Word Count: 4955 | Reading Time: 17 min
I think you should tiptoe around your house.
When it’s half past midnight and the crickets have stopped chirping, that’s when you should sneak around. Observe this place you consider home settling into its bones. Hear it breathe. Let yourself be engulfed by it. Put your right cheek to the ground and watch the shadows shift under closed doors. Steal from your sister’s nightstand and place your offerings where two walls meet. Sit. Stand. Feel – as much as you can, whenever you can. Don’t stop even when your mother catches you in the middle of the night with your ear pressed to the drain in your kitchen. Not even when she screams at you for being awake on a school night or threatens to tell your father. I think you should do it for months on end until your family quietly accepts it. Until the sight of you scurrying on all fours round and round the living room, bumping into furniture, is not unseemly. If your brother gets too scared to go to the washroom anymore because sometimes you like to wait there, that is not your problem. You must, you must, experience this kingdom of yours. There’s so much to see. So many conversations to listen to.
But your parents don’t understand that, and neither do your siblings. Life could take place right beside them and they wouldn’t notice. That is why you must. You must scratch the walls and pry away their secrets. Your mother will cry and blame her husband, her naseeb, her God, but you mustn’t take notice of her wails and complaints. Your father will ignore it all. He’ll pretend he can’t feel you breathing in his ear. He’ll screw his eyes shut and tell himself he’s just imagining the heat blowing over his face. Your brothers and sisters will leave, come back, and then leave again. But by then, you will no longer care for them.
#
A pan sizzled in the empty kitchen. I smelled kebabs being served; heard the clanking of cutlery and scraping of plates. But I knew if I went out to the living room right now, the dining table would be void of dishes; the kitchen all cleaned up with no food in sight.
Khaala sat up straight in her bed, her mehendi-coloured hair a mess around her head, cards scattered about her. She had fallen asleep after playing alone. I had tried to learn some card games for her once but I had been hopeless at them, and my brother wasn’t the most patient of teachers. She looked past the open door and smiled at the vacant dining room.
I tried to fuse my back with the wall, praying it would swallow me whole. It was bad enough that I was stuck in this dingy room with flickering bulbs and a ceiling fan that groaned with every rotation; I didn’t want a hub of jinns watching me on top of it, too. If I were to pry myself off the wall and look to the right, I’d be in full view of them. And if I were to walk across the room, past the table and multiple sofas and chairs, I’d see the open kitchen where the cook would make parathas drenched in ghee for us in the morning, but now would be filled with scents of pulao and chatni, and pakoras. I suddenly longed for Dilawar Uncle’s signature karak chai. I craved its warmth, the way it would feel going down my throat, easing my insides. Ammi would never let me have caffeine, and I personally didn’t care for its taste, but it reminded me of home. Home, where Baji would lull me to sleep with a story she made up or a poem she read somewhere, where I didn’t feel alone or scared because there was always an adult to turn to. I wished my sister had stayed back with me but someone had to cook Abba’s breakfast the next morning.
Khaala hummed a familiar lullaby. Her hands moved deftly among the stack of cards, her eyes behind glasses that enlarged her pupils. Baji had once said she looked like a mad scientist, and I had laughed uproariously. I felt awful about that now because she only hummed when she could sense my uneasiness and wanted to soothe my fragile eleven-year-old heart, beating like a bunny’s. It was her way of telling me she acknowledged my presence and cared how I felt. She didn’t seem to understand other ways of showing affection, and so I accepted her small gestures as precious gifts. Abba said it was ridiculous that I thought she was trying to comfort me when it was obvious that Khaala lived in a world of her own making; the rest of us were just blobs of colour that dipped in and out of her vision. I refused to believe that. But nights like these would make me question my stance.
I tried again to pray, but I couldn’t get further from Bismillah. My tongue got caught and twisted in the multiple L’s and M’s and I ended up speaking gibberish that wasn’t remotely near the verses my Islamiat teacher had taught me. What possessed me to say yes to sleeping here? Khaala obviously wasn’t having any issues; it didn’t look like she needed my assistance at all. In fact, I think the injury had allowed her to do more of what she wanted – lie in bed all day, talking to her invisible friends.
