Bisma couldn’t bring herself to follow Mama out of the midday sun and into the stranger’s house. Bisma knew she’d have to—in the end she always did as Mama said. Of course she hadn’t asked any questions when Mama ordered her to pick up their cleaning equipment and follow her to the house at the end of the village. Hadn’t even asked how Mama’d swiped the keys she carried from the real estate office her uncle worked at. Her obedience was a foregone conclusion. She had practiced it for all her eighteen years.
The building loomed gray and dismal ahead of her despite the bright fuschia smatterings of overgrown bougainvillea that furled over its white plaster walls and terracotta colored eaves. Mama’s slippers left marks in the dry garden soil as she went ahead of Bisma, making cheerful strides to the house.
“Don’t be such a coward. It’s empty, I tell you.”
Mama raised the stolen key to the front door. She winked at Bisma, expecting her to join in with her glee. Her optimism. It was rare, seeing Mama like this. Bisma gave a small smile back, swallowing her anxiety. What could she do? When Mama wanted something, everything bent to her will.
Perhaps it was Mama’s childhood, foraging in the jungles close to the village, that made her so miserable. A hard life, she’d tell anyone who’d listen. Nobody had ever looked after her. She’d been sent out every dawn to look for wild spinach and fruit. The least Bisma could do, she’d tell her daughter as they folded their identical pastel coloured clothes together, was to not think herself above her station. Now they cleaned houses, going from door to door in the village to anyone who would pay. Bisma didn’t really mind. She did wish sometimes she hadn’t had to leave school to help her mother. But she didn’t need books, Mama said. Mama could teach her everything Bisma needed to know. The main thing for a child to learn, Mama said, was to be exactly like her parents and their elders before. This is how the village managed to get by. Every daughter was like the mother before her. Every son like his father.
“Who would eat betel nut and just spit it here?” Bisma said, joining her mother by the front door. Together they looked at the splash of rust sprayed across the wall of the house.
“That is why this new sahib needs us,” Mama said, demeanor bright, turning her back to Bisma, peering at the assortment of keys on the key ring.
“But he doesn’t want cleaners. He said so.” Her uncle, the real estate agent’s employee who sold this place, had already tried to convince the owner to employ them to clean the house to no avail.
Mama paused to tilt her head at her.
“Pfft. Use your head. Is that rich business man going to squat on the ground and sweep bathroom tiles like you and me? Twist rags in buckets of bleach? Hunt and kill the geckos with a broom? Hm? These boys from the city, they don’t know anything though they think they do.”
“Uncle said—”
“Your uncle is a doormat. What does he know of the fight to survive?” Her mother paused. “He’s pampered. Spoiled.” Her gaze swiveled to Bisma who grew warm under her scrutiny.
Just as suddenly, Mama brightened again. “Don’t worry. I know all about the sahib. He has history and he’s taken great care no one should know it. And Sohrab sahib has money, Bisma. Enough to buy all this. A man alone with money and a house that needs cleaning. Of course he’ll hire us.”
She unlocked the two front doors. First the metal grill door, and then the wooden one within. Dust flew into Bisma’s face from the mosquito netting lining the wooden door.
“He was strange even then.”
“Strange how?”
“But he’s done well for himself, hasn’t he?” Mama continued, stepping into the house. “That odd little boy, now all grown up to live like a raja. And no family at all, of course. How could he have a family, after all that in the jungle. But see. Look at the state of these nice things.”
Bisma stepped forward as Mama tsked and tutted. Her distorted reflection in the gold door handle grew. Mama’s voice echoed from inside the house.
“They’ve just been sitting like this since the last owners left. That boy has no idea how to live. Not normal, is he? No family to teach him otherwise, baychara. No matter.” Her mother bent her wiry form to pick up the cleaning equipment by her feet. “Maybe he thought the women of this village were raised on cowards’ milk so they would be too scared to work here. But he doesn’t know us, does he, Bisma? He doesn’t know what we do to survive.”
“Why would anyone be too scared to work here?”
“Close the doors.” Mama’s voice carried to her, alive and excited. “Bolt them shut. Just in case.”
Bisma followed her mother inside, swatting all her questions aside.
Her mother paused.
