The Jasmine Requiem

I spent most of my childhood in the sprawling, humid arms of my grandmother’s homestead in the eastern reaches of Maharashtra. Ours was a sprawling, aging Brahmin family, and I grew accustomed to the chatter of cousins, the clatter of brass vessels, and the ever-present scent of turmeric and wood smoke.

It was the summer of 2004, and I had returned, as always, to the old family home for the holidays. Our land was semi-rural, a patchwork of rice paddies and dense mango groves, with our house standing at the edge of a large, murky pond. On the far bank, a lone parijat tree leaned over the water, its night-blooming flowers strewn across the surface like pale corpses. The few streetlamps that existed were feeble, casting weak pools of light that the encroaching darkness quickly swallowed. The house itself was a hybrid: the old wing, with its mud walls and sloped tile roof, clung to a wide veranda, while a newer brick structure was half-finished beside it, its skeletal beams visible against the sky.

One evening, around seven, I was with my cousin Rohan and my younger sister Meera on that veranda. The air was thick with the scent of damp earth. Rohan, who had always been impulsive, stopped mid-sentence, his gaze fixed on the parijat tree. ‘I’ve decided,’ he said, his voice unnaturally flat, ‘that tree is mine. I love it. No one is to touch it.’ Meera and I exchanged a glance. Rohan had never shown any interest in trees before, but there was something disturbingly solemn about his tone. We looked at the tree, its milky flowers glowing faintly in the dusk. A breeze rustled the leaves, and for a moment, I thought I saw a shadow detach itself from the trunk and slip into the water.

That night, Rohan began to change. He, who had been my boisterous partner in crime, became quiet and watchful. He would sit on the veranda for hours at a stretch, staring at the tree with an unreadable expression. When I tried to engage him, he would talk about the tree in a low, reverent murmur, calling it ‘his bride’ and ‘his beloved.’ Meera began to have nightmares, waking up screaming about a woman made of flowers who was calling her to the pond. Our grandmother, a stoic woman who had seen much, grew visibly wary. She started burning neem leaves in the evenings and placing a small iron amulet under Rohan’s pillow, though he would always toss it aside.

The climax came on a night of the full moon. The moon hung bloated and white over the pond, turning the water to silver. Rohan rose from his bed, his eyes wide and unseeing, and walked to the veranda. I followed, trembling, as he descended the steps and moved toward the pond. He spoke in a voice that was not his—an ancient, cloying feminine voice that seemed to come from the water itself. ‘You promised to save me. You must set me free. They cut my roots, they burned my flowers, but I gathered myself. I need your blood to bloom again.’ Rohan stopped at the water’s edge, and the pond rippled without wind. In the moonlight, the parijat tree’s reflection seemed to twist, and a cloud of white petals lifted from the surface, swirling around him like a shroud.

I screamed and ran to him, but he was frozen. The petals began to cling to his skin, embedding themselves into his flesh. He cried out, a sound that was both his and not his, and then he collapsed. When I reached him, the petals fell away, revealing a body covered in small, bleeding puncture wounds. Rohan did not speak or walk again for weeks, lost in a fevered dream. Eventually, my family decided to cut down the tree. The axeman who did the job later swore he heard a woman weeping from inside the trunk as it fell. The pond was drained the following year. But that wasn’t the end. My grandmother, in her dying days, made a strange confession: she had once, as a young girl, witnessed her mother drowning a newborn baby in that pond, born of an affair, and had buried the child beneath the parijat tree. She had tried to banish the memory, but the tree remembered.

Now the pond is a dry, cracked basin, and the parijat tree is gone. But sometimes, on summer nights, I smell jasmine blooming from nowhere, and I see a woman standing at the edge of where the pond used to be, her face a mass of white petals. She reaches out, and I know she’s waiting for one of us to come back and finish what was started. I have not returned to that place since, but I carry the scent with me, and I know that the requiem for the buried is never truly over. It only waits for a new voice to sing it.