I glared at my aunt with a sudden surge of hatred. If it wasn’t for her falling off the bed and dislocating her hip, I wouldn’t be here, available to help her at a moment’s notice. I’d be upstairs with all my cousins, who were probably having the time of their lives, giggling and talking and having late-night snacks. My blood boiled at the thought of them having fun while I was stuck downstairs with my aunt and her crazy hair and her incessant muttering and her old, decrepit room that smelled like a pharmacy hoarding spoiled medication.
I got more and more agitated as time went on and the voices got louder and the scents got stronger until I felt I was being smothered. I peeked at the clock. It was just past three, which meant almost another whole hour of this ruckus. I stared at the wall opposite me, counting the number of purple flowers that appeared on the otherwise yellow and green wallpaper, peeling off in patches and revealing ugly gray and white cement. Counting sheep would mean closing my eyes and every time I did that, my brain would conjure horrifying creatures that I imagined were occupying the house. I stared and stared at the crumbling, semi-patched-up plaster behind the ancient wallpaper and willed myself to fall asleep. The constant cluttering and humming and frying was putting me on edge. I looked over at Khaala and prayed she would say something or do something to get rid of the creatures. I wished she were more like my mother, who wouldn’t be found dead without her prayer book and rosary beads on her person.
My back was sweating now and my arm was desperate to take off the weight and turn over, but I just could not bear to occupy such a vulnerable position. I was beginning to cry. I went under the covers, sniffling, and immediately regretted it. All the clothing in Khaala’s room had a slight mildewed smell from years of being kept in a wardrobe that had survived Karachi’s humidity. Sometimes weeks and months would go by and she wouldn’t open the wardrobe. She didn’t need to; there was no one to use the extra sheets anyway. The only time the contents of her closet saw the light of day was when I’d come over and clean it out and organize it with Ammi.
The rest of her room looked equally unkempt. Bottles of syrups and tablets cluttered the one small side table she had decided not to polish. It was hideous, with scratches and broken-off handles, but Khaala refused to throw it away. The mirror on her wall was now just a bulletin board of prescriptions and doctors’ notes because she refused to have them filed away properly, fearing she’d lose them if they went out of sight. Multiple beaded necklaces hung on a single key holder; they would periodically slip from the hook and end up underneath someone’s foot.
Ammi always tsk-tsked disapprovingly whenever she entered this room. Khaala would never notice her sister’s grumbling as she moved through the room moving this, adjusting that. Or at least she pretended not to. She’d just sit in her bed, held up by a myriad of pillows and cushions, twisting and curling loose hair strands of her hair round and round her fingers, looking off into the distance. Her hair, a botched job of orange and white—thanks to Ammi’s insistence on dyeing it with organic henna and Khaala’s insistence on leaving it be—would spill out of her braid, sticking out and curling like grapevines. If it wasn’t for Ammi’s nitpicking, Khaala probably wouldn’t even wash it, let alone dye it properly. Sometimes weeks would go by and she wouldn’t shower. But she would still never smell any different. You could smell her faint jasmine ittar every time you hugged her, though no perfume bottles decorated her already overflowing vanity. I always wondered if the intoxicating scent was also one of the ‘gifts’ they had given her. I had heard many stories of jinns bestowing new abilities and unexplainable traits onto their chosen human; a change in eye colour, a third language the recipient had never spoken before, random treats scattered around the house. It was their way of showing their appreciation, I suppose –– or a way to mark someone dear. Ammi didn’t seem to think so. She was an adamant believer in her faith and accepted everything the Qur’an told her from the heavens to the core of the earth and everything in between, the magic and realism of it all, but when it came to Khaala and her ways, she always labelled them as antics and nothing more.
Though they had only each other for company, Ammi and Khaala never really got along, I think. Not like I did with my sister. They never had late-night conversations or impromptu gossip sessions where we were to leave the room to give them privacy to pry and dissect. They didn’t even look at each other much. My mom was always hanging her head and evading contact, and my aunt was always smiling at the window, talking to someone we couldn’t see in words we couldn’t decipher.
She could be cruel sometimes, my mother. Spraying her older sister in the face when she got too excited or snatching away her beloved cards when she didn’t listen. She was also the kindest of the sisters, which I suppose wasn’t saying much. Still, she cared for Khaala. She bathed and dressed her and took her to the toilet on the days she wouldn’t move. She washed and ironed her clothes. Swept the floors and dusted her belongings, never moving anything out of its place. She’d sit with her in silence or watch a drama on the brand new television she’d given to her when it got too quiet. But she also couldn’t accept her sister for who she had become. Years on, she’d still believe she could bring her ‘back’. I don’t think she ever stopped trying.
