Strange Tales of a Strange House - Al-Kausar

Excerpt 1
In the port city of Karachi, also known as the City of Lights, there is a small town called North Nazimabad. The streets have no names around here. They are known by the blocks that they lie within, the landmarks that surround them, and the names given to the houses that crowd them. At any given hour, on any given day, one such street is alive with the hustle bustle of daily life.

The street awakens with the thump of the Dawn newspaper dropping from the heavens right onto the middle of the front porches, or sometimes on the grassy lawns damp with the early morning dew. Soon after, the milkman arrives on his Honda motorcycle, two buckets of milk strapped on either side, ringing doorbells and pouring milk into steel pots, or delivering thin plastic bags of the creamy, freshly squeezed cow milk.

As the day wears on, grocery vendor carts pass by in the afternoon, the ice-candy vendor in the evening, and another vendor at night selling roasted corn in the summer or peanuts in the winter. Along with the chants of all of them selling their wares, every few hours, there are the sounds of azaan, or call to prayer; one from the Sunni mosque and another from the Shi’ite mosque down the block. The Shi’ite mosque, one of the few in the city, is a major attraction, especially during the sacred lunar month of Moharram. It is also a setting for skirmishes between the two Muslim sects of Sunnis and Shi’ites, every few weeks.

At all odd hours of the day, groups of young men huddle into corners across the street from houses where there are any young females residing. Either that, or they are busy taking over a whole length of the street, engrossed in a loud and dangerous game of cricket; one is constantly in danger of being knocked senseless with a blow to the head by flying balls gone out of control. Around the corner is the notorious “Five Star”, a small group of stores and cheap restaurants selling just about anything cooked under various unsanitary conditions, enough to give food poisoning, or a bad case of diarrhea. This, of course, does not lessen their demand. The most popular of the delicacies sold here are the sweet orange dessert meats, jalebis- deep fried in a skillet the size of a small Jacuzzi-, the street version of a burger called bun kebab- simmering on the grill along with dead flies, which sometimes end up in your mouth-, and the crème de la crème, bright orange and black roasted chicken tikkas- spicy to the point of heartburn.

Once in a while, passing cars come to an abrupt stop in the middle of the street or a game of cricket halt for a few seconds, before resuming again; disquieted by a lone hunched figure hobbling past. Legend has it that around sunset, if you look hard, you might see a vision of an old man, the color of dark chocolate, limping around up and down the street. He strolls around, vanishing and reappearing; in search of something. But mostly, he likes to perch outside the entrance to a big empty house with a deep blue gate. There, in front of that house in all its ominous 3000 square feet of trees, trees, trees, and eerie quietness, he sits as though guarding the secrets within.

They say the house is haunted. By the ghost of the old man who built it. By the ghost of the one who had sat there at the old man’s bedside as he lay dying, and by the ghosts of those who sometimes return to walk through its corridors once again. The house is empty now. There are no curtains, there is no furniture. There are no little kids running around in the garden. Yet the garden still blooms.

As you walk through the massive corridors of the house, you hear the peals of laughter of little children. An echo lingers. A queer melancholia sets in. The house refuses to be sold. Tenants come to live here, but no one stays. They all say there’s something wrong. They say that someone still lives there. You can hear the footsteps at night. You can hear curtains being drawn where none hang. Sometimes at night, the house sighs.

The name of this house is Al-Kausar…


Excerpt 2

There were two main corridors in the house, one set horizontally along the front of the house, and the other horizontally along the back of the house. The lounge, Drawing Room, and Dining Rooms were arranged in the center of the house, while the bedrooms were set along one of the shorter sides of the huge rectangular house. All except for mine, which for some reason was added to one corner of the front corridor, as though an afterthought. Still, even though each of us five women technically had our own rooms, we all insisted on sleeping together in one main bedroom. My mom slept on one cot, my sisters and I on the big bed, and ayah on a mattress on the floor. Mani had his own room, halfway up the stairs. Halfway up because none of us were brave enough to climb the stairs all the way up to the terrace (where there was an extra, empty bedroom), let alone the second terrace above that. Not alone. Not at night. Sometimes, not during the day either.

Beyond the front corridor was the main garden, blooming with all kinds of bright colorful flowers: fuchsia bougainvilleas, roses in all colors, big red china roses, pink carnations... and a plethora of other plants including seven or eight different types of cactus plants. There was the plant whose leaves we used to insist on picking and chewing because they tasted funny. There was the plant with the black pine needles which we would spit on to make them pop. There were the magenta morning glory flowers that stained our fingers, and the plant with the sharp sword-like leaves we poked each other with. There was the sweet smelling jasmine tree, and of course, the weeping willow.

In the backyard, there was a guava fruit tree, a lemon tree, and a lime tree. There was even a coconut tree. But most importantly, there was the tall tree we shared with our next-door neighbors; it grew on our land, but the branches extended far onto theirs’. It bore strange fruit, called jamun. Everyone loved the jamuns, but we were all afraid to go too close to it, because that was our haunted tree.

Few of us were ever brave enough to pick the fruit directly off the tree. There were some courageous souls who eventually came to tragic ends after attempting to climb it. One morning we had woken up to a loud crash and then the screams of our sweeping man. We later learned that he had set a ladder up against the tree to pick the fruit. He suffered some major fractures and ended up in the hospital for a few months. Another incident involved one of the neighbors, who had actually managed to climb the tree to the very top. She also fell, breaking one arm and one leg. We heard they both had nightmares about the tree.

Back inside our house, we had all gotten used to the footsteps that we heard every night. There was the strange way the doors closed behind us sometimes, and the way lights would switch on and off. Some quiet nights we could even hear our names being whispered. But all these were common to us, we weren’t much afraid. We had begun to ignore them really, although there were times when we were scared. Sometimes, we’d be sitting in the dining room, having a quiet conversation, and there would be tapping on the windows, as though someone was trying to get our attention. We would run to another room, and we would hear footsteps following us. Some nights we were afraid to go to the kitchen by ourselves even for a glass of water. Each of us had a strangely similar experience, which had led to us sleeping in one room. It went something like this: we would either hear a tapping on the window, or a cool breeze would suddenly blow, while the windows were still shut. We would try to get up or move and find ourselves paralyzed; unable to turn, unable to scream. Eventually, the moment would pass and we would be able to jump out of bed, never to return to sleep in our own bedroom again.

But those were the only times we were actually afraid. Most of the time, we just thought the house was being friendly, playing with us. If the footsteps were ever to disappear, we would have been thrown into some sort of a subconscious discord.