She had lived in the neighbourhood. I don’t remember when she died. I just remember the legend. The legend of Mania(No. that is the name, pronounced Maa-ni-aa) that followed, that lived through blackouts of summer and the usual loadsheddings. We as children were hushed up with ghost stories and Mania featured in them regularly. She would be that frail white face in the nothingness of darkness, the white sari and the anklets that make imaginary sounds as she glided through the blackness of the night (my present idea of ghosts is quite coloured by dementors, ..too much of Harry potter you say) …and all of that (We were also told about this severed leg which (or the ghost of which) would go about taking revenge, no, I will not go into that..quite gory…although looking back..Why were 5 year olds subjected to such horrors?)
There used to be this jamun tree . The canopy mostly wore itself thin on that tree. And if you looked at the moon through its leaves..wooo.It was spooky. There was something about its smoky (or ashy) green leaves which brought about the eerie once the sun set.
The jamun tree among other things, saw quite a spate of unnatural deaths around it. Some just plain accidental but mostly unexplained or unnatural.
Our house is the last one of our block. As much as I loved the garden, the wet greenness of monsoons and thelackadaisical, carefree and bougainvillea laden winters, Mania’s supposed active after life on that tree, the jamun tree, made the thought of crossing over to our neighbours place anytime after dark , one laden with the probability of a woman in white pouncing on me. (As a child am sure we don’t need an overactive imagination to think of ghosts).
A few years back another neigbour who had shifted to another neighbourhood along with his family was found dead under mysterious circumstances. We still don’t know whether it was a suicide or whether he was murdered. A couple of other accidental deaths happened, one of electric shock and another was a freak road accident. You might ask why I wrote all this, I don’t know now..but when I had started writing they did seem pertinent. My own superstitious conclusions surround the fact that these were people who had lived in quite proximity of that tree. But that is besides the point.
In the meanwhile, our immediate neighbours (they have been here for some 7 years but I still refer to them as the new neighbours, the jamun tree actually belongs to their compound) had been unabashedly ‘trimming’ away the tree (they said there wasn’t enough sunlight for their stupid vegetable garden) until you could say “it used to be a tree”. For the past couple of months all that has remained of it is a foot long stump.
I don’t think its been a month since Gopi, their daughter died (name changed for “I don’t know what” reasons). She had had a chequered background. They say in the days before she died, Gopi used to sit for hours on the stump, thinking, probably contemplating suicide.
Thus interestingly, it again came down to the jamun tree. The neighbours talked, we talked. Tongues let loose by what if not sensational in the first place, had to be made into one. Non one will probably know why she died.
Her father was a drunkard, wife beater, she had once eloped, …all of this is quite unimportant. Hush, did you say, did I say, did the neigbours say.
Mania was raped and murdered, this is an useless piece of information. And more importantly, not something I can still confirm. Like with a lot of other things in life, it came down to the jamun tree. Its so much easier to talk about the jamun tree, isn’t it.
