In the blistering loo of May, Khalid Anwer, stuck in traffic, awaited the rickshaw in front of him. He had left work early for the second time this week, barely putting any thought into his excuse. He had been unable to write another word of the plumbing articles assigned that day for a company called Drain Men PLC. The client instructions that had been sent to him with names crossed out, requested toilet puns in the content. It was always some website in a foreign country that wanted to build its online presence; businesses owned by people he would never meet. Usually, he was able to come up with seemingly new content by rearranging information from other similar projects. At this point, they all said the same thing, but no one paid enough attention to notice. This afternoon, Khalid had not even been able to muster up the will to tactfully self-plagiarize. The third cup of chai had not helped one bit, somehow making the aluminum filed edges of his cubicle sharper, encaging. He didn’t know if being alone back home would help either, but an urge to escape had taken hold.
To his right, a nala yawned, splitting the Meena Bazaar road in two. Trash oozed from the concavity as rivulets of sewage trickled past it. Plastic bags of green, blue, red, pink, white, and black covered the cleft. He sensed them crinkle in a corner, right near the cemented bricks that fenced the nala from the road, and a rat emerged from underneath, sitting atop bloated polythene. It gnawed and tore at the plastic which leaked with something Khalid could not place. The clouds shifted and the sun peeked deeper along the length of the nala covered by the hood of the road. Tails and snouts stirred as light suffused them. There was no way of saying how many of them lived there. He shuddered at the thought of the sheer number and magnitude of colonies the entire city must host, but something about them scurrying around under a gigantic city that was either oblivious or indifferent to their existence, also excited him. The apartment buildings, the hordes of people in bazaars, the fumes of buses and LPG powered rickshaws, the grating sounds of motorbikes filled up the city in a way that could blind one to the other things that gave it life. To Khalid, a nala was just as alive. A chasm between roads that revealed the guts of his city.
He wondered where all the waste went. He had seen the fires under bridges and in empty plots, with large piles of trash ablaze. Would someone have to go six feet down into this nala to pull out all the plastic bags to burn?
Khalid lived in Block E of an old apartment complex past the Ayesha Manzil bridge from Karimabad. If it once had a name, it had now gone out of use. The residents simply referred to it as ‘compound’. A tarry dampness covered each block, mingling with large swaths of algal green. An ideal setting for a horror story. Khalid had thought this writing job would help him hone his craft as a writer – bring him closer to writing fiction. Instead, at first, it had begun to erode his passion for writing in the first place. He was churning out thousands of words of content from his desk every day; search engine optimization articles with a call to action at the end guiding the reader to buy a product. For his own sanity, after the first few months, he had learnt to switch his brain off and spit out the same information in deceptively different ways. Day in, day out, he had diligently withheld; removed himself from each word that he wrote. And somewhere along the way, this insipid workplace adjustment had set something else in motion. What he had suppressed at work all this time was becoming palpable, condensing into a new drive to write by himself. He was trying to cook up a jinn story for the past few weeks. The block in front of his building, Block D, had called out to him. It had been vacant ever since Khalid had moved in. He’d never seen anyone walk in and out for repairs either. This puzzled him – not much in the city was left alone. Utility eventually consumed everything.
At the compound, Khalid snaked his 125 between the serpentine paths created by other parked motorbikes. His foot hit the footstand of the neighboring bike. He winced, getting off, and cursed. This happened every other day. Up ahead, Shakeel bhai was absorbed in his usual pre-maghrib chit-chat with Salman.
“Allah knows all the shit that’s blocked up in those pipes,” Shakeel bhai spat towards one of the gutters, moving away from it.
He would usually end up running into him when he was trying to leave for work or rush back to his flat. Shakeel bhai, however, was never in any hurry, ever. He was always around, hanging outside his block, chatting with passersby. Talking to him felt like a waste of time with zero value added to his life. And so Khalid found it easy to judge Shakeel for his torpor, for the lack of a life that allowed the man to know so much about the happenings of the compound. Other times, he envied him, for he embodied a zen that seemed to make him invincible to the pressures of having to do something. A calm – feigned or real – that appeared so total it never looked like he had anywhere to be.
