Everything has a purpose, Ayaan’s mother would say, and a man usually finds his through marriage. Which is what brought them to the matchmaker whose diary had been lined with names and mobile numbers in ballpoint ink. That detail had struck Ayaan. In this day and age he’d just assumed everything was in an app. But the woman had enjoyed flipping through her book, lingering on certain names, elaborating on the flaws of this one, the market value of another. She never used those words, but he understood what she meant just fine. One thing she said without hesitation, without much pleasure either was that this girl, Sarah, was perfect. And now that they were at her house, it was hard to disagree.
His mother was speaking now. Lording it over the women of Sarah’s family. She had a gleam in her eye, she hadn’t looked so energetic or happy in years. The other women around her were silent and looked on brightly, listening to her fast, excited river of words. Even the men sat with docile smiles on dining chairs lining the wall, listening to her talk. Yes, Sarah was perfect, but so was her family, and that’s what really counted in an arranged marriage. They were all treating Ayaan’s family like minor royalty.
He got up to use the bathroom.
Odd, he thought. The room with the ensuite bathroom they’d told him to use seemed to have already been decorated as if ready for a married couple. Nostalgia gripped him and he looked at the two long ribbons of crepe paper crossing over themselves at the entrance. Back when he was a kid, he’d participated in these same rituals. Before someone in the family got married, it was customary for the household to decorate the bridegroom’s room with colourful ribbons, pink roses and spangles from the shops. Transforming a wretched adolescent bachelor pad to a bridal chamber. He went closer. Yes, he could see there in the dark. Crepe paper folded over in corded stripes tied to all possible surfaces. And those canopies of roses strung in loops above the bed.
He inhaled to take it in . . .
And stepped back, hands slamming his nose, trying to erase that smell of the butcher’s shop. Now that he looked again, the ribbons throbbed, shades of blue and black rippling.
He stumbled as he backed away further, and two hands shoved him from behind.
“Me first,” his father announced tersely before reaching out to flick the room’s light switch on, and then fleeing into the bathroom.
Ayaan blinked in the glare of the white electric light.
Nothing. No decorations. No smell, either. The small dressing table mirror showed his face back to himself in one of his best shirts and jeans.
He flinched when a shadow moved in the corner. An elderly man, sitting by the window. All alone in the dark? In his lap was a knife and he had been worrying at the wall with it. Instead of being embarrassed at being caught at it, he grinned at Ayaan.
“You alright, son? You look a bit sick.”
He looked quite pleased at Ayaan’s distress.
“This view,” he continued. “You can see the sea from here. Come look.”
Ayaan’s eyes followed his. It was always a familiar sight on this side of Karachi. The sea was a fact of life. You could forget about the sea, but it would make itself felt. In the smell of dead fishes. In the salt in the air. Ayaan’s family’s apartment, which was close by, had a similar view from the balcony.
When he went to sleep that night it was sudden and heavy. Being in his boyhood home had that effect on him. He would always struggle to sleep in London. He would always feel cheated of free time. But here he did as he pleased, and sleep welcomed him as soon as he intended to bid the day farewell.
In his dreams he saw himself at the door of his room. It was all dark, and it wasn’t supposed to be. There were the two ribbons garlanding the entrance. Someone was whimpering. From faraway, he could hear someone screaming. If you peeled away the city’s endless traffic and the stray dogs barking, you could hear the beat of a drum like a pulse shuddering through the length of the land. And waves crashing like white noise.
In the dream he turned his head, utterly sure of this fact that had just come to him—
—somebody was hiding in his closet.
He woke up drenched in sweat despite the fully air conditioned room.
His mother was still living off the fumes of last night. The family was perfect. The girl was perfect. It was all down to the fact her son was so handsome. Her own attention to detail so precise. His mother’s triumph was self-sustaining. He managed to give monosyllabic responses until leaving to see a friend.
It would be a winter wedding. They were eager for the marriage to be very soon, his mother said. This was a win. Usually a girl’s family would ask for more time, spend it researching the other party very carefully, interviewing everyone. But see how perfect everything is. They are falling over themselves to marry into our family, his mother gushed.
