It is a Tree like many others. Neither old nor distinctively tall, it has rough, brittle bark and a pile of bricks at its base. Sticks of incense left unlit between the bricks might mark the tree out elsewhere, but not in Southeast Asia, where trees are the infrastructure of an Animist spirit world. What sets the tree apart here is a sign that reads, “KILLING TREE AGAINST WHICH EXECUTIONERS BEAT CHILDREN.”

You imagine it, while you read the sign. An infant still soft with baby fat is held by its legs and swung against the trunk of the tree repeatedly, until its skull cracks. The executioner is a country boy of seventeen without an education. A thorough indoctrination has failed to prepare him for the job of killing infants, but the boy obeys out of fear, and it is his horror you feel most keenly, after he has discarded the child with its mother in a mass grave. You want the words on the sign to be nonsensical – just words, like Noam Chomsky’s “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously” – because what they point to is black, bilious, mad. The tree on the other hand is ordinary, and it is its ordinariness that starts to work on you after a while, when you reach out to rub the rough bark, wondering how genocide could leave its blunt instrument unmarked

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