Sahni's House

It was near the end of Durga Puja season in 2006 when the talk about Sahni surfaced over lunch one day. I was living in a small corner room at my uncle's house in Chittagong and Sahni was the previous occupant of that room. She disappeared four months before my arrival and no one had heard from her since. At the time of her disappearance she was 14 years old and had been working as the newest domestic help out of a team of four - mostly older women - at my uncle's house.

So naturally curiosity got the better of me and I started asking questions - none of which were welcomed - and before long I got the feeling that Sahni was off-limits as a topic in the Chowdhury household. But time to time, I did ask and sometimes the other maids in the kitchen would proffer answers - not all of them right but not fully wrong either; it was up to me to decipher what stood as truth and what sounded preposterous. For instance, I learned Sahni was well-liked by everyone in the family. Her own folks never came to visit her and that troubled her and often led to shouting matches over phone calls to her mother. She also told my aunt that her mother did not want her to visit and that they had nothing to do with her anymore. This I found odd but could not get the maids or anyone else to offer up a reason.

A rumor - and I call it one because I did not connect Sahni at all with this one in my mind - made the rounds that she was physically involved with one of the runners from my uncle's sweetmeat shop down the lane and that the man had possibly convinced her to run away with him. The man was asked about this and he denied. Moreover, he was still working at the shop so how come he had 'run away' with Sahni?

A week after her disappearance, plainclothes police arrived at the house and everyone in the household was interviewed. Nothing came of the investigation and the case was promptly shut. I later found out that Sahni's family filed the missing person's report. The irony of it was not lost on anyone.

One night after I returned from work at the local British Council, I cleaned out the drawers in the little room. Odds and ends, mostly, filled the drawers. A comb with long hair in it, some brightly colored zippers, a woman's purse, some scraps of art paper and a packet of unused tampons. I placed all of it in a plastic bag and put it in the trash tub in the kitchen. In the corner of the worn mahogany almirah, I found a passport sized photo of a girl with an ebony complexion, shiny black hair and large deep eyes lined with too much kohl. There was no smile but a hint of one and the eyes looked out at me as if wanting to know if I could absorb a secret. I put the picture in a little envelope and hid it in my folder of important documents.

I did not sleep much over the next couple of days. The image of Sahni brewed in my mind and something like doubt and paranoia began to take hold of me. Roughly two months after I moved in, a new maid was hired. She was about the same age as Sahni and always wore an over-sized blue maxi as she went about her chores around the house. This irked my aunt a lot because she could not see her feet. It was like she was gliding across the floor and that made my aunt superstitious and the other maids laugh behind her back. Her name was Rupali. Twice a month her elder brother, who worked as a porter at the train terminal, came to visit her. Sometimes her mother accompanied him and my aunt let Rupali take the day off so she could visit New Market with her folks and eat kacchi biryani and falooda in the evening. I saw my aunt push a couple hundred takas into Rupali's crystal embroidered wallet which she bought at a village fair a long time ago.

On a wintry night, just days away from New Year's, I woke up to a scratching sound in the room. It seemed to be coming from the hollowed storage space just above the bathroom door. I decided to bring in the ladder from the kitchen storage to climb and see but was too sleepy to do it. Later that night, the sound came again and I sat up thinking. Gradually I could make out the soft whimpers of a female voice out by the dining area followed by the gravelly voice of my uncle and the booming one of my aunt. They were talking to someone. I stepped out of the room pretending to get a glass of water and when I reached the table they had stopped talking. The crying woman was Sahni's mother.

In the morning, I called in sick at work and after breakfast at a tea-shop in the bazaar, came back to my room, pulled up the ladder and climbed into the storage space where I heard the sounds last night. I used my cell phone's flashlight and saw nothing in there except a blue and black checkered fabric suitcase at the far end of the wall. I unzipped the suitcase and looked through the items inside. Clothes belonging to a female, notepads of various colors, pens, a silver bracelet and a bottle of perfume. There was no doubt who it belonged to. I left it there and climbed back down shutting and locking the storage door behind me.

That night, the sounds returned. This time it was a soft knock on the storage door from the inside. I shone the flashlight on the doors and it stopped. As I sat at the edge of the bed, a slow quiet fear growing inside me, I heard shuffling feet inside the space up there and left the room for about ten minutes. When I came back, the sounds were gone. I did not feel like sleeping anymore.

I had skipped work for the second straight day. A feeling of airlessness was taking shape in me. A gradual gripping choking of the soul and mind. The unbearable restlessness of an uncomfortable mind that knows questions which have no answers. I looked at Rupali. She was bringing me a cup of tea. As usual, the overlong maxi dragged on the floor gathering dirt as she seemed to float towards me. We hadn't spoken yet but on many occasions I had seen her staring at me.

I did not want to be in the house anymore and thought of packing up and leaving. It seemed like no one cared or asked much about what happened to Sahni. In many ways it was like she never existed.

I reluctantly went back to the room after spending the day loitering about in the nearby park and then at New Market. I lay down on the bed and before long I had drifted off to sleep. When I opened my eyes again it was pitch-black. Outside, the running motor of a CNG-powered rickshaw was the only sound. Some voices arguing over the fare and then silence again. I felt my breathing pick up and a flutter ran through my heart. I was at rest but my mind was not. The air grew heavy - a patina of dread and fear - lay over the room. I felt suffocated. When I tried getting up, the body did not move. A disconnect. I pushed and exerted. Beads of sweat broke on my forehead. I was suddenly cold and for the first time in many years, I found myself on the verge of tears. I tasted iron on my tongue and the smell of blood filled the room. When I was finally able to sit up, the force of it almost sent me hitting the foot-post of the bed.

My chest hurt and a throbbing headache was beginning to chew me from the inside. I looked at the storage space above the bathroom. The lock I put was in place.

The next morning the aroma of lentil soup and porotha seeped into my room. I went to the dining table where the Chowdhury's were gathered. A cacophony of voices, the grinder in the kitchen, the shouting of the vegetable vendors on the street outside - all told me everything was normal. In the corner, my aunt was inspecting Rupali's hair for lice and her maxi to see if patching was needed. I looked at her and she stared back. My aunt lifted her maxi for a quick moment when my eyes went to her feet. Her feet were backwards. I looked up at her again. She was yawning and inside her mouth was a blackness as dark as the far reaches of hell. Then she looked away.

I sat there momentarily zoned out. And when I finally started eating, I realized something unspeakable had happened to Sahni. And that it happened in this house.

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Published by Mizanur Rahman, in the United States of America.