This meant a lot of work had to be done in their apartment. New paint for the walls. New curtains for the drawing room. Workers coming in and out. This was not how he’d expected his holiday home to go, Ayaan complained.
The workers would be gone soon, his father said curtly. The place needed work before they could host wedding guests and the family who would come from abroad later in the year for the wedding. Because there would be a lot of people. Noticing things, finding an excuse to wag their tongue. And Ayaan’s own room needed to be transformed into a fitting bridal chamber.
Fine, Ayaan thought.
A man came out of his bedroom, leisurely. Staring at him.
“What?” Ayaan said, glaring.
Instead of explaining himself, the worker looked at him even more insolently. He looked a bit familiar, Ayaan thought.
“Just inspecting.” The worker said, taking out a pen knife and worried at a corner of the wall with it. “Seeing if it’s ready.”
Was he looking for a tip? There was nothing done in the room. In fact it looked worse than before. There were scratchings on the door of the wardrobe. As if mice had been at it with their teeth. The worker grinned at him, and Ayaan had a feeling he was not young, but old, and that in fact he had seen this man somewhere, and he could almost remember who this person was. But the worker turned around and left, leaving a strange smell behind him, a bit like a butcher’s shop or a dead rat.
That night Ayaan dreamed.
He saw scratchings in the plaster. Above his bed in the white plaster, words writhed like seaweed moving in invisible waters. On the closet door strange symbols sang an insistent, inaudible melody, and something from beyond the deep responded. He heard the whimpering sound again. Like someone trying to escape. A drum beat shook the walls and something wet squelched outside. Again he knew there was someone in his closet.
He threw open the door to it.
A creature was hiding inside. Its face was curled away from the open door. Something stank. A dark puddle on the floor that stank like urine and rank terror.
He woke up panting, as if he had been holding his breath for a very long time.
In between the nightmares, Ayaan had been trying to get to know Sarah. She remained opaque to him. Coy, even, which many girls back home were, Ayaan thought, but there was a limit.
The problem, he realised, was that he hadn’t gotten to know her face to face. Alone. They’d hardly spoken, and the texts they sent were stilted. This was nothing like all the dates he’d ever been on before. He could change that. Make it even better than those times.
They met at a cafe and each got a coffee. Surrounded by other couples on dates. He didn’t even notice when evening turned to night. The conversation had flowed well. She was a good listener. Sometimes she would strike a peculiar note.
“We are lucky,” she’d said. “I am, especially, lucky. To have been forgotten. Unseen. Floating in the deep. And then to be noticed. Made into one.”
“We will be,” he said to her intensely, “we will be as one.”
She suddenly looked up as if he had said something awful. For a moment he thought perhaps he had. Had inadvertently and prematurely revealed his intentions for how the night would end.
“I am but a serving girl,” she’d said. “A bondswoman.”
This startled him.
“Are you trying to say I’m going to make a servant out of you?” he said sharply.
“Not to you,” she said, more quickly than he would have liked.
To God then? He wondered. Nothing wrong with a bit of useful piety in a wife. But this felt off. Performative. Off-kilter in how ardent it was.
“Shall we?” he said in the car, before he had fully planned out what he was suggesting.
She’d looked at him inquiringly so he grabbed her. Pulled. She pulled back. This he remembered later on, though he didn’t want to. It was too similar to some of the other times. Some of the other dates. And then . . .
He didn’t want to go to sleep because the nightmare waited on the other end. But if he stayed up he would replay what happened over and over.
Her body had come apart. It was as if by pulling her he had torn her into pieces. And the smell was back, of the chicken shop. His hands were sticky, gleaming red in the moonlight. Help, he had cried. Hurtling away. Then realising no. What would he tell everyone? Returning and wondering why all her parts were mismatched like a patchwork person, why they were coated in slime from where they’d come apart. Getting rid of the body, depositing it in the sea.
