The village of Dhondbari lay baked and cracked under the relentless summer sun, a forgotten scattering of mud-walled houses and dusty lanes. For Rohan, a city boy forced to spend his vacation there, it was a prison of boredom. The air was thick with the smell of cow dung and drying earth, and the only sound was the incessant drone of crickets.
His grandmother, Aaji, was a creature of this ancient land, her skin as wrinkled as a dried riverbed. Her days were governed by rituals and superstitions that Rohan found absurd. Her most solemn warning concerned the old banyan tree that stood alone at the edge of the village, near the long-dried community well.
“Never go near the Peepalwali after sunset,” she would say, her voice a low, raspy whisper. “She was a woman who lost her child to the drought, and her grief soured her soul. She wanders there, looking for children to replace her own. They say she calls to you in a voice you know, a voice you love.”
Rohan would scoff. “Aaji, it’s just a tree. These are old stories to scare children.”
“Some stories are old because they are true,” she would reply, her dark eyes holding a fear that was anything but childish. “And remember this, Rohan. If you are ever in the dark and you hear your name called… you must never, ever answer.”
One sweltering evening, rebellion and boredom got the better of him. The sun had just bled below the horizon, painting the sky in shades of bruised purple and orange. The air held a deceptive coolness. Determined to prove his grandmother’s fears baseless, Rohan ambled towards the forbidden tree.
The banyan was a monstrous thing, its aerial roots hanging down like the matted hair of some great, sleeping beast. The silence here was different—not peaceful, but heavy and watchful. The familiar chorus of crickets had died, leaving a suffocating void. An unnatural chill slithered across his skin, raising goosebumps despite the heat.
He stood before the darkened maw of the dry well, peering into its inky blackness. A sense of unease, primal and unwelcome, began to creep into his heart. He was about to turn back when he heard it.
“Rohan…”
The voice was soft, melodic, and achingly familiar. It was his mother’s voice.
His rational mind screamed that it was impossible; his mother was hundreds of miles away in Mumbai. Yet, the sound was so clear, so full of love and longing. It had to be a village girl playing a prank, mimicking his mother’s voice from one of his phone calls.
He remembered Aaji’s warning, but his pride wouldn’t let him run. “Who’s there?” he called out, his own voice sounding small and thin. “Very funny.”
“Rohan… come here, my son. I have something for you.”
The voice came from the deep shadows under the banyan tree. Against his better judgment, he took a step forward, then another. A figure began to resolve itself from the gloom. A woman in a simple, faded sari, her head covered by a pallu. She stood with her back to him.
“Who are you?” he asked, his bravado crumbling into a sliver of real fear.
The woman turned slowly. In the dying light, he saw her face was beautiful, but her smile was a slash of wrongness, too wide and too fixed. And her eyes… her eyes were hollow pits of endless, ancient sorrow.
Then, his gaze fell to her feet.
They were twisted completely backwards, the heels facing forward, the toes pointing behind her.
A scream lodged in Rohan’s throat, a solid block of ice. It was the Peepalwali. The story was real.
Her fixed smile widened, cracking the skin at the corners of her mouth. She took a step towards him, and the sound was not of a footstep, but of a dry, scraping drag. It was the sound of bones and earth. From the depths of the dry well behind her, he now heard another sound—the faint, phantom wail of a crying baby.
“You answered,” she rasped, her voice no longer his mother’s, but a dry rustle of dead leaves. “You are mine now.”
He finally found his legs. Rohan turned and ran, his city-soft sandals slapping against the hard-packed earth. He didn’t dare look back, but he could hear her. He could hear the sickening, rhythmic scrape-drag, scrape-drag of her inverted feet, a sound that was somehow getting closer, impossibly fast. The air grew frigid, and the scent of jasmine, cloyingly sweet and rotten, filled his lungs.
He burst back into the village, into the warm, flickering circle of lantern light outside his grandmother’s home, and collapsed, gasping for air. Aaji was there in an instant, her frail arms wrapping around him. Villagers emerged from their homes, their faces etched with a knowing pity.
Rohan never spoke of what he saw, but for the rest of his life, he was haunted. He was haunted by the sight of those backward feet, by the sorrow in those hollow eyes, and most of all, by the memory of his own mother’s voice, calling to him from a darkness that had been waiting for a thousand years to be answered. He had learned the hard way that some stories are old for a reason, and some warnings should never, ever be ignored.
