Of the myriad of things my grandmother was afraid of, the actual spirit that haunted the orange tree in our backyard was shockingly not one of them. All of my friends and family had had terrifying encounters with the spirit, some too gruesome to even write about. Many a time, my father had offered to cut it down, but my grandmother was staunchly against it.

"Absolutely not," said my grandmother, who at sixty, was still very much the matriarch of the family. "That'll just anger her, and then what good will that be? Leave her alone. Besides," she would add, in a melancholy tone. "She's just lonely."

"It's not a she," my father retorted, rather miffed at being shot down for a tenth time. 

"Of course it's a she," my grandmother retorted. "I talked to her. Such fine manners. Definitely a she."

"You talked to it?" my father asked, horrified. Talking to a ghost was definitely more disturbing than gendering them.

"Of course I did," said my grandmother. "It's only the polite thing to do. That reminds me," she turned to me, seated at the edge of the kitchen, close to the fire. "Rake the dead leaves. She doesn't like things to get messy."

Since I was more scared of my grandmother than any arboreal ghost, I went, rake in hand. It was a warm winter day, and the orange tree was in full bloom. The leaves shook softly in the passing wind, more inviting than sinister. I suppose it did look a bit forlorn. I could not imagine it had many visitors—not even the most rambunctious kid in the village would dare pluck an orange from its branches. Littered at its roots were a carpet of browned leaves and temple offerings long left to rot in the shade. Just a few days ago, one of my many detestably religious cousins had tried burning incense under it, in hopes of chasing away the spirit. That particular cousin was now no longer religious, much to the dismay of my aunt and my delight. 

I sighed and started raking, whistling to myself. 

"Psst."

At first, I paid no attention to the sound, not because I thought it might be the leaves or something equally unrelated, but simply because I did not hear it. A habitual daydreamer, I was admittedly quite lost in some half-remembered fantasy. It took a sizable orange to my head to realise the spirit had been trying to communicate with me.

"Ouch!" I dropped the rake and glared fitfully up at the tree. "Grandmother was wrong about you. That was very rude."

Silence. Then: "Well, you weren't listening. Or cleaning."

Valid point. "Still, an orange to the head is too much. You couldn't have tapped me on the shoulders with one of your branches or something?"

"Well." Silence again. "Sorry."

I did not expect that. "Oh, okay," I said, and then decided to test my luck. "Can I have that orange? I'm quite hungry."

"Unbelievable!" the spirit screeched, the sound reminiscent of my mother. I winced, stepping several feet away. Then she composed herself. "Absolutely not. You haven't even cleared the leaves. Instead, you just wasted my time and my orange."

I was in no mood to clear the leaves, and the orange looked really juicy. "How about I tell you a story instead? I'm quite good, I hear." A lie. "In fact, I just made one up right now." Not a lie.

The spirit deliberated her options. She must've had more faith in my storytelling abilities than my cleaning, because she agreed with a disgruntled sigh. 

I honestly can't remember what story I told her. It's all half-strung words and images; the mellow winter sun on my back, the wind whistling through her branches, and the tang of fresh oranges in my mouth. What I do remember is going back the next day, paper in hand as I read her the latest news. Napping underneath on drowsy afternoons. Laughing in the shade. Exchanging gossip around the village. 

"No, no, the shroud-maker's husband had an affair with the candle-seller," I stressed, peeling an orange. I was always careful to throw the peels elsewhere, Grandmother was definitely right about one thing; she did value cleanliness. "So she refused to weave the candle-seller's uncle's funeral shroud."

"Ah," mused the spirit. "I thought it was the shepherdess. But that was the previous one, I think."

"Oh. That I did not know," I replied. So he was a serial adulterer. "But the husband felt bad, so he secretly told her where his wife kept the spare ones. So when the candle-seller's nephew crept in at night to steal one, the shroud-maker assumed him to be a thief, and beat him black and blue!"

The branches shook round me, which I knew by now to be laughter. "Ah, she should have beat her philandering husband instead. Perhaps next time."

In the midst of all this, she still continued to be her most terrifying self to anyone besides me and my grandmother, naturally. My father gave up on his dreams of having the tree cut down, after finding not just one, but two fierce defendants of it.

"Betrayed by my own flesh-and-blood," he would sneer at mealtimes, but for the most part, he had made peace with it. 

But the rest of the village had not. 

There were many excuses given later, and most of them had nothing to do with the ghost, at least on the surface. The road needed to be widened, the boundary wall needed to be broadened, the neighbours complained of the oranges in their yard rotting since she allowed no one to pick them (that part was not true; you just had to ask politely and promise to throw the peels elsewhere). But the actual reason was simpler than all of them; the orange-tree had whacked the village headman's son on the head when he tried to make off with one to impress his friends, and the lad's bruised ego had driven him straight to his father, who was just elated for a chance to one-up my grandmother, who kept staunchly opposing his atrocious views at the village council. 

The orange-tree was chopped down by the headman himself on a rainy afternoon, despite the protestations of my whole family, my father included. The wood, all of it, even the stump, was given over to the priest to burn for pyre in hopes of exorcising the spirit entirely, if it still remained. 

The priest used it for the headman's pyre a week later. He had come down with severe abdominal pain and the day after chopping the tree down, then promptly died, an event which was mourned little but quoted for a long time in the village as a precautionary tale against pissing off fastidious tree-spirits.

I didn't go back. It felt obscene, like trespassing a grave. But my grandmother did. 

A week later, she entered the kitchen with a basket of ripe, juicy oranges. "Her last gift," she said. 

I felt inexplicably sad. 

"What do I do with them?" 

My grandmother—who looks six times both ways before crossing a road, who is afraid of loud alarms and thunderstorms alike, who is the last person one would expect to poison a headman and get away with it— casually handed me an orange. 

"If you've got a story to share," she said. "Then I've got an orange to spare."