Ayaan’s hands shook as he checked his phone. Someone had sent a text from her number. A photo of something cooking? He blinked back tears. Was this a joke?
He drove to her house. Rang the bell. Went inside, ignoring conversation.
Sarah was in the kitchen kneading dough. Appraising him with eyes that only looked a little different than the girl whose pieces he had left in his car. Whose hair was a slightly different shade.
The family gathered around. Those same docile smiles.
“I wanted you to try this,” his fiance said. “I’m glad you were in the neighbourhood.”
She gave a bashful grin, and Ayaan observed with clinical detachment her dimple was in the wrong place. “I put it together myself. Though my family helped.”
He doesn’t remember the wedding when they reached his family’s apartment. He could recall that any attempt at a ritual, any suggestion of mirth, was quashed by his parents. Especially the one where the guests block the way to the bride, not giving way until the groom scatters money. They held their lips tight. Their fists tighter. They were eager for all the customs that privileged them as the bridegroom’s family, and disdainful of any that required anything of them.
And there they were, bride and groom were, in his bedroom. She was seated on his bed – their bed, he supposed. This was a bridal chamber, after all, for all it was still his boyhood bedroom behind all the decorations.
Ayaan was a little high. He had not been looking forward to when they would both be alone for the first time. His stomach felt wretched.
But she looked pleasant and pretty, the embroidered red dupatta over her head, her fingers stained with mehndi. Her skirts fan out and someone has put a dhol on the bed with her. Not typical of bridal customs but she was beating a good rhythm on it. Her bangles clinking, her rings flashing.
“I’ll get some water,” he said.
He regretted saying the word water as soon as he uttered it. It grew, shapeless, beyond his mouth. The dhol drummed on and he sees, so clear before his vision, the image of a great darkness feeding on crushed ships, whales. Markings gleamed from various corners of his room as if lanterns lighting the monster’s.
“Here,” she said as she drummed on. “It’s here.”
The pressure bore down on him. As if he were covered in fathoms of dark liquid, so far below that the sun could never hope to reach.
“Who’s here?”
Outside the window the sea was quiet. Even the seagulls.
He needed to go. He didn’t like this kind of set up. He’d go. By the time he’d come back it would be too late for intimacy. He’d just go to sleep. They had a special breakfast tomorrow planned for them by the extended family. So they had to be up early anyway.
“I’ll be back,” he ran out.
He drove around by himself for hours. Relatives climbing up and down from his apartment had raised their eyebrows at him as he’d exited the building. They had gone at great lengths to give him privacy with his bride, but he was squandering their half-hearted attempts. Ayaan drove and everywhere he went took him to the seaside. The sea looked green and smelled even worse than it usually did. His ears rang with an awful drumming which made him dizzy.
When he returned the apartment was in darkness. The extended family had gone very quiet.
“I will get the torch from my mother,” he called at his room as he passed the door. “She knows where it is.”
I’ll turn the generator on, he was about to call out and add, but something his eye had caught but his brain hadn’t deciphered made the bile rise to his throat.
A hand sat on the table. A foot by the fridge.
He backed away to the room where the balcony was that looked out at the sea.
Out there the seas were parting. Something giant was emerging.
At the entrance of his room, loops of gut garlanded the way through. Organs clustered in bouquets awaited him. His mother was not going to get her chance to order her new daughter-in-law about.
The closet. He could hide in there. Though he was already shaking so hard as he crawled under entrails looped across the ceiling in garlands that he had wet himself.
He looked up. The sound of the drumming had become a cosmic pulse. The words carved all over his room shivered. His bride’s fingers dripped red and the pupils in her eyes had disappeared.
The bedroom was decorated for a bridegroom, but the bridegroom wasn’t him. A special breakfast was planned for the couple, but there was no extended family left to provide it. He was here though, Ayaan thought, the drumbeat making his eyes bleed, even as he cowered into himself in his closet. He would make sure they wanted for nothing the next morning. Everything has a purpose. He would play an important part in the new age that was to come.
Faraway the creature rose from the deep. And from his room the dhol played on.
