Lei guessed that whatever happened on that night, although she didn't remember it quite well happened for good. Although there were too many perks involved in the whole ghost business also.
The good things were that Uncle Somi started to treat Lei more like a human and less like a farm animal. The sixteen year old twins - Cousin Aniket and Cousin Nidhi no longer picked on her and Lei was free to stay at the hostel even during the winters.
The episode had changed one thing drastically, the people who had barely felt her existence now feared Lei more than the Bo tree itself.
The country people had always been friendly and kind towards Lei, but now they treated her with strange ill will. While some considered her a witch, the other thought that she was actually a goddess, who could ward away bad spirits and cure diseases. For her part, Lei barely felt any changes about her person; she was not even bothered by the back of her ear that sometimes began to burn and itch fiercely, especially when she walked to the supermarket that stood right next to the old petrol station.
The supermarket was built only two years back and still managed to look fresh and young, although some calamity or the other was always befalling that building. There was always a fire breaking out in one of the sections or the racks were suddenly rattling and toppling down on their own; on some mornings all the glasses were found strangely cracked and then there were the crows that always hovered above the building and time and again a couple of them would fall down dead from the sky.
That piece of land was held collectively by the villagers once and they had been only too glad to give it to the important looking men some three years back. The land was cursed after all; that was the piece of the land where the Brahmin scholar, who started the village fire countless years back, had had his hut.
Lei had the mark of the same ghost at the back of her ear- only it was so well hidden that she was never able to see it with the two small mirrors that Uncle Somi had readily provided for her. And that was the reason that Lei wasn't bothered by the fact that it sometimes burnt and itch awfully.