Home, Dark Home
by Jahnavi Misra
part 1
“The jinn is always polite: ‘May I please borrow a bidi or a cigarette?’ It always asks nicely,” the new security guard informed my seven-year old self. “It may look like a friend or even a relative; but I’m telling you, do not offer your cigarette. Not ever.”
I remember that his thick moustache was dark and authoritative, and his eyes were wide with warning, but his mouth registered a faint smile that did not go with the rest of it.
“Do not let it have your cigarette, or it will pull your outstretched hand and carry you off to its abode in a deep, swampy lake.”
“There’s no chance. I don’t even smoke,” I replied, reassuring him.
* * *
I see the mosaic columns glittering in the sun as I enter the gate. I see black smears of time on the walls and the overhanging flat roof. The house needs a good paint job to hide its age. How long has it been since I was last here?
The tall and short Ashoka trees haphazardly lining the large, unkempt garden. It is our house. Old and wild. Nothing is landscaped, nothing is designed. Not that we did not want it to be neat and elegant, it is just that it is impossible to tame all this energy swirling around everywhere. I have always suspected that there are all kinds of strange powers playing hide and seek in this house, powers that do not like to be controlled.
The guard offers to take my duffel bag. He smiles the same sly smile that I had noticed on his face so many years ago, when he had relayed to me his experience of the local jinn.
“How are you?” I ask, as he walks towards me today. “Your hair has become grey but your face is the same,” I tell him. I can almost feel tears.
My bag is deposited on the patio. The guard does not feel the need to go inside the house. “What will I do there, madam?” he asks, dropping the bag.
“Don’t call me ‘madam.’ Don’t you remember my name?” I ask him.
He gives me a sheepish grin and leaves.
I look down at my feet and observe once again the orange and green patio floor, the same mosaic as the columns surrounding it. How beautiful it all is in its dilapidated, melancholic glory.
I want to go in, but I hesitate. The idea of being home — the rage and the cloying affection — all hitting me at once. The heat is intense too; maybe it is that and not my untamed and unfathomable childhood home that is making me feel faint, making me feel small and insignificant.
I step in anyway. There is nothing else to be done. The house inside is only a little less weather-beaten than the outside. In the narrow hallway, I am greeted by the long, crayon mark I left along the wall as a child. It looks like an old scratch on an old car.
I had only been trying to make my presence felt; telling the house that I belonged. But my father thrashed me for it. “How dare you?” he screamed at my confused, shell-shocked face. How was I to know at four years old that walls are sacred?
He was so outraged then that I am mystified now by the fact that he has still not covered up the mark in all this time. I run my finger across that ancient streak. It feels like I am touching my childhood face. “Don’t worry,” I tell it, as it looks up at me sobbing. “You will be okay someday, maybe.”
There is a kitchen at the end of the hallway. A narrow room that is too small in comparison to the rest of the house. There is another, bigger kitchen across from the courtyard, but I am not ready to approach it yet. I refuse to look in the direction of the courtyard. I know already that I will feel fear when I go there.
I turn towards the bedrooms on the left instead.
I step into my parents’ room. People used to gather here often; it was a kind of a living room really, with chairs around a large bed showing off an intricately carved headboard.
It is in this bed, all cosy under a velvet quilt, that I was told how I had kicked my mother’s belly for the first time when she slept, unhappy and exhausted, after the recent passing of her uncle, her father-figure.
She found him lying next to her in her dream that night. He smiled an eery smile and said, “Here I am.”
“Why?” she asked. “You are dead. You need to go away,” she said, turning away from him in fear.
“Child, I am here now,” he replied, and held her from behind in a warm embrace.
That is when I kicked for the first time inside her womb; exactly on the spot that his hand had touched.
“You are my uncle,” my mother always told me.
“But I am a girl,” I always protested. Why would I want to be associated with the tragedy that was his life?
My sister and I shared the slightly smaller room adjacent to that of my parents. I can almost see us on that bed: me clinging to her for dear life. I remember so well, sliding to her side of the bed and trying to cuddle up to her every night as we slept. I was scared of the dark; of my aloneness in floating black space.
I remember my half-asleep sister trying to shake me off, finally resigning to my hand clasped around her arm. I held on tightly, hoping that arm would save me from the dark dangers I knew in my gut were all around us, waiting to pounce, waiting to catch me by myself.
The bed looks small now, but it had seemed big then. It had probably seemed even more gigantic to that little bald girl, even littler than us. She had made the journey from the servant’s quarters all the way to our room, to hide behind it.
“What are you doing here?” we asked the little girl, after we woke up that morning to find her crouching behind the bed post.
She did not reply. She never spoke.
We felt sorry for her, so small and so innocent. Maybe she had lost her way we thought, and we ran to our mother to let her know.
Our mother promptly informed the little girl’s mother, who was the cook in our house. And the poor little girl was dragged back to where she had run away from.
How were we to know that she would die soon after, her little body covered in cigarette burns, her ribs broken? How were we to know? I remember her mother grovelling, promising my mother that she would leave our house immediately with her monstrous husband and never return; I watched as she begged my mother not to call the police on them.
“I can’t explain it, but I can hear the giggles of a little girl in my room sometimes,” I remember the next cook saying, as she settled into the same quarter.