“Use the padlock on the door. Don’t want your uncle following us and coming in. Always looking for his cut.”
It was dark. None of the blazing heat outside was making it through except for in the most tepid, pale imitations of yellow. The windows were closed and curtained shut. Exposed net screens were coated in dust.
Even so she could make out the large square floor tiles that spanned the corridor at the entrance. They were pretty though covered in grime. Maroon speckles against a cream background. The maroon flecks were asymmetrical in size and were probably part of the scattered silica design, appearing at discordant intervals, except sometimes they ran onto the white plaster of the wall, which was odd. The corridor from the front door led to a large square lounge.
The lounge was large enough to require two ceiling fans, both trailing thick ribbons of dust which spun as Mama switched them on, scaring away geckos asleep in the cool dark on the ceiling and who now wriggled away as Mama heaved open the gemstone colored curtains. Ornate sofas were placed together in a way that might have been companionable, but they were shrouded in plastic sheets.
Bisma looked out the window trying not to cough, made nervous at the loud hum of the ceiling fans, the wall clocks that had stopped a long time ago, and the echoing voice of her mother moving further away in the darkness of this house that wasn’t theirs.
All along the four walls of the lounge, doors stood in an array, shut like sleeping eyes. Winking awake one by one as her mother walked with confident footsteps, flinging each one wide open.
Bisma started in the lounge. She dusted the windows. Tried to open the side door to let the dust out, but couldn’t. Used a soft broom to collect as much dust as possible and tried to trust that with a wet mop she would finish the job. Found cockroaches behind the plastic sofas. A pair of broken glasses behind a door.
Mama got busy in the kitchen tutting at the state of the grime, the unused stove, ordering Bisma to wipe down the deep freezer too big to fit in the kitchen and which stood in the lounge, humming quietly.
Tired, Bisma stretched her back and walked towards one of the rooms the lounge opened up to. Bisma opened another door to a dark room small enough not to echo. A wall covered in bookshelves. Open cartons still filled with stationary and binders. A desk lined with books.
She could read. But these books on the desk were handwritten in a messy, wild script. She paged through the thin pages on which someone had scribbled a story in blue ballpoint. In the middle of the story was the drawing of a tree. The words went up and down, it seemed, as if hanging from the branches.
She read. The story twisted her gut. She felt her face tilt forward without her willing so. Forward, and forward, until—
A drop of red hit the page. She looked up, startled, checking her reflection in a wall mirror covered in grime. Her nose was bleeding. And now that she thought about it, the side of her head hurt. The words blurred as she dropped the book back on the desk.
She couldn’t even remember the particulars of what she had read. Or even what language it had been in. Like most school going children where she grew up, she was familiar with Sindhi, Urdu, and English, but couldn’t for the life of her recall what the book had been in.
Had the words started at the bottom of the page? And gone all the way up?
Bisma realized she hadn’t heard Mama’s stolen keys for a while.
She closed her eyes. Scenes floated behind her eyelids. Like the names and stories behind scatterings of night time stars forced by narratives into shapes, some story her mother told her long ago rose to her memory. “Be careful of the jungle,” she’d say, good humored as she sliced potatoes. “Beware of the bhoot that hide in them wearing the skins of the dead.”
“The dead men hang from trees by their feet,” Mama had told Bisma and her siblings. “They cluster together, sheltered from the sun, smiling away. Nodding as they move in the breeze. Making the best of things, one man’s mouth sighs as the sun begins to rise, and then the body falls silent, asleep with his eyes open. The flies settle on them as the heat rises from the ground after sunrise, and the noontime putrefies their flesh. The dead men don’t know this because they don’t know anything, and by the time the beings within their skins awaken, the flies are of no consequence. There are dead women too, of course. Their hair streams down as they hang from the tree. They laugh and sigh and touch their faces. The beings inside are not women, and nor are they men, but they are learning what was expected of the bodies and when they walk they can fool most people.
Habits die hard—harder than life, so the dead men till the earth at the cusp of the graveyard, as if still laboring in the fields. I’ve seen them. They have no seeds, and forget what they’re doing in between, and besides, the beings inside them are often hungry, so they scatter away from their trees and stagger at the periphery of the village, as far away from the fires as possible, because, you see, they hate fire. Some haunt the highway connecting the village to the city.
