The House that Spoke

by Zuni Chopra

  I glanced towards the fireplace through the doorway to the living room to see how he felt about such a discouraging development, and immediately noticed that he was subtly crushing his logs against his sides, so that they splintered and grew rough. Perhaps it was the way the light hit him, but his crest was almost invisible. I gasped, and then turned towards the door.

  The top of the desk seemed to be shifting ever so slightly to catch grey spots of dust swirling in the sunlight. His surface was growing steadily filthier as he did so, as was the oblivious quill’s greying feather.

  My gaze turned to fix on the chair. He was muttering encouragement to the desk under his breath. And yet he looked a little too clean himself . . .

  All at once, acting on pure instinct, I twisted my wrist with my hand pointed towards the chair’s wooden leg.

  I was nowhere near enough to touch him, and yet he moved along with my wrist, contorting until it looked like he might crack under the slightest weight. Startled, I stared down at my palms; I’d never been able to do that before. The chair did not seem to have noticed, yet he looked as though someone enormous had sat on him too hard.

  Well, whatever had just occurred, it had helped me immensely.

  With a lurch, I moved towards the living room. In a small corner of the room was a drawer in which Ma kept the cleaning supplies. Judging by the visible sheen of grey atop it, she hadn’t yet begun to spruce up the house for the visitors’ arrival. ‘Hurry!’ whispered the fireplace, and I nodded hard, moving quicker.

  Pulling out the red cloth that we always used to dust, I pressed it to the dirtiest part of the carpet. I pulled it away and saw, satisfied, that it had turned a shade darker. Perfect.

  Next, I reached for the bottom of the drawer and found the shaggy jhaadu. I was normally the one who swept the house, since it gave Ma a backache. It was already so old I couldn’t think of what to do to make it any less effective, so I finally settled on yanking out a few of its long jute strands. Just then, more of its fibres sailed unbidden into my palm, as though my hand were a magnet to them. I frowned, trying to make sense of it.

  Hearing Ma’s footsteps, I slammed the drawer shut and ran upstairs. When I entered the bedroom, my jaw hit the ground, smashed through it and continued to fall. The sheets had sprawled themselves across the floor, the bed had more wrinkles in its fabric than Tathi’s forehead and every painting not only seemed faded and dull, but was also tilted ludicrously to the side.

  ‘What do you think?’ trilled the empress, twirling in her grimy frame as if showing off a new dress. ‘Most of it was my idea, of course.’

  I nodded quickly, unable to speak. There was no way she’d bring them to see the bedroom now! It seemed as though embittered, shrunken demons had gnawed, slapped and scraped at everything with their long, sharp claws. I moved back into the library, where I was greeted with a similar sight. Each book stood crooked in the bookshelf, and I had arrived just in time to see a final few leap around and switch places with each other, so that colours, sizes and genres clashed to make a mixed jumble of books within a maze of shelves. The armchair seemed to have puffed himself out to the point of bursting. He looked fat and uncomfortable, his springs pressing against his surface and attempting to erupt right out.

  I shut the door, silently euphoric at the effort my friends had put in despite the twinge of guilt at how Ma would attempt frantically to put everything right again. But it was better to keep the house and cost Ma a bit of effort than to lose something so irreplaceable. Besides, it was her own fault—she’d decided to sell the house in the first place, and hadn’t even bothered to ask me about it!

  It was almost appalling how pleased the realtor was with Ma’s saag. I supposed he was too dim-witted to figure out how to make some himself. While he slurped at the saag like a skinny, sly lizard, Ma listened eagerly to his comments on where they were with the sale.

  I stood in the doorway, trying to see if his glossy, gelled hair would deflate and slump against his scalp if I stared hard enough.

  ‘Well, it is most surprising, but out of the three potential buyers, only one can be here today. I had been under the notion that all three had agreed to come, but one of them sent word yesterday to say he had a crisis at work, and another phoned me not a moment ago to say he wouldn’t be free for a while, on account of his son’s injury. It is most curious . . .’

  He stared into the distance, frowning, and then shook his head as though startled by a fly.

