The spirit inside the tree

At a Glance

• Central figures: A Gond bhumka (priest) named Dhurwa, and the spirit Saja Pen - a clan deity bound inside a great saja tree at the edge of the village.
• Setting: A Gond village in the sal forests of what is now eastern Chhattisgarh, in the hill country between the Indravati and Godavari rivers.
• The turn: A timber contractor’s men begin felling the saja tree, and the spirit inside it wakes in rage, sending sickness through the village.
• The outcome: Dhurwa enters the forest alone, offers his own blood to the tree’s stump, and persuades Saja Pen to move into a smaller tree the village plants and tends within the settlement.
• The legacy: The practice among some Gond clans of maintaining a living tree within the village as the seat of their Pen - a clan deity whose dwelling must never be cut, and whose roots are fed during the annual Jatra ceremony.

The axe had already bitten twice before anyone heard it. Dhurwa was squatting by the cookfire, scraping ash from a clay pot, when the sound reached him - not the sound of the blade on wood, but the sound that came after. A low groan that did not belong to any animal. It came from the direction of the saja tree, the old one, the one whose bark was rubbed smooth on the side facing the village because people touched it when they passed.

He set the pot down and stood. His wife looked at him. He did not explain.

The Tree at the Edge

The saja tree stood where the village ended and the forest began. It was not the tallest tree. It was not the widest. But it was the oldest thing anyone knew of, older than the stone boundary markers the manjhi of the neighboring Muria village had placed two generations back, older than the well. Dhurwa’s father had told him that Saja Pen lived inside it - not like a bird lives in a nest, but the way breath lives in a chest. The tree was the body. The spirit was inside.

Nobody worshipped it in the way outsiders might imagine worship. There was no shrine, no image. People left things at the roots - a smear of turmeric paste, a few grains of rice after a good harvest, the first drops of mahua liquor before anyone drank. When a child in the clan fell sick, Dhurwa’s father would press his ear to the bark and listen. If the spirit was angry, you could hear a humming. If the spirit was quiet, the child would recover on its own.

The timber contractor had come from Jagdalpur three weeks earlier. He had a government permit, or said he did. He wanted sal trees, mostly, for railway sleepers. His men had already taken six from the ridge above the stream. Nobody had objected to those - they were ordinary trees, and the money was real. But the saja tree was different, and nobody had told him it was different because nobody thought he would touch it. It was obviously not sal. It stood apart. It had the markings.

His men touched it anyway.

The Sickness

By the second evening, three children had fevers. By the third morning, the contractor’s lead axeman could not lift his right arm. The cut in the saja tree was a hand’s width deep, pale wood showing like bone through skin.

Dhurwa went to the tree. He pressed his ear to the bark the way his father had done. The humming was loud - not like bees, but like the ground before an earthquake, a vibration that went into the jaw and the teeth. He stepped back and looked at the wound in the trunk. Sap ran from it, thick and slow, the color of rust.

He told the contractor’s men to stop. They laughed. The contractor himself came the next morning, looked at the tree, looked at Dhurwa, and said the tree was on government forest land and the permit covered everything on it. Dhurwa said the permit did not cover Saja Pen. The contractor asked what that was. Dhurwa could not explain it in the man’s language so he said nothing more.

That night a woman in the village began shaking and could not stop. Her eyes rolled. She spoke in a voice that was not hers. The words were old Gondi, the kind Dhurwa’s grandmother had spoken, and they said: I am cut open. I am bleeding. If I fall, you fall.

Dhurwa Goes Alone

He went before dawn. He took a clay bowl, a small knife, and a cockerel with its legs tied. The forest was dark. The path to the saja tree was a path he had walked since he could walk, and he did not need light.

The tree stood in the grey air. The axe cut gaped. He could smell the sap - sharp, metallic, wrong. He knelt at the roots and killed the cockerel. The blood went into the clay bowl and he poured it over the roots, slowly, the way his father had poured mahua liquor. Then he drew the knife across his own left palm and let his blood fall into the same ground.

He spoke in Gondi. He did not raise his voice.

Saja Pen, I am Dhurwa, son of Lakhmu, son of Bhima. I am your keeper. The men who cut you are not ours. I cannot stop them. They have paper and they have the government behind the paper. But I can give you a new body.

He waited. The humming changed. It did not stop, but it thinned, became higher, became something closer to a question.

I will plant a tree inside the village. Inside the fence. No axe will touch it. I will feed the roots myself at every Jatra. Your blood and my blood are in this ground together. Come with me.

He pressed both hands flat against the bark, the cut hand and the whole hand. He stayed that way until the sun came through the trees.

The Sapling

He dug the sapling from a place uphill where saja seeds had fallen. It was barely as tall as his chest, thin, with five leaves. He carried it wrapped in wet cloth back to the village and planted it in the open ground between his house and the headman’s house, where everyone could see it.

He told the village what he had done. Some believed him. Some did not. The contractor’s men returned to the old tree two days later and finished felling it. It fell with a sound like a long exhalation. Dhurwa did not go to watch.

But the fevers broke that night. The woman who had shaken and spoken in the old voice slept quietly and woke remembering nothing. The axeman’s arm loosened. The children ate.

The sapling lived. Dhurwa fed the roots at Jatra with turmeric paste and blood from a cockerel and a few drops of his own, reopening the scar on his left palm each year. The tree grew. Within five years it was taller than the roofline. People began touching its bark when they passed, the way they had touched the old one, and the smooth patch started forming on the side that faced the path.

What Grew There

The contractor never came back. The sal logs went to Jagdalpur and then to the railway and nobody in the village saw money from them. The stump of the old saja tree rotted slowly in the place where the village met the forest, and grass grew over it, and eventually children played on it without knowing what it had been.

But inside the village, the new tree held. Dhurwa’s son learned to press his ear to the bark and listen. When the humming was quiet, things were well. When it rose, he knew to make offerings. The Pen had moved. It lived where the people lived now, inside the fence, where axes did not come. The roots went deep into the same red laterite soil, and the spirit was in them, the way breath is in a chest - not visible, not separate, not gone.