#
Now they are going to call you names and hurl insults at you, right to your face, because they believe you can’t hear them. And for the most part, it is true, you cannot hear them. For the others are so loud, it’s almost impossible to pick out individual voices from the chatter. And you have to focus, really focus, to even make out a single sentence. Work they don’t have to do because you do it for them and you have to quieten their voices and your own voice to hear the others, when there’s so much chaos you could rip off your head. And so you have to scream because that is what parents do when their kids don’t listen. But they continue to not listen. They shush you for the rest of your life. You want to run away and leave them to their devices and see how they like it then. That’ll teach them. You might even be successful, once or twice, perhaps. Until you realise you must go back because for as much hatred you have for them in your heart, you also have a sense of duty. Though you won’t admit it ever, not even to yourself, there is comfort with them and familiarity, and you cannot bear to lose that.
Your hearing has become so sharp that you can pick up the whimper of the guard’s dog when the kids throw stones at him, so precise you can hear the baby left alone in its crib seven houses away, his parents unaware that the sitter they hired is talking to Saleem on her phone in the backyard. It’s not just through the night that you must keep vigil, but also through the day and the evening and the dusk, dawn, as the stars watch you endlessly. They see all you do and these bright angels of the heavens thank you. You speak to the Universe softly and it listens. You feel it rush through your veins and your hair loses colour and gains it and you’re there now, in your bed with your trinkets for company and a silence that is never quiet. And what good company the others are, because they tell you about their day and their problems and you listen quietly; you are now the Universe and the stars as you behold them with eyes as big as saucers and a mouth that almost never moves, yet here you are, giving them solutions so they thank you with a stack of glass bangles by the foot of your bed or a plate of jalebi perched precariously on your table. This is how you’ll live out your curse and your gift and you’ll wonder if there was ever a life you knew before this.
Yet somehow, throughout it all, Khadija remains. You’ve forgotten all your siblings–if you had any to begin with–and your parents are a distant memory. In the blur of passing jinns and weeping souls, you see your eyes reflected back in hers and you feel a pull so strong you’d make it out of a storm by sheer love. You don’t have the same affinity for the child she brings with her now but she has familiar eyes and you can’t help but love her too.
#
“What are you reading?” I leaned over Ammi to catch a glimpse of the small book she was clutching.
“It’s a Surah.” She snapped the book shut. “What are you doing up so late? Go to sleep.” I tried to snatch one last look at the little pamphlet’s cover before Ammi hid it deep within the crevices of her crisp dupatta. All I caught was frayed edges and fading words.
“Fajr,” I lied. I didn’t even know what time the azaan was called. I just wanted to get out of Khaala’s room. As soon as the clattering of dishes had ceased, and I couldn’t smell biryani anymore, I’d shot right up from the sagging sofa and made a beeline for the garden where Ammi liked to sleep, her back resting on the wooden takht, her face to the skies. “Why are you up?”
“Are you questioning your mother?” My own eyes glared back at me, framed with plastic glasses the colour of coal.
“You’re so dramatic, God,” but I smiled and asked her to scooch over which she didn’t, of course, instead telling me to go back to my room, insisting she’d wake me up in time for fajr. I nestled beside her all the same, lowering my back on the hard bed, softened with layers of thick blankets and sheets. Ammi tut-tutted and mumbled something unsavoury about my weight but made space for me all the same. I turned to my side and slung an arm across her belly, cosying my head onto her shoulder.
“So chipku,” she complained and tried to swat my hand away.
“But, mommy, I looooooove you.” I pushed my head completely on her chest now and laughed. She hated it when I got too close to her and I loved it because for those few moments when we weren’t bickering or I wasn’t trying to grab her attention away from my siblings, we’d actually be lovely to each other. Even at twenty-one, I wanted her love like a baby. Selfishly and unconditionally.
“Khaala woke you up again?” Her voice was velvet.
