In the ancient town of Banaras,India where the Ganges flows like a serpent of smoke and sorrow, there stood a tree no one dared to name. Locals called it That Banyan, or simply the Whispering One. Its roots clawed at the earth like fingers trying to escape, and its branches never stopped moving—not even when the wind was still.
Priya Das had never believed in such things.
A psychology PhD candidate from Delhi University, she arrived in Banaras chasing data, not demons. Her thesis: mass psychogenic illness in rural India. Her target: a cluster of cases centered around that banyan tree.
Villagers claimed it possessed those who walked beneath it. That they returned days later, changed—speaking ancient tongues, eyes rolled white, often violently convulsing before dropping dead.
Priya called it superstition.
Until the tree whispered her name.
---
Her first visit to the tree was under the scorching afternoon sun. She brought a camera, EMF reader, notebook. No sudden temperature drops. No eerie voices. Just birdsong and rustling leaves.
"See?" she told her assistant, Raju. "Nothing but myth."
That night, she dreamed of roots wrapping around her throat, dragging her underground.
---
The second visit, she stayed longer. Meditated beneath the tree. Waited.
That's when the ground began to hum. Not audibly, but inside her bones. A resonance. Like she was being tuned to something else.
Raju's nose bled. Her camera battery drained. And she saw—just briefly—a shape in the bark. A face.
---
She began changing. Forgot things. Called people by names they didn't recognize. Spoke fluent Sanskrit in her sleep. Woke with dirt under her fingernails.
Raju quit.
She kept going.
Priya started recording herself.
In one video, she stared into the lens for twenty-three minutes, unmoving, then whispered: "We were many. Now we are one."
She didn't remember filming it.
---
She visited the local temple. Asked the pandit if he knew of the tree.
He refused to speak, only drew a symbol on the floor: a triangle within a circle, with an eye at the center.
"Sealing mark," he said. "You opened it."
Priya laughed. Then wept. Then screamed.
---
On the seventh day, she entered the banyan grove one final time. Her eyes were red-rimmed. Skin pale. Her voice had deepened.
Villagers saw her vanish into the tree's shadow.
No one followed.
Three days later, a child found her sitting beneath the tree. Silent. Smiling.
She now teaches at the village school.
Her thesis was never submitted.
But sometimes, if you ask her a question she doesn't like, she'll respond in a voice not her own.
And if you listen closely to the tree, late at night, it murmurs Sanskrit prayers.
Or laughter.