Resurrection

Like the fluttering of a thousand heartbeats, a flock of pigeons took to the sky. The slender, pale hands, pinkish nails, white half moons ghost-like, floated into Sohael’s field of vision. He could see only those hands--nothing else of her--as they wrung out sopping wet clothes and hung them on the line. The clothesline bowed in the middle, almost touching the ground, saturating the cement, turning it a darker color of grey. His evening ritual of the past few weeks got underway, bolstered by a cup of hot, milky tea.

He had rented the top floor of a two-storey home just a month ago. It, shared a wall with the house next to it as did all the homes around here, smashed together as they were. From his terrace, he could only see a small triangle on the bottom floor of the house next door. Like most homes in the area, the interior was a paved backyard was surrounded on three sides by rooms. The fourth side opposite the entrance was a straight wall with one door connecting it to the outside. This was to allow the sweeper to enter and clean the toilets without despoiling the rest of the house.

His attention returned again, to her. He had never seen the whole woman, the owner of those slender, lovely hands. New in town, in his first job as advertising executive for the newest multinational agency to set up its offices in India his only complaint was loneliness. Deliberately he had had decided to live in the old part of town, away from the swanky, shiny sections, since he was working on traditional accounts like soaps and hair oil and herbal products for housewives. And this was where his target consumers lived. He wanted to see how they lived. How they were. What messages he could use to target them.

One day, as he sat on his terrace, looking into the distance, thinking of a new concept for a woman’s soap, his tea and book lay forgotten. Then he heard something, looked down and sideways and saw her, saw them. No rings, no bangles or bracelets, unadorned by any jewelry and the more spectacular because of that. He dreamed of those hands.

The hands stilled on the line. He forgot to take a breath. Had she figured out she was being watched? Then, “Coming,” she shouted out, “let me get these clothes hung up.” Now his mind had a voice to go with the hands. Girlish yet husky, almost as if she had a cold. It made him feel things he had always discounted. Things from the movies, from poems and songs. Things that made him dream. That voice coupled with those hands played havoc with his dreams at night, eventually waking him up, sweaty and unnerved.

He had made friends with some of the other young men in the neighborhood. Sometimes they all hung out at the corner tea shop, especially on weekends, all bachelors away from the familiar comforts of home for the first time in his life.

“Hey, who is that girl? You know the one…she lives next door to me?”

“What girl hero? Only been here two months and already chatting up girls, ha?” Vivek, one his new friends quipped. Vivek called everyone hero. Addicted to movies, everything in his life revolved around them.

“Shut up man! No, I am just surprised because I’ve never seen anyone from that house outside.” Sohael said irritatedly.

“Oy, he’s talking about the ghost house, yaar,” Rishabh entered the conversation, sipping his tea with noisy slurps.

Sohael felt his blood chill. “Ghost?”
“What happened, hero? Scared huh? Don’t worry, we just call them all the ghost family. They moved here, hmmm…maybe about six months, maybe eight ago. The dad was sick at that time I remember. They had to carry him in on a stretcher. People went to visit. The girl would always just greet and meet at the door. Polite but distant. Didn’t even invite anyone in. Never visited neighbors. They have just one servant. Clean the toilets themselves too, I think. Yuck!” Vivek’s grimace of distaste accompanied his words.
“What does she look like? The girl?” Sohael’s curiosity remained unabated.
“Leave this now, na. This is boring. She’s nothing like Madhuri, that’s for sure,” Vivek guffawed, referring to his favorite actress.

The conversation moved on. Sohael remained enmeshed in his own thoughts, his silence more than compensated for by his friends.

The next weekend, he spent time on his front terrace, facing the access lane so he could see who was going in and out of the house next door. Most of the people he recognized. Then as dusk slowly fell around him, the birds long gone, he saw a small, furtive figure look around before darting into the doorway next to his.

Lighting up a cigarette, he went downstairs, nonchalantly leaning against the doorway, greeting people as they walked by, chatting with those who stopped. Darkness fell, blanking out the night, pierced by the lights of the streets and the houses.

The door next door opened quietly and a shawl wrapped figure stepped out.

“Who’s there?” Sohael asked in his best authoritative manner.

“What?” the figure asked. It was a woman, with a rough voice shot through with the tiredness of her day.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?” Sohael persisted.

“Work,” the other person said, head dipped down.

“Who do you work for?”

“For this house,” work-roughened hands led to wrinkled wrists, one of which displayed a single red, glass bangle. She gestured to the doorway behind her.

“Who…who lives there?”

“Why? Why do you want to know?” Her voice grew more confident as she realized he was just a nosy neighbor. As she turned to leave, from the folds of her shawl fell a single blossom.

Fragrant white, it perfumed his fingers as he caressed and then crushed it. The clear, sticky juice coated his skin as he dropped the mangled flower on the ground. He inhaled the potent scent of the bloom.

Were the flowers for her? Did she thread them into strands and braid them into her hair? Perhaps she wore them around her neck. That night he dreamt of her hands again. They threaded small, white buds of the queen of the night into long strands. And wove them around his heart.