  ‘Anyhow, these days, you simply can’t count on people to be punctual. Not regular, you know? Never keep to time.’

  Ma was nodding vigorously, showing most plainly that she agreed with his every word. As far as I could remember, she’d never showed up on time for anything in her life.

  I shared a disgusted look with the desk, who, unfortunately, was serving as a makeshift table for the two of them.

  The doorbell sounded. Ma flung the door open even as she plastered a delighted smile across her face.

  There, standing at our doorstep, was a most repulsive man. He was short and squat, with dark, beady eyes, and hair so unnaturally white that he appeared ill. Behind him, the sky twisted and thundered as a troubled sea. A leaf, faded and yellowing, trailed through the air behind him, landing dejectedly against rough soil. It couldn’t have been the chinar’s, though. Our chinar never sheds.

  He stepped in and the door immediately slammed shut behind him, as though it had been fighting to close against Ma’s grip.

  Ma wasted no time in decking the doorway with rose petals for his arrival. Once she had finished introducing herself and trilling on about how happy she was to have him visit, she pulled me forward for a similar performance.

  ‘And this here is my daughter, Zoon!’

  ‘How nice.’

  ‘Zoon, this is Mr Bhukhari.’

  I stood like a dummy, my smile tight and closed. Predictably, that was not near enough for Ma.

  ‘Zu, don’t you want to say hello?’

  I gritted my teeth.

  For the first time since this man had arrived, I looked right into his eyes.

  That was my first mistake.

  His eyes were dark holes of storming, pitch black, forcing an icy, shuddering cold into my soul. They scuttled over his face, seemingly multiplying and ensnaring me in a silken cocoon of anguish and despair. Hopelessness surged through me, disrupting the idle thoughts of a simpler morning.

  I tore myself from his shattering gaze. Horrified, I looked away.

  ‘Nice to meet you . . .’ The words stumbled from my mouth, my confident airs and graces tripping over a stone jutting out fiercely from the pavement.

  Despite the gentle drizzle against the windows, his skin was utterly parched, as if it had all but evaporated before it touched him. A smile slithered over the corners of his cracked lips. ‘Oh, the pleasure’s all mine.’

  Ma smiled, pleased at this show of goodwill.

  She busied herself with pouring four cups of noon chai she knew I didn’t like.

  My eyes, once shining with superiority, never left the carpet.

  But it mattered little; no more words were expected of me. Mr Bhukhari was seated and handed some chai. More saag, accompanied by hot pakoras, was promptly served. And talk of the sale began slipping into idle conversation until, like parasites, it grew to lord over the table.

  ‘Yes, I am very pleased with the look of the house. I’ve hardly any changes I’d want to make,’ barked Mr Bhukhari, bringing the chai to his lips.

  ‘Oh, that’s wonderful!’ simpered Ma. I threw up a little in my mouth. What had happened to her? ‘And you know, we are so honoured to be selling it to such a respected politician!’

  Yes, so honoured. So very honoured. Utterly and completely bursting with the honour.

  ‘So,’ put in the realtor in a business-like fashion, ‘when would we be ready to sign papers for the sale? You know, of course, Mrs Razdan, that before we sell we’d need to call in some professionals to . . . clean it
up.’ His eyes lingered on the desk and the chair, which were looking dusty, creaky and ready to collapse at a moment’s notice. I smiled to myself. He continued briskly, ‘That, I presume, should take at least a week or so. And I would need to, of course, review the contract with the both of you and ensure you both agree with its terms. Then we’d need to go over taxes and the like.’

  Ma nodded a bit too fast, like a schoolboy fighting to give the impression of comprehension. ‘Oh, sure, we’ll have all that done. Immediately.’

  ‘I’ll be ready to buy it as soon as possible,’ said Mr Bhukhari.

  ‘And we’ll be ready to sell it as soon as possible!’ said Ma.

  I winced as fake laughter swarmed upwards from their throats.

