The Ghost of The Bo Tree

THE SEVENTEENTH

And that was the memory that was running through her brain, after a year, over and over again as the country train ran past the fields, freshly sown with winter wheat,.

Now that her standing had altered and become somewhat better among the people in the farm, Lei should have been glad to return to Uncle Somi's, but she wasn't. She wasn't quite sure what the reason behind her strange disappointment was- perhaps it was because she knew that people only feared her now or perhaps it was because she knew that this year she would find Cousin Neel in his bed, paralyzed, mute and resembling a vegetable.

She did not know Cousin Neel's which stare was worse- the stare where he would look at her in lust and drool; or his stare now, quiet, painful and accusing. Both made her equally uncomfortable. And what would be Cousin Nidhi's attitude towards her? Would she have turned as cold and distant as she was before? Would she still try to please her because she feared the ghost? But most of all, how would Nero feel on having her back?

In her time away from Uncle Somi's farm, she had grown inexplicably close to this guardian whom she had never met, who was not even alive and who was most probably a fragment of her lonely imagination. Lei had tried to show the mark to Tonya as soon as she reached The St. Francis Hostel, but Tonya said that there was nothing behind her ear.

So had it all been false? Had she imagined everything that had happened? The disappearance of the mark behind her ear, had given a severe blow to her concept of realities. Maybe nothing of what she had experienced had ever been true.

It seemed impossible, now that she was away from the farm, to believe that Uncle Somi himself had offered her money! Or that Cousin Nidhi had smiled at her with warmth and not jeered with hateful contempt! She could have definitely imagined it all.

And that is why she was curious to return to the farm after nine long months at the hostel. She needed to know, as soon as possible, whether all that had happened during her sixteenth winter in the country was going to continue during her seventeenth.

It wasn't.

For there was not going to be an Uncle Somi anymore, no Cousin Nidhi, no Cousin Aniket, no Cousin Neel and no Farmhouse.

Uncle's Somi's farm had burnt down.

Everything ; from the horse-less stable to the lemon trees, from the large farmhouse to Binnie the Cattle rearer's small hut, from the orange trees to the old swing at the right corner of the store room- from clothes, shoes, tables, chairs, sofas, the hookah, the rocking chair to the man who sat upon it, and his three children- they were all nothing but heaps of grey, cold, dirty, dismal ash.

There was only one thing that stood ominous and alive, right in the center of the vast black fields- The Bo Tree.