He liked his tea sweet and milky, infused with cardamom and clove. He poured it piping hot into a sturdy glass tumbler and wandered on to the back terrace. Just a few moments before the birds took wing. It was that sweet time of evening, after the sun sets but before the night swallows the world into nothingness.

The hands came into view again, wringing, spreading, hanging, smoothing out the wrinkles in the wet clothes. He cleared his throat. They stalled. He could almost hear her listening, trying to see who it was.

He started whistling, off key but unmistakably a love song. Quickly, the hand picked up the bucket of still-wet clothes and withdrew. For the next few days the wrinkled hands adorned with a red bangle hung the clothes. But he was patient. He waited.

A week later, they returned. Somewhat tentative, fluttering over the clothes, smoothing them out on the line with hurried movements. Occasionally, they would stop as if listening for something. He almost dared not breathe.
He gave her another two weeks. Then, “Uhhhmm…excuse me. My name is Sohael. What’s yours?”

The hands withdrew but he sensed that she was still there, waiting..
He laughed uncomfortably, the silence now tense, “I mean we are neighbors, we should at least know each other’s names. Don’t you think?” The last three words throbbed with a stretched emotion.

Her hands returned, clenched on the clothes-line, gripping the light pink material dripping its water onto the cement in streams. Then they withdrew again, as if a decision had been reached.

Quickly, he responded “No, please. Please don’t go. I didn’t mean to scare you. I don’t mean any harm really.”

“Rekha,” the husky almost-as-if-she-had-a-cold voice whispered loudly before she left.

Rekha! It meant a line, a limit, a boundary. And that’s what this nascent, fragile new relationship was about. Limits. Boundaries. His fevered dreams that night made him throw off his bed-clothes and finally wake up to a still dark morning, holding the promise of a cool day.

Rekha, or rather her hands, did not appear for the next two days. Then she was there, again. She was sick. He heard her cough. Coughs that seemed to rise from the depths of her being, racking her body, making her short of breath, making her lungs ache from their task.

“You’re sick,” he blurted out.
The hands continued their work.
“Yes. I have a cold. Bit of a fever.”
“You should go to the doctor.”
There was a smile in her voice, “really?”

A fit of coughing interrupted the conversation.
A flash of inspiration, “I could take you. To the doctor I mean,” he added hurriedly.
Silence.

She laughed then. A rusty, un-used laugh, but still it was there. “Go out? To the doctor? With you?”

“Yes. Since…well…I’ve never seen you outside you know. Perhaps you don’t like going out. So…I thought…” his voice trailed off.

“So you thought I might go with you. Why?” The question hung in the air as damp and as heavy as the clothes that were making the line bow almost to the ground.

“Well…uhhh…ummm…it’ s like this…” He started the sentence without knowing how he would end it.

“Never mind. I can’t go anyway.”

He sipped his cooling tea in the quiet that followed.
The hands stilled again as if she strained to hear a distant voice.
“No-one. I am not talking to anyone. I’m coming.” She left.

***
Armed with a fifty rupee note and a box of sweets, Sohael waited. Then he saw the dark, swaddled shape of the servant woman coming toward him. She stopped, putting up her single bangled arm almost as a defense against the tide of questions she seemed to know, were forthcoming. Her only response as she took her bribe was, “I don’t know. I just take them these flowers everyday and sweep the courtyard and the kitchen. I don’t know anything else. But there is something strange there.” Then as an afterthought, “they pay me extra not to talk to people about them.” She hurried away.
While at work he thought about the hands. His mind wrestled with explanations for the mystery. He refused to think of her as a ghost. To her she was real, not a mere shadow flitting periodically into his life. One day, he told himself, he was going to hold her by the hand and lure her out of the mystery.

He could barely wait to get home. For a few minutes of a frantic whispered conversation. Of hearing her soft breathing, of watching her hands still, her chores forgotten for his sake, at least for a moment. He wondered what her hands would feel like. Not smooth. Not soft. They were hard working hands. They would feel rough, a little worn. Slender, shapely, yet possessed of a steely strength. He lived in anticipation of holding them in his and learning their texture, their tenderness and magic and mystery.

It was a Sunday morning when his sleep was snatched away by frantic sounds, shouts and cries. He awoke and rushed outside in just his undershirt and pajamas. The entire neighborhood was there, standing around, watching, talking, as they stared at the door next to his.

Several cops tried to keep the crowds away from the door. The door was open, wide open. Through it he could see the courtyard that till now he had only seen as a slice. It was smaller than he had imagined. He could see a section of the clothesline to one side.

He sidled his way to the door and darted quickly through it. He stood in her courtyard and inhaled the soapy smell of damp clothes drying on the line. He looked across to one of the rooms opposite where he was standing. He could see the khaki uniform of a police officer and the bare back of a priest. The priest’s back was bisected by his sacred thread, his saffron dhoti contrasting against his dark skin. They were talking loudly, gesticulating. He walked closer, trying to make out the words.

The smell of flowers and incense flowed towards him. And something else. A darker, deeper, base smell that the flowers were trying to hide. Flattening himself against a wall he sidled closer. Now he could make out the individual voices.

