The House that Spoke

by Zuni Chopra

  ZUNI CHOPRA

  The House that Spoke

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE HOUSE THAT SPOKE

  Zuni Chopra is a fifteen-year-old author who has published two books of poetry. She has a passion for fantasy writing and poetry, and her favourite authors include Neil Gaiman and Lewis Carroll. She lives in Mumbai with her parents, older brother and their six dogs. This is her first novel.

  Advance Praise for the Book

  ‘It beautifully captures the air, the fragrance, the culture, the relationships, the landscape of Kashmir . . . the true soul of Kashmir . . . a Kashmir that manages to retain its natural beauty, its culture and its essence of harmony in the midst of the black shadow of violence and bloodshed. More importantly, it captures the actual feelings of young Kashmiris, both Pandit and Muslim, who have, as in this book, experienced beauty . . . and peace in their homes, even though they are surrounded by violence and bloodshed’—Masood Hussain

  ‘Extremely confident, lyrical and magical . . . I loved its Studio Ghibli qualities as in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away or Howl’s Moving Castle—but this is definitely a Zuni Chopra production. The backdrop is terrific and well handled’—Adrian Levy

  ‘Merges fantasy and historical elements with the ills in modern Kashmir, coupled with a message of hope. Perhaps only a child could have the free-flowing imagination to conjure up a story like this. I was fascinated by the way it was told’—Amish Tripathi

  To my closest friends, Anjali, Ish and Shreya, for all the times we escaped the world to dream of something better

  And, as it has always been, to Kashmir

  ‘You’re not the same as you were before. You were much more . . . muchier. You’ve lost your muchness.’

  Lewis Carroll

  Chapter One

  Kashmir, Bharat

  1591

  The Pandit stroked his tangled beard with the air of a man quite pleased with his work. He stood—one gnarled hand on his withered hip, his charcoal-coloured pheran billowing around his twined ankles, his turban heavy upon his wrinkled forehead—staring at the majestic infusion of wood and brick. A house. His house. His masterpiece. Life hummed through its wooden walls. Cloaked in chinar, enveloped by the snowy mountain range, it stared into the royal-blue evening sky. He could sense the magic flowing through it, and it made his success glow even brighter in the gentle moonlight. He leaned proudly against the sturdy, rough bark of the tree.

  How pleased Emperor Akbar would be! Why, all the land would know of his glories . . . of his . . . but . . . no! No one must ever find this house! Perhaps it was better if . . . if no one were to know . . . it would not take away from the power of his house after all . . . it would only ensure its safety. He glanced up at the house once more.

  It was indeed a masterpiece, of which only a single room was breathing.

  1752

  It was late—almost half past ten. A small troop of weary British soldiers was moving heavily through the thick dunes of darkened snow, their backs to the towering snow-capped mountain range, as they sought shelter in the maze of a frosted wood. Their gruff lieutenant, who was particularly exasperated with the icy, untameable winds of this treacherously exotic country, was barking directions at regular intervals between frustration and fatigue. But they’d lost their way so thoroughly in the cold winter’s night that it was all they could do to keep walking. Their eyes stung and squinted against the sudden sharp gusts of air. White knuckles gripped at shiny, new, heavy metal weapons that had proved useless against the wilderness of the night. The trees above them were swathed in seas of freshly fallen snow, pressing against one another so that they cut off even the smallest glimmer of the scattered stars.

  Kout I. Peterson, a small, unwieldy soldier of the troop, with a tuft of brown hair and a rather crooked nose, brought up the rear. Short as he was, he could barely see past the man in front of him. The muzzle of his thick, bloated weapon smacked against his reddening thigh as he pushed his protesting legs forward. His bad ankle was grinding against his bones, twisted and swollen, his socks thick and frigid with melted ice. Every now and then, he would feel his leg sink into a sinister, hidden pit of sleet, so that his rough, flat feet burnt from the cold. His tongue felt fat and heavy, his mouth parched.