I can hear a crow cawing in the courtyard. I have to make my way there now; I cannot avoid it anymore.
It is an open area encircled by tall mosaic columns, just like the patio. Lush money plants in simple terracota planters once alternated the columns. But they are not there anymore, making the place seem even more empty and unnerving. The courtyard is surrounded by rooms that, once upon a time, were used as offices and warehouses for my grandfather’s business. After his passing, the rooms were turned into bedrooms for the ever-burgeoning family.
On one side of courtyard is a set of stairs that goes up to a large and airy roof terrace. I have spent countless hours on it over the years, looking down at the world from my lofty height. I could see everything from there, cars passing, people loitering, pigs and cows happily congregating around rubbish heaps.
But right next to the terrace stairs, behind a dirt-green door, is another set of stairs that leads down to a profoundly dark basement underneath. Without the single, uncovered light bulb hanging off a wire from the ceiling, the basement is darker than any dark that I have ever seen. There is also an all-permeating musty smell down there, the smell of oldness and decay.
In putting the basement stairs so close to the terrace stairs, I sometimes wonder if the makers of the house were already aware of the eternal game of hide and seek that will be played between the different powers that rule this house. Some of the energy is released up towards the sky and some contained deep within the structure of the house.
As I stare at the door to the basement, I remember the gardener telling me the story of how on one hot afternoon, as the gardener slept on his khatiya in the courtyard, he was woken by the sound of my long-gone grandfather calling out his name in a screamy whisper: “Raaamdeeen.” He did not dare respond; and as he shivered in fear under his thin cotton sheet, his khatiya lifted in the air on its own and overturned, throwing him on the ground. He said that he found it difficult to sit on his sore bum for days after the event.
I wonder where my grandfather went: up into the ether via the terrace stairs or down into the bowels via the basement stairs.
I know that my grandmother went to the terrace because my mother saw her there once or twice, after her death.
“She always loved to walk on the terrace. No matter how cold the night or how sweltering the day, you would find her pacing on the terrace as if it were the lushest of parks. It’s no surprise that she likes to walk there even after passing,” my mother shared with me once.
But nobody much encouraged this type of talk in the house, dismissing it all — sometimes their own experiences — as superstitious nonsense. Nobody wanted to acknowledge what I always knew, that the house is not what it seems. It is much deeper and broader — it has many more dimensions than what is obviously visible.
I have always been able to sense these dimensions, especially in the courtyard with stairs going both up and down.
From the corners of my eyes, I would see the peripheries of the courtyard start to curl up into itself, like a paper starting to burn, ready for its dark transformation, slowly but surely. As soon as it happened, I would run as fast as I could, with the sound of my pounding heart made louder by the ominous silence around me.
The goal was always to get out of the courtyard before the transformation completed. My running would always stall it somehow, as if it needed an audience to finish the job; as if it needed me to see it through.
But today I am transfixed as I stare at the basement door open by itself, wider and wider, revealing the dreaded darkness behind it. The house is transforming again, starting to show me its various dimensions but, this time, I cannot run; I cannot even move. I try to lift my feet but it is as if they are stuck, glued to the age-old courtyard of my childhood. I try to scream, but no sound comes out of my open, desperate mouth.
The darkness starts to spill out from the basement. I cannot believe it, but it really is happening right in front of me; the darkness is oozing out of the basement in a strange viscous form. I wonder if I can stem the flow with a mop, but all I can do is watch. The darkness continues to seep like so much poisonous ink spreading on the floor, darkening everything it touches.
It is when I notice the black ink climb up the wall, like a vine, that I am able finally to free myself and move again. Lifting my foot with all my might, I stagger back. I try to get to a door, any door that might lead me away from the courtyard. The darkness moves towards me as I try to walk slowly away from it, trying not to attract its attention, as if it is a living, breathing thing. I know that it is; I have always known.
As I sprint towards the always wide-open main door out of the courtyard, I can see the darkness moving faster, too, quickly spreading all over that side of the floor and the wall. As I lunge to get out, I hit my head against something in the doorway, something I cannot see. It is as if there is a glass wall preventing me from getting across. The wall is thick and unbreakable, but is made of nothing. It is made of air, and the is air so thick and so hard that I hurt my knuckles when I try to punch it.
The ink is advancing steadily and even more quickly now.
I think of the rooms surrounding the courtyard. I wonder if I can hide inside one of them. But I dislike the prospect of being stuck forever in a small space without food or water, while the darkness covers everything. The windows in all the rooms lead out to the garden, but I know they are reinforced with thick iron bars, not even a whole hand can get through them; it had seemed like a good idea to someone at some point, I guess.
I cannot stop myself from hoping, and I scream loudly at one of the closed doors, “Is anyone here?” My strange hope, I think, is that someone might have slipped in, a thief or a robber maybe, since I don’t remember shutting the front door. An intruder would be a welcome sight right now.
I peep inside, but there is no one. The intricate sofas and chairs are untouched. I do not want to go in. If I did, I feel I would have to remain in there for eternity. I contemplate shutting the door, just to preserve the unsullied sanctity of the room, but I cannot get myself to pull the door shut either. I will be trapping myself anyway, be it in the room or the courtyard, if I start closing doors to contain the darkness.
Copyright © 2025 by Jahnavi Misra