“Truth be told, I’m used to the smell at this point, Shakeel bhai,” said Salman.
“Of course, even disgust gets tiring after some time… but I did hear someone say they were collecting money to get it cleaned out. Was it you or someone else that told me? ” Shakeel shook his pack of Gold Leafs and frowned at what the feel indicated: one.
“Jahanzaib sahib was talking about getting the muezzin to make an announcement about pitching in.”
“Makes sense. It does fall on the path to the masjid and that should be reason enough to do something about it – the namazis should have a clean path to walk to the masjid.”
“They should. It would be ideal to collect money after the Jumma prayers.” Salman nodded, imperceptive to the sarcasm.
“Shakeel bhai, Salman bhai!” He shook hands with both of them, bending slightly towards their bodies with each hand-shake.
They shook with unnecessary strength, proceeding to then perform the customary clasp to the chest. Khalid found himself reciprocating awkwardly.
“Khalid, how has work been?” Shakeel bhai took his last cigarette out and chucked the empty pack towards the trash pile near the gutter.
Khalid sighed. “Work is work, nothing new. Going through the grind.”
“Well, aren’t we all? Not much else one can do at your age anyway.” He lit a match as his hands cupped the cigarette even though no wind blew within the compound at the moment. The flame flickered and licked the cigarette poking from the ‘o’ Shakeel had formed around the matchbox with his index finger and thumb. The grace and skill arrested Khalid’s attention, the flame reflecting in his eyes.
“Shakeel bhai, any idea what happened to this building?” Khalid pointed towards the block across the gutter.
“Block D? It’s been locked up because there was an accident with a kid a few years ago.” Back-to-back drags formed rings from the tip of his cigarette that flourished in the stillness.
Khalid leaned in.
“There’s not much space to play for kids in the compound and even if there was, an abandoned place like that would have had some allure. Add to that the warnings by all the grown-ups about not going in there because they could get hurt. I mean, I understand that there’s a lot of old stuff inside – with leaking pipes and broken walls and all – that could injure a child.” Shakeel sucked on the end of his cigarette with verve as he always did when he wanted to drive a point home. “But you tell kids that age not to do something and they’ll go right ahead and do that very thing. The parents may as well have taken them there themselves. It was only a matter of time before someone tried to get inside.”
Khalid shifted his weight. “I see. How old was the kid?”
“I know he was no more than thirteen, maybe fourteen. Nice, polite kid as well. Always said salaam as he passed by. Apparently did well at school too. One evening, he didn’t return from his evening play time. We all looked everywhere – had the masjid make an announcement. His parents were out all night searching the streets. The police weren’t of much help. I saw his mother go over the same spots in the compound over and over again. Nafeesa Aunty transformed in a matter of days. I still remember the taste of the shahi tukrey she sent every Thursday. After Amir’s disappearance all she had left was bitterness and suspicion.” Shakeel shook his head.
“Did people ever find out where he was?”
Shakeel absent-mindedly nodded at Salman as he left for the masjid, then returned his gaze to Khalid.
“No one ever found him, Khalid. His friends were prodded for answers. The poor kids were terrified. Their parents asked them if they knew anything about Amir’s disappearance but what they said only added to the mess. They described stories that were unbelievable. Stuff about them having visited the abandoned building and seeing things. That there were things in there that moved and breathed but couldn’t possibly be living. It sounded like utter nonsense and some of us lost our temper, thinking they were making shit up. It was a difficult time for the parents. And after the kids had been made to go through endless inquiries, some parents stepped in, forbidding them to talk to anyone in the compound.”
Shakeel fidgeted and rubbed his index finger with his thumb. “Khalid mian, the story is a bit longer, will you come with me to the khoka?”