The night sky above twinkled and winked cheekily at us. I was almost glad for the sudden power shutdown in the middle of the night. You never see sparkling skies in the city anymore. I nuzzled my nose into her cotton dupatta and breathed in Ammi’s vanilla perfume. My nod was eclipsed in the layers of clothing. Even after all these years of sleeping in Khaala’s room and taking care of her when no one else wanted to, I would still have nights where I couldn’t fall asleep in her house, no matter what. With the yellow wallpaper with the ugly lavenders long since faded to a muddy colour, I had fewer options of sending myself to slumber.
I turned my head up to the sky.
“She was talking a lot to them tonight,” I told the sky. “Usually, I don’t care but the power had gone out and I was just counting down the seconds till, you know.”
“Hmm.”
We never said it aloud, now that I think about it. But we both understood it was better not to. Sometimes speaking leads to becoming – Ammi and Khaala had learned it the hard way. This is what those horror movies and supernatural thriller novels don’t warn you about; that after years have passed and the movie’s resolution has been done and dealt with and happy endings doled out to the surviving characters, the entities you invited in your life never really leave. They attach to your soul. They’re there even when you don’t see them, even when you insist that nothing otherworldly ever occurred in the heart of your house. They stay even if you do accept them. And no matter how much of yourself you give to them, it is never enough. You could either accept their constant presence in your life, or turn a blind eye to it; it wouldn’t matter to them either way. Jinns, demons, deities, or whatever you choose to call them, they have a knack of sticking around. In your thoughts, in your house, in your fears.
“Do you think if Chhoti Nani were here, Khaala would still be like this?”
“Hmm. Yes. Probably.” Ammi sighed. “Your Khaala’s sisters would be different, though.” She shook her head and laughed dryly. “Eight of them, can you believe it? And not a single one lifts a finger to help. Even though they’re all older than me. They should’ve been my parents’ replacements. But no, they wanted to build their own life and have their own comforts far away from Apa.”
“Were they all in this house when it happened?”
Ammi adjusted herself again, pulling her dupatta tighter around her arms.
“Some were, most were married. But honestly, it’s been her and me against them anyway.” Ammi laughed softly. It was rare to see her reminisce like this and I didn’t want to lose the chance to know more about her.
“Really? You guys were close?” I raised my brows and tilted my head towards Ammi. “But you two barely talk to each other!”
Ammi laughed again and I felt her demeanor relax slightly.
“Oh, well now it’s different, of course. We’ve grown old together, there’s not much left to talk about, you know.” She sighed, pausing slightly. “But, oh, the trouble we’d get up to as kids. We had a huge age gap, you know, but Apa loved me like no other. She’d play the silliest games with me and indulged my every wish. This house always felt so crammed with people going in and out all day, but out here in the garden with Apa, the world seemed infinite. She was a force of nature, that Khaala of yours. It was impossible to feel unseen with her around. I think I called her “Amma” till I was old enough to go to school. She was just that loving, you know. I miss her a lot. Sometimes I look at her and she looks right through me and I feel so alone, I . . .”
Ammi sniffed and I held her closer and squeezed her so she’d know I was there for her. I’d always be.
“If I had even one family member here, helping me or even just willing to have a conversation of more than a few words, I know she’d be better. I certainly would be. But they hide away like criminals, like she’s nothing to them.” Ammi’s voice cracked. “They don’t care if she lives or dies. Or if I die caring for her.”
Years from now, Ammi would be helping me burp my daughter in her arms, rocking her back and forth, soothing her small back, and the topic of siblings would come up and she’d say the same thing again. She would pet Rania’s head and thank Allah for blessing our house with her and still somehow find a way to connect it back to her irresponsible sisters and her careless brothers who fled to foreign countries, and she’d reminisce how even in her last breath, almost none of them showed up to say goodbye to Khaala. I would say the same for their children, all my cousins who, even after twenty-something years, chose to barricade themselves away and leave me to stay with Khaala. I never called my aunts by their relation to me, just their names. As far as I was concerned, I had Khaala and Khaala alone.
When they were laying Khaala to rest, Ammi was at home in her sister’s room, sitting on her bed, smoothing the white sheets under her callused hands, tears rolling down her cheeks.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Apa, I’m sorry,” she’d repeated until she’d fallen asleep, exhausted . I now imagine that her throat was dry, that she was full of all the words she’d wanted to say but never did.
