A nursery child locked in the classroom of a Marathi medium school in the Camp area on a particularly long weekend and forgotten by all till its (the sex was not defined) body was found by a watchman when school re-opened on the Monday morning of June 15.

Like a lot of news stories - when and if taken honestly to their natural conclusion - it turned out to be a glaring hoax. The wailing child-shut-in-a-deserted nursery turned out to be the wayward branches of a Jacaranda tree rubbing against the cable wire in the backyard of the Ethel Gordon Jr College of Education at Quarter gate. The soft screeching noise made by the wire sounded suspiciously like a child or a woman crying and had for the past 25 days led neighbours to believe that something horrible was happening in the junior wing of the college which, according to the individual imaginations, amounted from a dying child to a woman being raped.

``I was in Nagpur when I first heard this rumour that a child had been left locked in the classroom on June 14, and came rushing back,'' says an agitated Sarla Pramod Waghmare, principal, Ethel Gordon Jr College. A thorough check was done of all the classrooms which revealed nothing. The rumours, however, did not stop, merely transgressed to the rape angle. While other than a few press representatives, thanks to anonymous phone calls made to newspaper offices, nobody came to the principal, the hushed whispers continued to do the rounds amongst neighbours, watchmen and richshaw drivers.

``If a child had died at least the parents of the child or the police should have approached me,'' says Waghmare. The neighbouring police chowky, also has no account of the incident, either official or otherwise, and the parents of the reportedly dead child can also not be found. It was then that the school staff heard wailing sounds in the night. Investigations revealed a towering Jacaranda, whose upper branches were constantly rubbing against a newly connected cable wire near the brightly painted sloping roofed primary wing of the college, a sound that got emphasised and dramatised in the dark of the night. It is a now a case of all's well that ends well but not before the college has passed strict instructions to have the accused Jacaranda denuded of its culprit branches!