The Moringa witch sits on her porch and calls to five-year-old Mira. Mira knows the woman is a witch because she is greenish, has no teeth and her tongue is red with paan. Her fingers, curled from arthritis, looked like pods from the moringa tree, long knobby pointy green things like string beans with big seeds inside them. Like they are green fingers only ten times larger. Drumsticks, they are called, hard like sticks for playing the drum in a school band. Mira is scared, but she is with her aunt, who says, “She is just a bit mad. She is lonely, let’s go talk to her. ”
The old woman gives Mira a chocolate and laughs. She brushes her drumstick finger on Mira’s soft cheeks. It leaves a red mark, but no one notices.
Mira moves to America. Drumsticks in America only grow on chickens, delicious with BBQ sauce or tandoori masala. Drumsticks to nurture and grow the children until they leave. Drumsticks to spice up a dying marriage. And then one day, America discovers Indian drumsticks. And when America discovers something that is a miracle cure, think kale or turmeric, Americans are ashamed not to try it, so Mira gets a packet of seeds from Amazon.
The seeds grow drumsticks relentlessly. Mira picks them and cooks them and gives them to all her Indian friends. One of them pierces the bedroom window. Luckily the insurance fixes it, but another one pierces the window within days. The insurance says to cut down the tree, and she does, but it grows back the next year and makes so many holes in their house that Mira goes around with duct tape as her husband points out new holes.
She calls Texas A and M, and those experts come to inspect, take some pods, and produce a research paper that touts moringa goodness but does not mention how to get rid of them.
Their house, her house, looks like a target for gun practice. Mira places her ears on the walls and can hear cannons and horses. Sometimes she thinks the war is inside her. Her husband, now retired, wants some time alone, takes their Winnebago, and leaves.
Mira is sixty-six when she wakes up one day to find a drumstick piercing her waist. She pulls it out and it creates a bruise. Mira wants to go to a doctor, but her husband says who goes to the doctor for a bruise? Her husband does not want to be blamed for the bruise, and Mira agrees even though he hardly lives with her. But drumsticks keep piercing her body, her sides, her arms, and even her cheeks. They are easy to pull out but create bruises that heal with a greenish shade. Her husband jokes about planting a turmeric tree beside the moringa and having a color fight. Mira goes grocery shopping and to Walmart, no one comments about her greenness. When her children call, which they rarely do, she is cheerful. They don’t ask and she does not tell them that inside she is hollow and dry.
Mira sits alone on her porch during Halloween, calls to kids passing by, and dangles her drumstick fingers in front of them. The children ask if she is a real witch. Their parents comment on how inventive Mira’s costume is. Mira gives the children chocolate. And waits, and waits on her porch, for another Halloween, for the grim reaper, or whoever will give her any attention, until she becomes immobile, she becomes the tree and moringa drumsticks grow on her and everyone talks about the woman who became a tree.
Ani Banerjee is a retiring lawyer and an emerging writer from Houston, Texas, who was born and brought up in Kolkata, India. Her flash fiction has been published in Janus Literary, McQueen’s Quinterly, Grim and Griswold, Flash Flood, and other places.
Lost Balloon 