  There came a loud, jarring crack as his boot pressed down upon a crushed scrap of rusty metal oozing out like a bubble of blood on the pure silver landscape. Had it not been for this sudden noise, he would never even have realized the contact, for he could—thankfully—no longer feel his feet. He glanced down at his boot as though it were a stranger’s, seeing it cutting into the dull glow of red iron jutting out from the shade of a fir tree. He thought abruptly and longingly of fresh cerise strawberry jam, dripping off warm, crusty white bread milled from the grains of the field, accompanied by steaming tea in his wife’s new white china teacups. Ah, to be home! But home was some 5000 miles away. And with a sickening crunch he smacked painfully into reality—he was not home. He was here, in this uncivilized, bizarre and outlandish terrain, surrounded by blizzards and yetis and chilled, raw air, so far away from anything of value that he wondered if London had forgotten him.

  What an honour it had been then, to write his name with great flourish upon the registration form, to receive his smart new uniform, to walk proudly into the pubs in the evenings and proclaim his undying patriotism, a patriotism he now felt was teetering on the brink of extinction. The futility and utter childishness of their task—to head to Rawalpindi and aid the army’s trading company, which hoped to expand further west—seemed to weigh down upon him in the night.

  Just then, as though some native angel had taken pity on his fate, he saw the smallest chinks of light begin to show themselves from behind the trees. The droplets of gold multiplied until they gently merged with one another and grew brighter, till finally, the troop burst out into a small clearing with an old, wooden house before them. For a moment, they were all struck by a feeling none of them could describe—a sudden calm, yet an undefined, strange sense of foreboding. Their eyes shifted to a towering, deep brown tree beside them, which looked like it had a river of paint flowing within, bringing out the colour each crevice held. Its branches stretched out above them, as though trying to catch the wind.

  ‘Sir?’ came the voice of one of the troop. ‘Um . . . Lieutenant Hawthorne, sir? Are we spending the night here?’ The lieutenant swung around at the question. He shook his head to throw off this lingering sense of curious apprehension at the welcoming warmth and shelter. He was the lieutenant, for God’s sake! He had to pull himself together!

  Shaking the snow off his weathered boots, he barked, ‘Right then, gents, we’ve reached camp for the night. Tomorrow morning, up bright and early then, and we can ask this house for directions.’ He paused a moment, biting his tongue and closing his eyes, before altering his sentence to fit his status. ‘I meant, of course, the people in this house. Well, get yourselves in order then, and all change out of your pockets and handed over.’

  There were a few grumblings from the soldiers.

  ‘All change OUT of your pockets, I said!’

  Once they’d handed over what he thought would be enough to persuade the owners to give them a room and some food, he climbed up the creaky front steps, taking care to avoid slicks of ice
, and rapped sharply on the front door. For a few moments, there was no reply. The lieutenant was about to simply march in—that’s just the sort of man he was, you understand—when the door was gently pulled open from the inside. In the doorway stood a young woman who seemed to be in her early thirties, callouses betraying her suffering, wide eyes her fear at facing strange men, pursed lips, her alien local speech.

  Instantly, every man on the doorstep felt suffused with a cosy, quiet calm—not a heated, eerie sort of silence, but the calm that wafts like pure cotton around one’s healing heart. They stood jovially in the doorway despite their chilled limbs, and the lieutenant spoke in a slow, loud voice that seemed to have lost its old gruff grunting about the weather and the soldiers and the time.

  ‘Why, good evening, young lady. How do you do?’ he began. ‘My troop and I were looking for somewhere to spend the night. Would you be amic—kind enough to allow us a bedroom or two?’

  She did not seem to understand, or perhaps she was simply formulating an acceptable reply. The lieutenant stood as patiently as his instinct allowed him, out on the porch under the dusty, white-flecked sky.