When they aren’t hungry anymore the beings return back to their tree, slow and sated. Sometimes there are new ones among their numbers. The beings can wear the bodies of the dead the way you or I wear our clothes, and sometimes they exchange an old one for something fresh. And they walk among us.”
“How do you know this?”
“I’ve seen them. I have hidden in places and watched very carefully those things that would drive other people mad.”
Poor Mama, Bisma thought. She has always been hiding, fighting, foraging for food and information together in the dark.
Bisma realized she hadn’t heard Mama’s footsteps for a while.
Mama stood still in front of the deep freezer, its lid wiped down so neatly by Bisma now wide open. Her stooped figure peering down framed by the wisps of vapor escaping it. Her hand on her chest, over her heart.
“Mama?”
Her mother closed the freezer gently and turned. Bisma moved the tissue away from her nose but put it back. It was still bleeding.
“Mama. We shouldn’t be—”
“It’s important not to be ungrateful in life,” Mama said to the ceiling. Mama’s hand sneaked out and dug into her arm. Bisma winced—there were too many bruises on her arm already where Mama gripped her. “Opportunities have to be grabbed where you find them. It’s important to be brave. Women must know when to be scared, when to stand tall. When to stay and when to leave. Just do as I do. And you are like me. You will do the same. You must.” Her hand dug harder. “Put small hopes and dreams aside. It is the only way we will both survive.”
Bisma took a deep breath. She caught a look at their reflections in the white reflective surface of the freezer her mother had so swiftly closed. She looked wrinkled and old, worn by her thoughts that circled her head as she tried to sleep at night. All the things she wanted to do, all the things she wanted her mother to have, and how it all conflicted. Her mother’s hand on her arm looked smooth. Her smile now self-assured.
“What was that?” Her mother turned her head. “Is it your uncle? It’s him, isn’t it? Come to whine at us about how we’ll get in trouble. And then asking me to give him a cut, no doubt. Let me go tell him where he can put his cowardice.”
Mama went off with that face that told Bisma her uncle was in for a telling off.
She moved her head at another soft sound. Was it from the kitchen?
The kitchen was empty. A box of matchsticks lay on the counter. Bisma picked them up.
Bisma gave the house a quick lookover. There were doors to rooms they hadn’t opened yet. One turned out to be the dining room. One was a storage space.
The bedroom door at the end of the corridor was open.
“Mama?”
Bisma retreated into the kitchen. There was a bottle of bleach by the sink. A cleaning cloth on the worktop.
Her mother’s footprints marked the wet floor tiles towards the back of the house. Where had she gone?
There was a piercing scream.
“Bisma!” her mother screamed. “Save me, Bisma!”
Bisma fled in the opposite direction.
“Over here,” her mother’s voice reached from behind her. “Bisma!”
She couldn’t leave the house. It was locked, and Mama had the key.
Back to the open door of the bedroom. The knocking turned to scrabbling sounds, and Bisma closed the door, her heart beating fast, hands over her mouth as she retreated to the back of the dark room.
At the back was a built-in wardrobe. It was stuffed full of clothes, hanging stiff from the overhead rod. She could hide in there.
Someone was walking outside in slow, shuffling footsteps.
Bisma crawled inside the wardrobe, and closed the door behind her.
“Sohrab!” Her mother sobbed outside, somewhere. “Sohrab, remember who I am.”
And then, a strange silence, and her mother’s wondering voice.
“You’re not Sohrab.”
Bisma never tells anyone what happens next. If she did, they’d know she gets chased. They’d understand her terror. What she would never bring herself to say was inside the wardrobe it was very dark. So dark that she remembered the matchsticks. So she lit a light and all the clothes hanging in the cupboard cast their shadows every which way, but the first thing she saw inches from herself was a man’s face. The upside down face of a man hanging from his feet between the hangers and the clothes shrouded in plastic sheathes. And behind him, a woman’s. And more. Each face flat, skin hanging like an empty bag, slits for the eyes yawning like empty maws.
The last thing Bisma did before passing out was snuff the matchstick in her fist.