  I had started a shop, got married, grown old and left all I had to my children by the time Mr Bhukhari was done seeing the house. He had stopped and peered at each object, commented on every thread of the carpet and questioned each grain of white in the wood. Though at first I’d been pleased to see how the dust and clutter in the house was making him uncomfortable, by the time they reached the library, I had collapsed by the fireplace from boredom.

  Finally, Ma was ushering them out of the door. Mr Bhukhari wasn’t smiling, and I took that to mean that our attempts at sabotaging the sale had worked. But then again, from what I’d seen of him, he hardly ever smiled. The realtor said something about further visitors while adjusting his hat for the final time. The door closed behind the two of them with a satisfying thump.

  Ma gave a great sigh, presumably because her cheeks had grown exhausted from keeping that horrid smile in place that long.

  ‘So,’ she began, and I was relieved to hear her voice had returned to its reasonable self, ‘I was thinking maybe we should go out today, do something fun.’

  I paused. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, Zoons, I just think I haven’t seen a lot of you lately. And maybe we need some time to sort things out between us.’

  She reached over and patted my head. It felt like hot chocolate was radiating through her palm and into me. I smiled without meaning to.

  ‘All right. Where do you want to go?’

  My excitement responded before she could, as though a jack-in-the-box of childish happiness had burst open inside me. ‘Oh, let’s go for a shikara ride! Please?’

  She beamed.

  ‘And we could buy some strawberries . . . and mushrooms . . .’

  ‘It isn’t even strawberry season!’

  ‘We might find some!’

  ‘You’re hungry again, aren’t you?’

  We laughed.

  It had taken us a while to reach the lake, given our leisurely stroll and idle chatter. We’d stopped once or twice along the way, having seen Rani Auntie near one of the local temples and tarrying to ask her whether she’d like to come along. She’d shivered through a shake of her head, bundled carefully in her yellow shawl; the wind didn’t agree with her much. Now that we were there, my nose had gone slightly red, my eyes glistening with the cold, and I, too, was bundled up like a jalebi so that my smiling mouth was hidden beneath a thick scarf. The weather seemed to have worsened. The sky was dark and heavy, hiding the sun, and the clouds hung down like clusters of poisonous grapes. A few raindrops smacked down on us, fat, frosty and unpleasant.

  Shankaracharya Hill, once a grand, motherly figure against the landscape of Kashmir, was engulfed by grey fog that clung to its surface like suffocating gas.

  The water was black and thick like oil, splashing noisily against the cracked rocks on the bank. The shikaras clinked gently against one another, like the last few coins inside the small, frayed pouches of their owners.

  The cherry trees were few and bare, sprinkled around the blackened stone. I pined for their pink blossoms drifting gently across the clear water.

  A little way off, the hawkers croaked out pleas to passers-by, flinging up dented necklaces, splintering carvings, last hopes. Their tired legs sat rough and unused against bits of cloth, the only thing shielding them from the filth of the bumpy road. Their eyes had receded into their wrinkled faces, exhausted and hopeless from all they’d been made to see.

  A short distance up ahead, a starving stray, his belly a concave hollow, sniffed hopefully at a dead leaf as it landed beside his paw.

  Ma made her way to the shikara owners, her dupatta catching on a stone as she went, so that she nearly stumbled over towards them. She made to ask them in swift Hindi as to how much one ride would cost. I recognized her tone to be the one she used when bargaining for salwars and the like.

  ‘Sorry, ma’am. Aaj toh koi bhi nahin ja raha hai. No one going now.’

  Ma turned to me, a disappointed look on her face.

  ‘None of them will take us out right now, Zoon. The weather is too harsh.’

  As if to punctuate her point, a disgustingly large raindrop splattered against my forehead.

  We trooped back home in silence, drained and cold. Even the hot, fresh handful of chana we bought on the way back, accompanied by a jibe about the rain from the unusually pallid chana man, did little to nudge my lips to break into a smile; I barely contributed to the conversation as Ma congratulated him on becoming a father. Each step echoed how little I wanted to return; Ma was sure to begin cleaning out the rooms or arranging to meet electricians, painters and plumbers to see how quickly they could finish work. I knew this because she was not the sort of person to leave a task unfinished or half done, even for a moment.