Twilight was upon them. The surrounding concrete made the setting sun invisible. No shadows formed and the approach of dusk began to overwhelm the light. The azaan shot through the air and broke into a hundred echoes across the weathered corners of the apartment buildings. Khalid and Shakeel ambled towards the khoka, waiting for the muezzin to finish so Shakeel could resume the story. Behind, to their left, in the gurgled out waste of the drain, amid empty milk boxes and plastic bags, a small blue, five-petalled flower poked out.
Later that night, Khalid looked out the window of his apartment. The lights of the city reflected off the shiny tarmac, forming shapes that dissolved into each other. The window, placed in an extreme corner touching the adjacent wall, always gave him the sense that his apartment was attempting to squeeze out of the building into the city. He could not look over the compound from it. Only the top few floors of Block D could be seen. The doors to the thin balconies that faced his apartment and away from the road would open-and-shut as the wind sang across the dilapidated block, intimate with all its secrets. He envied the way it could go anywhere and stay unmoored, belonging to no one. It was easy to doubt Shakeel’s story. He was a man who could certainly be suspected of exaggeration and yet it had seeped into and roused something in Khalid. The kid’s disappearance, devastating as it must have been, was not a radical event in the city. What wouldn’t leave Khalid’s mind was its connection with Block D. What had convinced a whole group of families that a haunted apartment building had caused it? Amir’s family had left soon after the incident. The other kids had continued to cling to their stories. This had sparked anger at first, which had gave into paranoia. But no one had really believed them. No one but Nafeesa Aunty, who already thought Block D was infested with jinns. She had asked some molvi to come to the building and read the Quran inside. The gentleman had identified parts of the block that he believed were possessed. The walls, blackened with trapped moisture, formed sinister shapes that appeared to move. He was convinced that the building was so old, so densely populated with malicious jinns that they had become infused with its structure, could even change it. He declared that Amir had become a victim of their games. Nafeesa Aunty would swear that she heard him calling out, whispering from the fissures that spanned ceilings.
On their way back from the khoka with Shakeel bhai equipped with his cigarettes, the dark had fully taken over the city. With the pale orange of street lights abound, Shakeel had continued. “One night, Sabir – the watchman at the time – found a shadow in the dark, wrestling one of the cemented sewer lids. At first, he told me, he thought it must be one of the heroinchees trying to steal the lid for money, and tried to chase the shape in the dark away. Now, a heroinchee scares easy. He cares for nothing but his fix. You know he’d never risk an actual fight” Shakeel put his hand on Khalid’s shoulder.
Khalid nodded impatiently.
“What he found was the lid half removed and a woman peering into the sewer. Turned over and half inside. I imagine, Khalid, if it had been me instead of him, I swear to Allah I would not have known what to do. And who might that woman have been?” Shakeel’s eyes shone in the yellow light from the new bulbs the Association had just installed.
“Nafeesa Aunty?” Khalid stopped walking and turned to face him.
“Jee, it was the woman in the flesh. She grabbed Sabir by the arms and whispered that Amir was trapped inside. That this was the only way to get to him. Shook him and asked him to either come down with her or leave her alone. Sabir, the poor man, did neither. He bolted to her apartment to wake Jamshed uncle up. They lived three floors above me and, mian, when I heard the sound of him banging on the door, I thought some robbers were trying to break into their house. Think about it, with all that goes on in this city, who would be foolish enough to open their door and check? So I did nothing but stay put and keep my ears pricked. By the time I thought it was safe to get out, there was already a crowd outside the building. And all your Shakeel bhai got to see was Ghazaala baji taking a hysterical Nafeesa aunty upstairs.” Shakeel paused here, closed his eyes and sighed.
“I have seen much in my life, Khalid. And most of my life I have lived in these apartments. But the sight of Nafeesa aunty pleading to everyone to look for Amir under the drains almost a year after he had disappeared, being taken up the stairs by a woman who was embarrassed for her, changed something in me. I can’t forget the way Jamshed uncle walked behind the two women and didn’t face anyone. Didn’t say a word. Everyone watched and your Shakeel bhai watched along with them, unable to do a thing. What could one do?” Shakeel sat down at the foot of the staircase, looking older than he had moments ago.
