By Oindrila Ghosal
“Did you grow up in a haunted house, Daddy?”
He smiled, ruffling his son’s capped head. He knew that the lenses children were born with eventually writhed and crumbled to dust with age. That had been the fate of his pair. Though when and how, he didn’t remember anymore. If only Moji[1] was still around, he thought, she would have spread out the detailed list in front of him.
Instead, he replied, “Ghosts and the living do not stay together.”
“Like dirty and clean laundry?”
He nodded.
“But I think you had not seen the ghosts growing up. They didn’t want you to see them.”
“I don’t think I ever told you a bedtime story about growing up with ghosts around me.”
He chuckled. He reminded himself of his son’s skill in repeating stories that he had heard a few nights ago, refracted through his lenses. But wasn’t that common for kids?
He had learnt the art of storytelling from Moji, who each night would cradle his tiny head on her lap and tell him stories she had grown up hearing while embroidering shawls by the lamp. He narrated the same stories to Fabienne, Kashyap’s mother, years later during their freezing nights in Fairbanks. Perhaps Kashyap had picked up the trait then, for when he grew a little older, he not only insisted on completing the stories his father began but also firmly believed that his parents continued telling stories with changed climaxes, in their bedroom. In those nights of exchanging stories, little by little, Fabienne was shrinking her plot points until, after one such invigorating session, she was nowhere to be seen.
“It’s just that you don’t remember anymore, Daddy,” complained Kashyap, tightening his clasp around his father’s gloved hand.
“You and your stories,” he scoffed, lifting his five-year-old son into his arms.
Their white breaths – his deep and his son’s short – swirled into each other’s before disappearing in the crystal air. He gripped the rotting capping rail of the fence with the other hand.
As a child, the fence had scared him with its enormity. Sometimes he crouched behind it, fixing an eye to a hole in the wood, when he returned home late from fishing rainbow trout in the river or playing cricket in the chinar groves. Now its height reached only an inch above his waist.
“Are we going to get inside, Daddy?” Kashyap’s exasperation reddened his ears, like Moji twisting them in the hideout behind the fence.
The cold stroked his ears. He did not lift a finger to scratch the inflammation. He simply stared at the home of his ancestors, what reminded of it further hidden under the snow. Moss on the walls. Grimy. Rickety. Unwashed soot. Unfixed windows. Battered porch. Clogged chimney. The skeleton of a juniper at the back.
Something tugged at the little hairs in his nose. Something burnt his eyes. Maybe a fly ash of yesteryears.
“Daddy?” Kashyap lightly kicked his ribs.
He clicked his tongue and continued staring at the ensemble of wood and brick through the strings of delicate snowflakes showering on the house, showering on them.
“Daddy,” he said with the softness of the snowflakes.
“Yes, Kay.”
“Do you want to hear a story?”
“Go on,” his voice, frozen in a trance, answered.
“The story starts with a family heading to the house of the fairies. A boy of my age. A father of your age. A mother…no, not a mother.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know any story with a mother in it.”
He added after some time, hesitantly, “Do you know stories of mother, Daddy?”
“Umm hmm.”
“Do you know stories of your mother?”
Even with the eddying of meditation in his blood, he curled his lips in a smile—before his neurons could conjure the scene of Fabienne’s terror-stricken face, begging him to keep his history, his story, from their son.
“What story do you want to hear?”
“Her story.”
“My mother, my Moji, came many years ago to this house as a young bride. This was the house where my Mole[2] was born. He had lived his entire life in the valley. Moji was from the Silver Mountains – up there. She had never seen the valley until the wedding. He had never been to the mountains before.”
“And then?”
“That’s the end of the story.” He lied. His promise to Fabienne lurked at the end of his tongue.
“You’re a terrible storyteller, Daddy.”
He laughed. “How would you have told the story, then?”
“I would not have kept my audience in the dark. What does Moji look like? Does she have my hazel eyes? Or your red cheeks? Does she have wrinkles now? Is her nose really tiny?”
His moji’s humming—a soft rustle—of ‘door ballaai tsajiyo[3]’ streaming in from the susurrating faraway wind dispersed his son’s shrill words haywire in the current. Before his eyes, on the thickening snow, feeble, disconcerted images pulsed. Moji’s green irises. The raisin mole on her lips. Her ears chained to pairs of elongated dejhoor[4]. The emerald on her nose. The scarlet scarf fastened around her head.
When his son’s swollen fingers, behind fleece gloves, tucked at his beard, he blinked his eyes, but the water-painted figments remained. He was unaware for how long he had been gaping at the glowing and dimming on the unruly, stark white snow.
“Are there any photographs of her inside?” his son’s voice reached him as if from across the mountains.
He paused. He plucked his reddening eyes from the snow to the dark porch. Was still moji, red and peeling from the burns, crouching? The orange flames rising from somewhere in the house were deafening her mute cries and devouring the bricks and wood. The embers and their smoke had already charred the chords in her throat. He had stopped right at the fence. The black orbit, where her mouth had been, was still muttering, asking him to flee.
He shouldn’t have left to run her errands, he cursed. Either he and moji would have burrowed their way out under the fire or, hand in hand, said their last prayers amidst the flames licking their cheeks. But moji had been under the weather for a few weeks, and mole had disappeared into thin air the previous full moon. His coworkers at the post office or the baton-wielding patrolling policemen across the streets and the lakes were equally clueless about the whereabouts of his shoestring after he had left for home, sliding the pen into his pocket.
He closed his eyes and opened them again. Only moji-shaped soot remained at the porch. The blackened sepulchre blended in with the twilight setting.
He gasped. His spine shuddered. His son in his tightened grip shuddered too.
“Can we go back, daddy?”
“What?” He had not heard him.
Kashyap repeated.
“Sure. Fifteen steps and we shall be indoors.”
“Let’s go home, daddy.”
He turned to his son’s crumpled face in his arms. He whispered, “Open doors remind me of mommy.”
Apology handheld dread in his son’s eyes. He had so far mirrored his father’s whine about visiting the home of his childhood as they sat in an aircraft from the other side of the globe and drove through the sea of paperwork and up the mountains. But the open door shattered him. It vividly brought back the evenings he relentlessly tired himself with the stories mommy had told him and invented newer ones when they exhausted in boring him enough. The same words, the same scenes flowed. Had mommy’s letters ever arrived by mail, as in a chapter taught at school, his stories would have charted new ground too. They would have been of a different composition. He believed daddy would understand.
His eyes didn’t utter a word. He tucked Kashyap closer to his warm chest and wrapped him in his arms. As he trod away, Kashyap dug his chin into his daddy’s square shoulder. Somewhere around the backyard of the house, red-smeared white petals of a tulip were unfurling under the snow. Had the ghosts from daddy’s childhood planted the seeds?
[1] Mother in Kashmiri
[2] Father in Kashmiri
[3] A lullaby sung by Kashmiri mothers to ward off evil: Literally, “let evils stay far…”
[4] Long chained earrings worn by married Kashmiri women
Oindrila Ghosal is an emerging author and also a doctoral student at Tata Memorial Centre – Advanced Centre for Treatment, Research and Education in Cancer, Navi Mumbai. So far, her short stories, “The Harlot’s Veena”, “The Asylum” and “The Jungle Within Me” have been published in Kitaab.
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