Story: The Praying Tree.

There is a tree right smack in the middle of an empty fragment of unused land. It is a large wattle tree, blooming golden-yellow in the right season with adequate sunlight and water.

It might look like a simple tree, left alone to flourish and ignored by the developers when they come to survey the land for urban projects. Look harder, and you will see plastic bottles hanging on the spreading branches, dangling from raffia string or fishing thread. Walk a little closer, and you will find other objects, items. Glass bottles in various shades, streamers made from colorful cloth (some already leeched of color, because of the prolonged exposure to the sun), old running shoes with inventive use of the laces, little bells and wire hangers twisted into various patterns and shapes.

They call it The Praying Tree. Every weekend, devotees come in their Mercedes Benzes, their Jaguars and their Alfa Romeos; the poorer ones arrive in more modest cars, on bicycles or on foot. Some have to travel around in circles with confused taxi-drivers before reaching the destination. The more experienced cabbies are devotees themselves and they will regale their passengers with stories of miracles, of magic.

On these days, they will bring along personal bits and things, knick-knacks and anything that can hang on the branches. Gifts, they always say. They will stand before the festooned tree, whisper their secret wishes and throw their gifts up into the tree, hoping that the gifts will catch and be suspended on the lofty limbs of the wattle tree.

Sometimes, the gifts, those strange offerings, will fail to hold on and the devotees will stand there, crestfallen, dejected.

At the end of the weekends (and of many weekends), the grass will be trampled by a multitude of slippered and sneakered feet. Litter will be scattered – plastic mineral water bottles, food wrappers and tissue paper. The Praying Tree draws in hawkers and vendors eager to earn easy money from the devotees; they themselves become devotees of another sort.

When the crowds dwindle and all the cars drive away, someone clears away all the little, all the junk without fail. Sometimes, they get fashioned into offerings too and become part of the tree. Nobody knows who this person is. Some of the devotees say that the tree has a caretaker.

So the Praying Tree continues to stand in the middle of the empty unused land, covered with the wishes of devotees, watched over by its quiet caretaker who then take the wishes and send them up to heaven.