment in South Delhi, but her walls were lined not with press awards, but with leaves she had collected, beads Mahua once gifted her, and sketches of the forest she drew from memory every night. What haunted her wasn’t the images, but the silence. In dreams, she still saw the Bone Shrine, its ivory latticework shifting in moonlight. She still heard the child’s voice whispering names that weren’t in her notebook. No matter how far she tried to distance herself from the forest, it clung to her—not as a curse, but as inheritance. The forest had planted something in her, something alive.
When her book, Whispers of the Dandak, finally released through a small tribal cooperative press, it did not make national headlines, but it spread like roots—deep, slow, and unstoppable. Grassroots activists translated it into seven languages. It became reading material in anthropology classes. NGOs carried copies into villages where forests were threatened. Aparna started receiving letters—not emails, but hand-written letters—from people who had lost something to land grabs, displacement, or silence. One letter came from a girl in Bastar who said, “Now I know I am not invisible.” Another came from a retired forest officer, saying, “I saw what you saw. I only wish I had written it down.” These letters became her world. But with each one, the pull of the Dandak grew stronger.
In mid-July, during the monsoon, she received a brown parcel with no return address. Inside was an old camera—the same model she had lost. The lens had a crack running diagonally across it, and tucked into the viewfinder was a single sal leaf, fresh, glistening with dew. She took it as a sign. She took a leave of absence from her editorial consultancy and boarded a train to Raipur, and from there a shared jeep to the tribal belt. The moment her boots touched the earth of the Dandak again, it felt like exhaling after a long breath held too long. But something was different. Mahua was not there. Her hut was intact but abandoned. On the door hung a woven talisman of bark and bone, signifying safe passage. Aparna entered, lit a lamp, and found her old notebook still resting on the shelf, as if waiting. Beside it, a new one.
The forest welcomed her like kin. Animals she once feared now watched her with disarming calm. The creek where Chotu had appeared was flowing steadily, with no sign of murk or memory. The Story Tree still stood, taller now, its bark richer, more textured—etched with symbols that pulsed when touched. At night, the whispers came again, but now they told her things beyond grief. Stories of healing, regrowth, and children born after generations of silence. She began documenting them, not as horror, but as heritage. Each story she wrote seemed to strengthen the forest—as if her ink replenished what mining had tried to erase.
One night, while writing under the light of an oil lamp, a figure appeared near the clearing. It was Mahua. Her hair was longer, streaked silver, but her eyes had not aged. “You came back,” she said simply. They embraced without words. Mahua spoke of a vision—one where the forest chose Aparna as its next guardian. Not in ritual, not in blood, but in memory. Aparna asked about the whispers, the shrine, Chotu. Mahua only smiled: “Some spirits move on. Some stay to watch. But now, they trust you.”
Months turned to seasons. Aparna stopped being a visitor. She became part of the cycle. She planted trees. She learned chants. She taught local children how to write their stories—not in Hindi, but in their own tongue. The forest gave back in ways science could not explain—rare herbs growing near her doorstep, sudden rainfall after drought, fireflies forming patterns above her hut. She knew she could never truly leave again.
Back in the city, Aparna’s absence was barely noted by media houses. But in quiet corners of rural India, her name was invoked with reverence. The girl who listened. The woman who wrote. The one who crossed and returned.
The last entry in her new notebook, dated on a quiet evening under a full moon, read:
“The forest does not forget. It waits. It listens. And when it finds someone who listens back, it lives again. I am not its savior. I am its voice. And in return, it is mine.”
From the canopy above, a single leaf drifted down, curling onto the open page like a signature.
End