“What do you think happened?”
“I don’t think anyone really knows. If a richer family beyond the bridge had lost a child, the police would have turned the city upside down. Nobody ever even found a body, it’s been years. Maybe it was the jinns”
“Or someone got away with something very bad because the jinns were easier to blame.”
“Could be” Shakeel looked around at the looming, discolored blocks and opened his mouth to speak, then paused.
“Maybe.”
“So what happened to uncle and aunty?”
“They left soon. Nobody really knows where because they didn’t say. I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t want any reminder of such a place in my life either if something so out-of-this-world fucked up had happened to me.”
“And they closed off all entrances to the block after this?”
“It’s the first thing the Association did. There was too much fear and paranoia. Kids no longer played outside and the families whose kids were involved in the incident left over the years. In case you haven’t noticed, the compound is not much of a place to live in any more.”
But whoever the Association had hired to close off all the entrances had not been thorough. During power failures, Khalid would often go to the roof of his own block to escape the heat. There, a thin spiral staircase towards the back of the roof led down the Block E building. No one used it as the bottom half had succumbed to an aggressive monsoon years ago. It hung like a serpent from the building with its tail cut off so it never quite reached the ground. If you took the risk of going down the hanging staircase, a couple of floors down, it bordered on the balcony of an apartment on the 6th floor, in Block D.
That night however, residents of the compound enjoyed uninterrupted electricity. And yet, Khalid found himself going up to the roof, animated by images of serious writers in Hollywood movies researching the setting of a story. He knew he was chasing an unrealistic picture but what it woke in him was more real than anything Khalid had felt in a long while. He wasn’t naive enough to believe that he would learn anything about Amir’s disappearance. He had already made up his mind about what must have happened. He had never been superstitious, and the way he saw it, it was precisely superstition that had led to the ensuing chaos after Amir’s disappearance. Not that he blamed anyone. Life puts horrors upon people in ever more creative ways. And people, forever trapped by circumstances, struggle to make sense of them. But curiously, jinns materialized when people faced a mystery that was beyond their capacities to resolve. Even so, there was something about Block D that had led entire families to believe that supernatural beings had abducted an innocent boy. At the very least, it should help him with the bare bones of his story.
The stillness that had broken the loo had now turned into a humid breeze. The roof was always empty at this time. It was 2 am; he knew he would be late for work the next day and was elated by how he didn’t care. Armed with a torchlight and hammer, he went to the edge at which the spiral staircase hung. He put his right foot on the first step and felt the whole thing sway. Heart thumping, he held on to the parapet for support and jumped, using all his strength to test if the staircase would hold. It endured. Second foot, all his weight on the staircase now. Two more steps. Nothing but a gentle sway. Somewhat assured, he descended.
The staircase was so narrow that one could easily fall even if it didn’t break off Block E. You could either topple over the side as it squeezed ever tighter on its way down or you could slip because of its small, crumbling steps. Carefully, he reached the place where it nudged the balcony he was supposed to get onto. Khalid threw the hammer and with it traversed a mental boundary that entirely ensured him of his commitment to what would have seemed silly until yesterday. He put his left hand on the balcony and tried to shake it to see if it would hold his weight. It didn’t budge. Biting on the torchlight, he put his left foot on the outer curve of the connecting staircase. His right leg now dangled as he was half perched between the staircase and the 6th floor. Putting more weight on his left leg and channeling it to his arm on the balcony, he swung his free leg around to gain momentum. Briefly launching himself into the air with his arm still touching base, he switched position midway and landed on his toes, now facing the staircase, his back to the door that opened into the 6th floor of Block D.
He had brought the hammer in case the door was stuck or locked but it opened easily. He nudged into it with his shoulder; it whined and creaked, giving way. Something broke off the hinges that Khalid assumed to be rust. He shone a light around and found himself in a room that was just like his bedroom. With a sofa-chair in the middle, of all things. Cobwebs had claimed the chair. The sofa was red with the holes on its sides also wrapped in webs. Rats, he figured. Could jinns live well with rats and spiders?
