Beneath the banyan's sprawling canopy, a strange stillness had taken hold. It wasn't silence—it was suspense. A breath drawn and held. The kind that precedes a whisper or a scream.
The four strangers didn't speak. They simply stood. A rustle of leaves—a sigh?—spiraled downward. And then… visions began.
---
🔸 **Avni**
She felt the bark hum beneath her fingertips. Her knees buckled, not from weakness but recognition.
She saw her grandmother's voice—not her face, her _voice_—echoing through a rain-washed monsoon night. They were in a dim room lit by kerosene. A half-written notebook sat between them. Her grandmother whispered, _"Truth, child, is a story we haven't told ourselves yet."_
But the vision twisted.
Avni saw herself in a hospital waiting room, clutching her manuscript. The doctors had called her in too late. Her grandmother had passed an hour before. She hadn't said goodbye. Her final story—the one she'd promised to write for her grandmother—remained unfinished. Avni woke from the vision with tears mixing into earth. She hadn't realized how deeply the guilt had rooted itself.
---
🔸 **Rohan**
He scoffed at first, thinking it a prank. Then the world around him stilled unnaturally.
Suddenly, he was ten again, digging through his father's books. Ancient maps, dusty tomes, legends scribbled in margins. His father had believed in mystical history—had died chasing it in remote Odisha.
Rohan's vision was a jungle clearing. His father stood beside the same banyan tree—smaller, younger. He was holding a locket with an engraving: _"To seek is to remember."_
Then came the darker edge: men in uniforms, shouting. Papers burning. His father's panicked eyes.
Rohan gasped. He never knew the government had branded his father's research dangerous. _Why_? And how had that led to the "accident"? Perhaps it hadn't been one at all.
---
🔸 **Tara**
She stood barefoot, sketchpad held like a shield.
Her vision was bright. Vivid. Her own drawings fluttered from the sky like birds. She was chasing them through fog when one caught fire midair, bursting into flame that formed her mother's face. Her mother was crying.
Then Tara saw herself, aged twenty or more, painting murals on hospital walls, surrounded by children. Joy. Real joy. She was giving something—telling stories not through words, but color. She realized what she feared wasn't calm. It was _meaninglessness_.
She whispered to the banyan, _"I want my stories to heal."_
---
🔸 **Dev**
His vision did not appear in light.
It was in pulse.
He was back on a battlefield—Afghanistan, maybe? The screech of mortar shells, the scent of metal and blood. A young boy—barely ten—ran into his arms, sobbing. Dev promised he'd keep him safe.
The flash changed. The boy was gone. Dev held a broken photograph instead. Something he'd failed to protect.
Back in Nandipur, the villagers had always sensed that Dev carried ghosts. But only he knew how many.
From the vision, one word bloomed in his mind: _"Atone."_
---
The banyan stirred once more. And just like that, it was morning again. Birds chirped. The strangers blinked and turned toward one another—not with confusion, but with quiet awe.
They didn't yet speak.
But something had changed.
The tree had shown them truths buried deep in root and bone.
---