#
It all seems like such an avoidable mistake now. All you had to do was listen to your mother. When she’d told you that women who are about to be married are easy targets for those who envy them, you shouldn’t have laughed and you most certainly shouldn’t have called her old fashioned for caring for you. When people did a double take and asked to try on the expensive ring your soon-to-be husband had gifted you, that should’ve been a warning sign.
Your mind turns to the pages you should have never touched, covered in a green cloth and buried deep within the earth. You curse yourself for not listening to your intuition, for giving into Khadija’s pleas like always, for helping her dig out the tightly wound pages she had discovered midway making sand castles in the front garden.
It’s funny how once something terrible has happened to you, it almost feels unreal to think about it again. As if you weren’t really you, but someone else floating above the scene, observing. You watch your hands claw out the shallow soil. Your engagement ring glitters in the burning sun overhead as you unravel the package you were never meant to find. On the pages that unfurl in your hennaed palms, there’s some Arabic here, a little Urdu there, and you immediately kiss them and press them to your forehead for you don’t know what they say yet but it must be a piece of the Qur’an–you’re sure you saw some familiar words. You carefully bind the loose sheets together, quietly proud of yourself for having done a great deed, and you kiss it again. When your sister makes a grab for it, you don’t stop her.
The whole event is so innocuous that you’ve almost forgotten about the strange pages completely until one night, your little sister giggles and pulls you from your sleep and asks you to go up, up, up on the roof where she can perform a spell she’s learned from those very pages to call fairies. It all seems a bit of a hassle but there are no danger bells ringing in your head. You refuse once or twice, you can’t really remember all the details now, but it’s only because going two floors up feels inconvenient when you’re so cosy in your bed. But your sister, the one you’d move mountains for, is getting increasingly upset. So you smile and agree to go along with her little game because you love this little firecracker that thinks the world of you and also because you’re feeling a little rebellious. It’s your wedding next week, so how many adventures are possibly left in your lifetime before you’re whipped into the frenzied world of cooking breakfasts and packing lunches?
Khadija has the pages in her small hands and she reads from it. She’s stumbling over her words and you start to laugh, but she’s serious now, so you play along and sit cross-legged in front of her with shadows and moonlight for company. The roof is exceptionally windy today and the floor is hard but you stay. For Khadija. You watch your sister’s concentrated face as she drones on and notice with slight surprise that it is slowly losing its chubbiness, instead growing out high cheekbones like your father’s. You see the hints of a sharp chin; you touch your own and smile because you’re beginning to see yourself in her too, distorted but young. Pride and warmth bloom in your chest; God has truly blessed you with her.
But the warmth is suddenly cut off with a sudden cold as you actually tune in to the words she’s saying, words the madrasa never taught you. An uneasiness settles in your stomach; suddenly it’s not so funny that you came on the rooftop at three in the morning to chant verses under the full moon. Suddenly, it seems like a very idiotic idea to have agreed to this at all.
You find yourself wondering what the mass of darkness is in the corner and whether you actually did catch a shadow move swiftly past in your periphery. Is your mind playing tricks?
You ask your sister to stop. She has been practicing for weeks, so she doesn’t want to – she’s finally got a hang of the difficult pronunciations. Every fibre in your being is telling you to take her hand in yours and make a run for it. You don’t, because you don’t want to scare her, or yourself.
You’ve coughed up something. Your vision is too blurry to focus, and your sister’s voice is too muffled to concentrate. Your vision keeps tilting. The dark mass rises and expands and shoots up and clambers down. You couldn’t run even if you wanted to. It feels like you’re stuck in your place. You keep coughing and coughing as something thick and viscous flies out of your mouth.
You see shadows so deep that they’re opaque, swimming this way and that. They’re circling you and you scream at your sister to shut up but she doesn’t hear you or maybe you’re not screaming at all. A hand constricts your throat, but no, a hand can’t be that big because now it’s constricting your lungs, too, squeezing your ribs until you’re sure they’re powder. Your jaw unhinges without you moving a muscle. Your head goes back, back, back, so your scalp is touching your spine. You don’t understand if your sister is crying or reading or silent because there are so many voices screaming around you now. The black mass from the corner rises again, high up, soaring until it’s level with the moon. Tears, blood, saliva spill down your face as the black mass shoots down, right at you, and slips into your soul.
In the midst of the confusion and the shadows and the light, you hear a panicked voice cry out Apa, apa, I’m sorry, apa!