“Oy priest, you know this is a criminal offence? All death’s have to be reported. To be registered.” A cop asked. He was obviously the one in charge.

“Yes. Yes. But what can I do? I was only called for the ceremony today. I had nothing to do with this. Believe me. Besides I was the one who went and got you didn’t I?” The priest’s voice quavered with fear.

Sohael cleared his throat. The two men turned.

“Uhh…I am an old friend of the family. What is going on here?

“Friend of the family huh? Did you know this was going on here? Did
you? The cop’s belligerence rose a notch.
“What do you mean? What is going on?”
“Playing innocent huh? Come with me. No-one else in this damned
neighborhood seems to be claiming these people. You’ll see what we are talking about then.”

The cop fully opened the half closed door and together they entered. After the brightness of the day outside it took Sohael’s eyes a while to adjust. At first all he saw were the masses of flowers. And he smelled them, in waves of layered fragrance. Some dead. Some decaying. Some fresh. Dozens of incense sticks perfumed the air, their smoke hanging in a haze in the already dark room. Someone was sleeping on the bed. No, not sleeping. He stepped closer.

The skin was pure leather, the hair wispy and long. Hands were crossed on the chest, fingernails overlong and dark. The smell of rot only confirmed the existence of this long-dead thing. Stunned, Sohael sank to his feet, his stomach quivering.

“Oh my God,” he kept repeating as he stared at the long dead man on the bed. “What the hell? What is this?” He looked at the dead man on the bed, repulsed yet fascinated. He could not tear his eyes away.

He sensed a movement on the other side of the bed. Hands, living hands were gripping the side of the bed. Hands that had populated a million of his dreams. She was sitting on the other side of the bed, her head downcast, behind a bank of flowers, shadowed by the haze of the incense smoke. His eyes only half registered the middle-aged woman sitting by one wall. She seemed to be made of stone. Just her breath was coming fast, her eyes glazed and he knew she was alive.

He stumbled as he got up, running to the courtyard. His vomit came in gushing, watery spasms.

“So, friend of the family. What do you know about this?” The cop seemed to take a peculiar delight in his shock and discomfort.

“I don’t them, not really. I have just talked to her, to the girl I mean, a few times. From there.” Sohael’s words tripped over each other as he pointed to the triangle of terrace that could be seen from this vantage point. Then he ran. The cop shouted after him. But long years of sitting behind a desk and too much good food had blunted the officer’s resolve and his physical fitness. Besides he had other things to do. Like decide what needed to be done here.

When the coroner’s van arrived, Sohael lay in bed, shivering with fear and disgust. When the cries and wails reached him, he could not block them out even by covering up his ears.

“You can’t take him. You can’t. He will live. You’ll see. Please let us do the ceremony. Please.” It was not her voice.

Almost despite himself he came and stood by the front door, still shivering and retching.

The older woman’s hair, seen here in the sunlight, was mostly white, her skin pale as if it had not seen the sun for a while.

“Please sir. Please. The priest is here. Please let us do the ceremony. We have waited for six months already.” Her voice broke off into anguished tears. It was only then that Sohael noticed the girl holding her up. For an instant again, he could only focus on those familiar hands.

She was simply ordinary. Her eyes were red with the tears that ran down her cheeks. Her face a mixture of confusion, fear and perhaps relief was symmetrical, though not spectacular. Her figure was lush without being fat, far removed from the fantasy women he and his friends had lusted after. It was as if those elegant, lovely hands did not belong to her. But there they were, smoothing away her mother’s tears, never still as always. He focused on them and on her smoky, wondrous voice.

“It’s over Mummy. It’s over. Papa has gone. He is not coming back.”

“How can you say that? The time for his resurrection is almost here. He was just sleeping, right? You tell them Rekha, tell them again. Tell them your papa was sick and just needed some rest. And he said it, Rekha. He said, ‘wait for me. I cannot die. I won’t.’ He said it so many times. How can we not wait for him? How can I not do what he asked? How can we abandon him?”

“I know mummy, I know. But we can’t do that any more. They won’t let us,” Rekha gestured toward the cops and the curious crowd of onlookers.

“His hair was still growing. His finger nails. You saw it. He is still alive, inside. We both saw it as we tended him. Officer, please…please…I did everything right. I stayed inside with him, doing the duties of a wife. Don’t take him away from us, please.”

Sohael could almost touch the woman’s anguish. No-one responded to her pleas. No-one knew how to. The coroner’s men brought out the body, now covered with a pristine white sheet.

“No. No. You will kill him. Truly kill him. Bring him back. We will prove that he will live.” The dead man’s wife surged after the stretcher, her daughter’s hand grasped in hers, tightly. The two policewomen assigned to them managed to hold them back.

The woman sank to the ground, her sari picking up the distilled filth of the neighborhood.

“Oh, Rekha! What will we do now? What will happen to us?” Her voice sounded like that of a frightened child. Slowly, they were led to the police car.

Rekha turned, looking straight at Sohael, her face stone-like, one hand smoothing back her hair, the other held in her mother’s. She seemed to ask him a question, silently. Quickly, he jumped back, closing the door.
He heard the car start up, rev its engine and drive away. His dreams were never the same.