He moved the spotlight from the chair to the wall beyond. It seemed to be of a dull bluish-green color but he couldn’t really tell because the light, by its glaring whiteness, also obscured what it revealed. He peered at the patch of light while he moved the torch to inspect the room. As he got to the ceiling, he found that from it protruded a wire slanted in one direction. It was swollen at its base and got finer towards the end. In the periphery of the light, he sensed another one poking out. He now surveyed the rest of the ceiling. With about half a foot of distance in diameter, these wires – no they could not be wires. They were too limber. They were everywhere. All over the ceiling and tilted in the same direction, some longer and some thicker than others.
He traced his vision over the fine details of one and recognized a hair-like quality to it. No wire he had seen could look like that but there was something more, something in its form that made it appear as hair. A desire to see what lay beyond took over and he moved the light around, taking a step forward. He found the door that led out of the room. It had a burgundy veneer that looked more vibrant than it should have. Clearly, no one had been around to clean dust off of it?
The veneer had started to come off in certain places, exposing the coarser wood underneath, and tumid vines erupted in an absurd triangle travelling up the door and to the frame. Sooty, slimy leaves surrounded the tendrilous stem, covered by what could be nothing but veins. The entangled veins and the thickness made the vines look muscular. Khalid had not seen many plants in his life and could not say for sure what this was. But the ferocity with which it burst out of the wood and the way it covered space sent an eerie chill down his spine.
Something was afoot here, he could feel it. He found himself searching his memory for what he knew about jinns. For his mind tried to grasp onto an explanation so his body could make a decision about what to do. He remembered stories of people being possessed by jinns after they slept under trees at night. Recalled discarding them with suggestions of poisonous fumes releasing from the trees. Now, paralyzed by confusion, he admitted he did not know whether trees really did produce such a thing. He found himself wondering if he would even be able to recognize a jinn if he saw one. He knew nothing about them and had no reason to believe that the stories he’d heard held any truth. Sweat dripped down Khalid’s neck and he felt his heart pound in his ears in a way that made his eyes pulse. Did the jinns just live on the trees like crows and sparrows or did they, in some inexplicable way, possess the trees themselves?
For reasons Khalid could not place, his body buzzed with motion and he took three steps toward the door and yanked it. The force was wasted, for the door opened as if it had no weight. The vines running across the door to the frame extended with his pull, the vine-thews losing their thickness until the door was ajar and the vines almost thread-like. He stepped out of the room and air thronged his nostrils with the allusion of decay. It smelled bad but the smell did not invoke disgust, it had a sickly sweetness to it that made him dizzy. He had stepped into what resembled the living room of his apartment. The walls that separated the kitchen area from the living room or what lay outside the apartment were shattered. Across from where he stood, he could see the apartment at the other corner of the building, and between him an opening gaped, with a chunk of the wall just hanging off the ceiling from a metal bar. Except, the metal bar was not just metal. Even in the dim light that he shone through the distance, he could see that it sprouted the same dark, wet leaves that he had seen in the vines before. He heard a sound from above and moved the light up to the ceiling to find more hairs. The growth was denser here and things moved in it. Alarmed, he found that the light froze the flow of activity that had caught his attention. Eyes sparkled, too many eyes.
The hairs served as some sort of overhead pathway for rats. The attention did not bother them for too long and they went back to their business. He was a visitor here and they did not care much for him. Khalid moved further. He found himself thanking his foresight for wearing his trainers this once, which reminded him that he had not viewed the floor at all. With slight panic, he cast the light on it and saw blood vessels of pipe-like thickness, pulsating, with congealed areas that bit deep into the floor. Clumps connected one vessel to many, with smaller ones branching off. He felt the urge to bolt out opposed by an equal force that made him stand there and stare. And as he did, the fear started to morph and give way into a sense of curiosity that felt even more alive. Something that felt ancient, some primal itch in his body wanted to imbibe fully from what lay around him, and he found himself losing touch with much of what he would have held dear hours ago. The night outside and the city on which it fell were now far away, unreal. With a deep breath, he took Block D in and felt dizzier. Eyes momentarily shut, he felt a warmth in his chest that reminded him of his childhood even though he had never felt it before.
