I struck up a conversation with a bus driver and he related a tale from when he was in the Malaysian army searching for a missing soldier.

During an army training exercise in the jungles of the peninsula, somewhere in the northern region, a soldier went missing. A search party was arranged and after a few days the man was found, in a daze, without his equipment. The bus-driver to be who was one of the people in charge of the search party asked the man what happened.

Apparently, while in the jungle, the missing soldier was approached by a couple, who asked him: “Do you want to come to our home?”

The soldier didn’t say anything. But found he could not fight the urge to be led by the couple deeper into the forest, until he approached a house.

Again he was asked “Do you want to come to our home?”

He did not respond.

This went on for several days until he was found by the search party.

The bus-driver-to-be, as a professional soldier in-charge, could not leave military equipment behind, and sought to find the white coloured house. He had a coincidental insight, and set forth on a hike with his troops until he found a prominent white house in the area.

It started raining while sunny. Roaring winds as if some ill-force wanted to make its presence known.

Some of the troops were apparently from Sarawak, and had knowledge of what was to be done. They uprooted a sapling, and planted it back into the ground with the roots facing the sky. The weather abated. Where there was a house, there now stood an imposing, tall white tree. The missing equipment, laid beneath it.

They retrieved the soldier’s equipment, and left.

All the while they were near the tree, they could see and occasionally hear “them”. Faces peeking from behind the trunks and undergrowth.

The bus-driver in the present day then told me, if that soldier had said “yes” to their invitation in any way, he would not have returned. And would very likely, have become “their” child.