  She opened her mouth tentatively, as though this was the first sentence she’d ever utter. But before she could respond, there came a great clattering of frantic footsteps. The lieutenant, who had been expecting to see a small horde of people, perhaps her children, raised his eyebrows as one scrawny, wrinkled man joined her at the door.

  His face was a crumbling chaos of bumps and ridges, so that at first, his mouth had appeared to the troop as nothing more than another wrinkle chiselled into his leathery skin. His eyes burnt like sputtering torches within his frozen face. His twisted beard was short and scraggly, so scruffy that it resembled a bird’s nest, abandoned for the winter. Strands of deadened, grey hair were squirming out of the thick, black turban resting over his shrunken head.

  When he spoke, his voice came cracked and raspy through the cutting air. ‘What you want with this place?’

  ‘My troop and I would like to stay,’ the lieutenant repeated. ‘We’re just passing through. We’ve lost our way, and we don’t have anywhere else to go.’

  The man’s pupils grew wide and deep, a winter tempest reflected in the darkness of their depths. ‘No!’ he muttered angrily. ‘No,’ he repeated, louder then, his voice a thundering rumble. ‘I sorry, but no one allowed to stay here.’

  Lieutenant Hawthorne was on the verge—what with his own shivering shoulders and how comfortable the house seemed to be—of asking his men to shove their way in and make him tea, when he recalled they had another, universal means of persuasion at their disposal. He handed over the scraps of twisted banknotes clutched in his fat fist.

  The woman inhaled sharply, her eyes darting from note to note, trying to quickly calculate how much it was. Her collarbone grew piercingly pronounced with the force of her shallow breath, her fingers suddenly fidgeting unceasingly, and her eyes betrayed her feverish excitement.

  The man turned to her, his expression one of utmost indignation. ‘No!’ he repeated to her, looking astonished at her reaction. What he said next, they did not know, for it was said quickly and quietly, in a tongue they had neither heard nor heard of.

  Her lip curled with something close to defiance as he spoke. She seemed to brush him off, her expression one of superior calm and control. Without waiting for any further retaliation, she snatched the wad from the lieutenant’s clammy palm and bade them all come in.

  They entered a small, cosy room, the sharp clicking of their boots cushioned by the carpet, whose soft wool swayed gently like bursting algae at the bottom of the shallowest sea. In the next room, they caught sight of a fireplace with some sort of carving on it. The blaze cackled merrily, lighting up the frosted crystals against the window’s glass. The men made instantly for that room, presuming it to be the dining area. But before the lieutenant could follow his troop, their host gripped his hand with remarkable strength for the age of his rickety bones. He pointed towards a trapdoor, dusty and unused, lying towards the back of the room, and thrust his forearms together to make an X in front of the lieutenant’s face. ‘No,’ he repeated with the air of a man trying his best to convince himself the world’s problems could be solved if only people heeded simple instructions. ‘You must no go there. Or you cannot stay. Right?’

  ‘Right, sure,’ the lieutenant replied. His host did not seem convinced, and stared at him reproachfully, the eyes boring through his skin.

  Just to satisfy the old guy, Lieutenant Hawthorne snatched the closest troop member and, signalling pointedly at the trapdoor, bellowed, ‘This is off limits, okay? Tell the rest of them.’ The soldier nodded hurriedly, his skull rattling in his face, and then turned to pick up the plate he’d just dropped on the floor. The lieutenant turned back to his host only to find that he had yanked the carpet over the trapdoor and seated himself firmly upon it with a beady glint in his eye.

  Then he waddled towards his dinner. Blasted foreigners.

  Kout I. Peterson lay quiet and motionless in his sleeping bag, utterly and undoubtedly awake. He had turned himself over so many times that he’d quite forgotten which side he’d started on. The moth-eaten scrap of cloth their hostess had provided as a blanket barely covered his torso, and he was kept up by the consistent chattering of his own teeth. Moonlight gushed in through a nearby window, and was reflected brightly off the snowflakes outside. While it was breathtaking, it didn’t lend itself to sleep.