He shut the torchlight to gauge if he could see without it. A vague purplish glow brought the wall to life. The vines went through the vessels and the walls and encircled everything, like someone had stitched the floor with them. The hairs too were luminous, making the rat-eyes shimmer. Some watched him idly. The vessels on the floor glimmerred a crimson so dim that one could almost never say for sure. He traced where they led to and found that all traveled in ornate patterns from the left top corner of the living room. And there, a heart pumped. A giant glaring heart embedded in the wall. The how of it was beyond the question. That it was, was too much in itself. In that moment, no questions arose in Khalid’s mind, he merely looked at what Block D lay bare to him. The heart, as big as him, pumped through the vessels which were so many he could not trace where they went.
Some of the vessels led towards a door to his right. , after what could have been hours, he moved to it. The door was smaller in width than the other one he had found at the end of the first room. A bathroom. Inside, sprigs sprouted from the base of the toilet and a massive bole shot through the remains of the bowl. The bathroom was lit with violet light from the drains and the toilet. The floor had been warped by the invasive growth. A bough burst through where the sink should have been, splitting into branches that went up and up and through the ceiling, which had been battered and tamed by their advance. From the wall beyond, something stared back at him, shining yellow light on the branches and the growth surrounding him. An eye bigger than Khalid had grown out of the wall. Sticking out vertically, its gaze affected a mix of fear and pleasure both equally vivid, and giddiness weltered through him. He was certain that he stood in front of something that had once been human but no longer remained just so. Heat rose from his body against the cold sweat and he felt feverish. He stepped closer, returning its gaze. Flowers had blossomed on the edges of the eye, lustrous, every color at once, erupting from inflamed blood vessels that were a dark purple in places. And here too, vines broke out where eyelashes would be, covered in green leaves that hinted at black around the edges. The eye did not blink, for it had nothing to blink with. It breathed.
“What are you?”
The pupil dilated. The eye exhaled. Smells so fluid gushed his nose that it couldn’t hold on to any. He thought he smelled a neem tree but the aroma slipped, giving way to an unpleasant moldy whiff, which broke into the humid fetor of sewage. And then, the stench of rotting flesh. The lability spurred his mind to drift between memories of everything he’d ever known, all at once, but with a hint of the unfamiliar, a distance. The vine-lashes unfurled and extended. Some that had become one with the growth on the adjacent wall truncated themselves and grew towards him, all around him. Something that teetered between a cry and a moan escaped his throat. The vine-lashes gently cushioned his back and began to self-enclose towards the pupil. He searched in his awareness an impulse for resistance but found only surrender, no longer anchored to instincts of self-preservation. Time splayed itself across the pulling vines and gaping pupil. Closer, Khalid could make out roots in the iris quivering, hear them crack and expand as the center of the eye opened wider.
Inside, slippery softness enveloped him. The walls of the cavity closed in, feeling him through a thousand fleshy fingers, easing him along a tunnel. Some stuck into him and he sensed them move deep in his flesh. Knives of fire cut through his insides. His skin loosened and stretched and then began to come apart. Two fleshy things slithered up to his nose and blocked it, then something slender and woody went up. His forehead exploded with pain. Things started to grow inside of him, out of him, all through him. Everything he had ever known dissolved away. For a moment, there was nothing. Then, the city flooded him and he settled into a larger whole he could not fully fathom. An ineluctable sense of being written on drowned what had once been his body. Waves of meaning tore through him, remaking him in their wake. The whole now told its story with the city in words that were not words. All this time he had taken them to be one thing when they could be so many. Each word burrowed to his centre and took root, sprouting new kinds of symbols that began to flow from him across concrete, sewage, and air into the night.
***