Bisma sat at a dining table. On the other end sat the smiling man she knew was Sohrab sahib. He was eating something with a lot of gravy oozing out of it—(would she like some? No? Very well)—and was so impressed with how she could read even a bit of his important words in the books on his desk. Yes, he says, cutting the hard pieces of very uncooked looking meat with a fork and knife. An amber coloured stone shone dully from a ring on his right hand. She is very impressive, he continues. Not many humans can even look at his books without their brains bleeding out. Of course, Sohrab sahib is himself a human, but he’s a very special one. He’s been given gifts. He’s been loved by the dead themselves.
He also thinks Bisma is pretty.
When the sound of crying came out of the jungle to these dead people, shrill and discordant, they must have wondered what it was. To many of the dead men and women it may have seemed oddly familiar, but never would they have expected it so close to their trees. As it came closer and closer, some of the dead people must have broken away to locate it. They gather around the source and the child cries louder still, keening and shrieking. Curiosity abated, the beings must have turned back—
Maybe this child smelled less like a person of blood and meat and more like milk, because this child was very new in the world.
The dead people, think of them shuffling back with their dead heads hanging limp from broken necks, until there remained but one freshly dead woman. Some things are second nature. There are habits etched in the muscles of the dead, which is why this woman lifts the child and holds him to her chest where the fabric has already been shredded by clawing hands. She begins to sing something she had known in life, still tucked away in some remaining brain tissue. The being, however, can’t access the words, and so she improvises freely. Her tongue is blue and too large for her mouth, her eyes are popping out of her head, but the child hears the vibration of her chest. Listens, and grows silent. Balls his fists, and clings.
And he feeds from her.
You can imagine when a half grown boy is found in the jungle, naked and with the stench of death around him, how surprised everyone must have been. You can ask them. Some of them are still alive. Bisma’s mother, for example, who was the one who had told the village about him in the first place. They will tell you how something wasn’t right with the boy, but how could it be, him being all alone for so long. He has a comb of bone in his pocket and he says it’s for his Mama’s hair. He carves strange things out of wood and he says it is to entertain his Mama. He speaks but it in a wafting murmuring, almost a song, the sound of the breeze moving dead things hanging upside down from trees. He writes with his finger in the dust and giggles because everything true is a hidden, beautiful secret, and he knows there are no real people except those who die just the right way and go on living in the skins of whoever they choose. And because he has a plan, he indicates to them. A plan to save his family.
Poor boy, they say to each other. They have found the burnt remains of a car crashed into a pile of rocks and rubble, and the two charred skeletons inside.
The people in the mosque are charitable and discreet where they feel it necessary. The boy rewards their patience with wisdom. He isn’t a fool—he surprises them with his knowledge of languages and knowledge of the world.
He is found at the butcher’s, staring at animal pelts, reaching out and caressing them gently. He becomes the butcher’s apprentice. The leaders of the mosque congratulate each other. They have successfully launched a growing boy’s livelihood.
And then, one night, he disappears from the village.
A sliver of light.
Bisma wished she hadn’t woken up.
Should she leave? She could leave and call her uncle. She tried not to look at the skins hanging around her.
But what if something was out there? Something in the freezer, something that shuffled, or something that had been in the wardrobe right here with her?
As she considered her next steps, footsteps approached the wardrobe. The door opened and Bisma peered up at the crimson stained face of her mother.
“Come. We have to go. Shh. He’s at the back.”
Mama moved her arm in the dark, as if to reach out her hand for Bisma’s.
A lifetime of habit can’t be stood against. Bisma flinched from her mother’s hand reaching out, her cheek smarting in apprehension. Mama’s slaps had informed most of her childhood.
But there was no need. Beneath her mother’s elbow, the skin of her hand was peeling away. And underneath it . . .
(from inside it?)
. . . a man’s hand reached oh so gently for her. An amber stone glinting from the ring finger.
This time Bisma screamed. Screamed and ducked away from her mother, rushing out of the room. She ran to the door and tried it but the padlock was locked fast.
“Help.” She hammered on the door. “Help me.”
She rested her forehead on the door and screamed. It could have been for minutes or hours until
“Bisma?”
She turned around slowly.
Her uncle stood at the bedroom door, smiling at her, eyebrows raised. “What’s all this noise? Why are you running away? A big, brave girl like you.”
