The Ghost of The Bo Tree

THE FIRE

Everyone believed that the Bo tree was haunted- all the Bo trees in the village were. In the fire that had consumed the whole village countless years back, many people had died and most of them had done so quite unhappily, and so most of their spirits were supposed to be hanging around all the possible Bo trees that were there in the village. But nobody seemed to care about any other Bo tree except the Bo tree that stood right in the middle of Uncle Somi's field; this tree was especially apartheid.

This tree was supposed to be haunted by the man who had started the fire and who had also burnt and died in the same fire. People said that he had been a Brahmin scholar of great learning; that he had been as young and beautiful once as his ghost was now ugly and frightful- that he was now nothing more than a distorted manifestation of his vengeance and guilt.

It was an ancient belief that ghosts always resided on a fig tree, and the more vengeful these ghosts were, the more ugly the tree turned. If that were true, Lei thought, then the ghost of the Bo Tree must be the vilest of all ghosts- for the Bo tree was truly distorted. If that is how distorted the ghost was, then Lei would surely like to see it; was it possible that something so ugly existed? Surely if it was, then if she had died on the day Herri the farmer had assaulted her- then her fig tree would have been the ugliest of them all.

But Lei often wondered what it was that troubled the ghost of the Bo tree; if he had started the fire- then surely vengeance was already taken. If he had died and burnt in it, he would have always wanted to or else he could have easily escaped. Binnie the cattle worker said that nobody would want to burn themselves to death, why would anyone do that?

Lei, on the other hand, knew that sometimes life did such things to a person, that one would rather choose to burn than breathe another second.

People of the village thought that death would come to anyone who approached the orange field Bo tree because the ghost living there would latch itself to a person and slowly suck the life of out of them. Lei knew, however, that the ghost living in the Bo tree was too cruel to latch itself to anyone. Whenever she went near the Bo tree, Lei's body began to tingle with a thousand different sensations- maybe it was just her lonely fantasy but for seconds she would hear a thousand voices speaking out to her.

Lei knew that all the Bo trees in the village were not haunted; only the Bo tree in the orange field was. She knew it because he had told her so- the vengeful spirit who had caused the village fire; he had told her the first time she touched the Bo tree trunk and was deafened by a thousand cries ringing in her head; he had said that Lei should never return to the Bo tree for she would disturb all the dead who now lived there.

And that was why Lei could never understand the story of the village fire- why would a man who hated men enough to burn them all, protect and guard their souls now?