  Kout shut his eyes. He put a pillow over his head. He ran his hands over his small, round face. He counted sheep. He steadied his breathing. He tucked his knees up to his chin. He made up a story in his head. Getting a little desperate, he counted goats. Finally, he could simply no longer deny it. There was no way he was getting a wink of sleep tonight.

  He looked enviously at his troop members, tangled about on the smooth wooden floor, half on and half off their sleeping bags, dreaming of the smell of home.

  His stiff shoulders jerked with the cold. When he blinked, his eyes stung. Frustrated, he gave a great sigh and watched his breath steam up in the frosty air. That was the last straw.

  Slipping out of his sleeping bag, keeping his blanket as warmly tucked around him as he could, he moved quietly towards the door, hoping to find some extra bed sheets or a heater. He scraped at the floor with the very tips of his toes, navigating his way through the jumble of sleeping bags that barred his way like fat bugs, trying not to wake the others. He was lucky; each plank of wood kept still and silent beneath his feet as he crept out of the room.

  Standing in the doorway, he whisper-yelled to try and get his hostess’s attention. But he didn’t even know her name, let alone whether she understood his English. He moved slowly downstairs, wondering where she was sleeping and why she hadn’t heard him. Just a deep sleeper, he assured himself.

  But there was nothing in the darkened living room except a few small dust motes hovering in the silver air.

  He backed out, his bad ankle catching on a latch beneath the carpet near the bottom of the stairs as he did so. He looked down with a jerk, surprised. Slowly, as though peeling away chipping wallpaper, he pulled the carpet off the ground, revealing a small brass latch hammered within the wood, deep crevices outlining a hidden door. Puzzlement formed furrows against his doughy skin. Could his hostess be there? Lowering himself to the ground, he cracked open the trapdoor, finding it was rather larger than he’d imagined, and looked inside.

  Before he could raise it all the way, a series of small brass chains snapped to attention, preventing the opening from widening.

  He was met with a low, prolonged hiss of steam from a tangled mass of rusty heaters. After letting out a slight ‘Oh’ of understanding, he felt his hopes rise fractionally for the first time that night. He didn’t need to wake up his hosts, after all; he could simply turn up the heat and head back to bed.

  A sting of irritation followed this realization. If only he could get past the chain locks. What was the n
eed for his hosts to bolt up the boiler room? As though it carried a lost kingdom of wealth! They were just heaters, after all. Pulling out his penknife from his back pocket, he started to snap through the ageing metal cables. Despite the crack of rusty brass, no one seemed to hear him.

  Finally, he pulled the trapdoor further up, the wood scratching against his nails, and caught sight of a small metallic flight of stairs leading down into the boiler room; he hadn’t noticed it before.

  But just as he made to hoist himself into a climbing position, an odd sensation quivered down his spine, like a snake slithering between his bones. He froze, his mouth dangling half-open and his eyes large and round. He turned his gaze once more to the heaters; they stared back up at him innocently—eerie, like possessed schoolchildren, quiet and calm.

  Kout bit his tongue, sternly telling himself he’d imagined it. Yet he could not rip his unfocused gaze away. He shook his head, trying to clear it, and muttered to himself that he really ought to get back to bed. He made to reach for the trapdoor’s handle—

  And let out a wild gasp. He had felt it again—an odd, urgent sensation, as though something were closing in upon him. Something was down there . . . something dangerous. His first thought was to call his troop. Then he realized that if he pulled a stunt like that, they’d think he’d lost his marbles. And none of them would take kindly to being woken at a time like this for some vague imagining of his. He’d be in hot water with the lieutenant after less than a month of being in the army! No, he mustn’t wake any of them up!

  Slowly, tentatively, Kout placed his bare, rough heel on the first step. It pressed against him, a sliver of a tundra glacier rather than metal.

  With each step, he knew with greater certainty that he ought to have turned back the step before, yet he couldn’t turn away, lured by the call of a hidden siren.