“Uncle? I don’t—”
She cut herself off. Pressed her hands to her eyes. In the wardrobe. Hadn’t there been something she should remember? A familiar looking skin. Jaw hanging slack in a way she knew. Empty eye slits—
Her uncle stepped towards her. He wobbled a bit on his left.
“I want to talk to you, Bisma. You’ll understand when I talk to you. I can feel it. You’re not like the rest of them. They are so like each other, every one. So many generations, just following the footsteps of the ones before. They’re not like us. They cannot fathom new ways.”
Her uncle, his voice so determined, so sure of himself. As if he hadn’t spent his whole life being bullied by Bisma’s mother. As if it wasn’t her uncle at all speaking to her.
“Mama?” She turned and called, voice shaking, “Where did she go?”
“You know where,” her uncle said, with a gentle firmness. “Come now, Bisma. You’re not a fool.”
Bisma collapsed, weeping and covering her face, her eyes, from what was speaking to her.
“Tsk. Let me show you something.”
He pulled her, shaking and protesting, back to the bedroom. He deftly picks something out from the wardrobe.
“See this? Let me wear it.” He stepped inside it, shrugged it on, and became an old woman. “Look,” the old woman said to Bisma in a hoarse voice. The old woman flipped through the skins hanging in the cupboard. “Wear the right skin and you can open any door of your choice. You can choose to do anything. Trust me. I have traveled the world.”
“I want to go home,” Bisma crouched on the ground. Covered her head with her arms.
“Hasn’t there been anything you wanted to do your whole life?”
“Me?”
“I can help you. Oh, it’s a family secret,” the old woman smiled. “Wait.”
She busied herself in the wardrobe and stepped into another skin. Stretched.
“That’s better.” It was Sohrab sahib now who turned and grinned at her almost shyly.
“I learned these wisdoms at my mother’s breast. How merciful are the bhoot. I am not half as skilled as those ethereal forms. But I do what I can. What wonders does my family perform with the skins of your dead! And they won’t mind. They won’t see you as meat. They’d be happy to welcome you.”
“You’re a bhoot,” Bisma whispered.
“Not at all. I’m the boy the bhoot loved so well, who gave him the gift of sustenance when he would have died. The bhoot who found my human parents, preserving them in my being by feeding them to me bit by bit. I’m the boy who went away and made good, who has now come back to his village. You know you can never leave. Once you know what duty is. You know this.” Sohrab looked disappointed. “I smelled it from your mother, how she has trained you well. How you yearn to please her.”
“Where is my uncle?”
“Oh,” Sohrab said. “He wanted to talk about something . . . about money. So I called him in to meet my family. Most of them are in the jungle but . . . you haven’t been upstairs yet, have you? I’m making a garden up there. Small trees. They love trees. Some parts are probably still—no. Don’t do that.”
Bisma collapsed, screaming, pulling into herself.
“Don’t do that. We are going to make such a great team.” He sighed. “Don’t pretend not to understand. I serve my family. All I want to do is give back to them the way they loved me. You understand family obedience. You know what it is to want to give your mother anything she wants. And that is what every man from around here wants in the end. A good girl with family values.”
“You killed her,” she whispered. “And you killed my uncle.”
“On the contrary,” Sohrab said dreamily, leaning forward to caress the hanging skins. “In some ways they will live on forever.”
Mama walked the periphery of the jungle. She wasn’t hunched over foraging for food. She wasn’t muttering to herself, remembering old wrongs bitter and severe. She wasn’t forever agonizing over the ingratitudes of her offspring.
“Very good,” she called out to the children playing in the stream. “You are doing so well.”
“No, they’re not,” an old man said, watching them. “They’re disrespectful and loud and horrible.”
“They will live long,” Mama called out as she walked. “They will be happy. I can smell it on them.”
Mama sat comfortably at the river bank and soaked her feet. Mama sucked on green mangoes. Mama screeched in laughter when their sourness made her teeth shiver. Mama hugged little children, admired the muscles of laborers, looked up at the full moon. And then, once she was sated with happiness, she went back to the house at the end of the village, took off her skin and became Bisma again, before going to sleep curled up next to the boy the bhoot loved so much.