  As we started on the familiar road to our house, a few gulaals dangling off Lameeya Auntie’s balcony caught my eye. The insides were black as a bee’s stripes, and the petals appeared as deep red wine dripping from its centre.

  All at once, I was struck by a very persuasive idea. Acting on impulse, I turned quickly to Ma.

  ‘Ma, can I go visit Altaf instead?’

  She peered at me, surprised.

  ‘Just because, you know, I was all excited about coming out, and now we can’t go out on the lake so . . .’

  She blinked once, then nodded.

  ‘Okay. Sure. But do you really want to, Zoon? I mean, you never showed any particular liking for him when you met.’

  ‘Oh, but I’d only just seen him then. I want to get to know him better. And I’d love to visit Lameeya Auntie and Bhasharat Uncle!’

  A small sigh escaped her lips.

  ‘All right. Don’t be back late, don’t break anything, and remember your manners.’

  ‘Iwillgreatthanksbye!’

  Before she could say anything else, I did a quick U-turn and zipped back down the road towards Altaf’s house.

  Chapter Five

  I saw him in front of the house, scattering a few flowers across the doorstep. Lameeya Auntie had often told me that this was good luck. He was going about it rather grumpily, though, tossing the flowers over each other; I supposed he hadn’t been given a choice. His white cap was pulled thin like a second skin across his skull. The gate leaned tiredly against the grass, too exhausted to be welcoming as it once was. Faded scratches in its wood proclaimed the family name—Ali.

  Their house had often given me the impression of a sweet old woman in a rocking chair, knitting a scarf for a son who’ll never come home.

  Small bits of jumbled wet cloth had been thrown over balconies meshed at odd edges of the house. Two of the four windows had been thrown open, their lattices forming twisted patterns of daylight, and a light hum of chatter could be heard from within.

  Altaf’s room was so easily picked out from the line-up; a jumble of small stones were scattered across the dusty windowsill, accompanied by a small wax statue of a cricket player, chipped at the edges so that it shone in the sunlight. The desk whose corner peeked out from the window was littered with crumpled paper and one battered notebook, open to a page displaying rough, hurried pencil marks woven neatly together.

  I cleared my throat and Altaf looked up. He smiled when he saw me, chores forgotten, a smile that I was surprised to find myself fully r
eturn as he came bobbing over. It seemed he was half full of helium; he could never quite remain firmly on the ground.

  ‘Hi! What’s up?’ he asked as he neared me.

  ‘Oh, nothing much. I just thought I’d come over and say hello.’

  ‘Sure! Do you want to come in?’ For a moment, I hesitated. It had been all well and good to tell my own mother that I’d go visit, but now that the moment was truly upon me it seemed a bit awkward to be bursting into someone’s home like that. I’d only been to Lameeya Auntie’s house a few times before, that too when neither of her sons were home. Heck, I hadn’t even known Altaf properly until a few days earlier. He was nice enough, and I had taken a liking to his buoyant and ditzy nature, but I didn’t know if I was welcome to invite myself over whenever it suited me. Really, this seemed like a worse and worse idea with every word I uttered.

  Altaf obviously noticed my discomfort.

  ‘You don’t really HAVE to come in . . . I just thought . . . do you want to . . . um . . . play hopscotch instead?’

  He gestured to small chalk markings against the pavement to the side of the house. Illegible markings—once numbers, presumably—had been scrawled roughly within haphazard blocks.

  Had I been slightly younger and more impulsive, I might have let escape a loud noise of disgust. I had never truly been one for hopscotch; I hated anything that got me sweaty or muddy for no discernible reason.

  ‘Oh . . . no . . . I don’t think so . . . I don’t really . . . play hopscotch.’

  ‘All right. Maybe we could go riding instead?’

  I had been on the verge of calling the whole thing off when his final suggestion beckoned me to reconsider.

  ‘Well . . . why not . . . but . . . it’s still raining,’ I responded weakly.

  ‘It’s only a drizzle! Come on, let’s get the horses.’