Twilight was setting in as Irawati walked to the site. When she reached the gate, she could hear a continuous, monotone chanting and could see a fire burning through a crack in the gate. For a long moment, she stood there, looking at the gate, too scared to go in yet too stubborn to accept her fear. Finally, she turned back, making up her mind to tell the Dog Lady, that she would feed the strays only in the morning.
For the first year after she separated from her husband, Irawati’s life was mostly limited to her house. Blurry days merged with blurry nights, and she spent her time like a ghost—moving from one room to another only to stare into space or cry, as time stood still. Evenings were spent drinking and sleeping as each pointless day spilled onto another, and the cycle repeated itself. The only time she forced herself to venture out was in the evenings to walk aimlessly around the neighborhood with angry music blaring into her ears. On these walks, she did her best to avoid any human contact. Her loneliness was both comforting and painful. She partly forced herself to go out so that she could pet the neighborhood dogs—Akbar, Murad, and Hero. Their silly faces and antics brought a slight smile to her face once a day. And then, she reminded herself that she also needed to stay alive for Bob. If there was someone who had gone through worse trauma than her, it was Bob—a rescue retriever-lab who walked with a hunched back. He had loose, droopy skin due to being starved and beaten, and his sad eyes would break your soul. This miserable dog made her feel useful and needed.
One day, while she was yelling at Murad to stop barking at a man on a two-wheeler, someone tapped her on her shoulder—it was the neighborhood’s very own pet saviour – the Fantastic Dog Lady. Irawati, much like the rest of the neighbourhood, had seen her around, bringing in a stray every other weekend, and circulating pamphlets that urged sympathetic homes to adopt them.
“I need a volunteer to feed some dogs and cats, will you do it?”, the Dog Lady asked, somewhat warily. Irawati agreed readily, before the Dog Lady threw in a caveat—the animals in question lived on an abandoned construction site. Irawati nodded, still on board. And then came another cautionary footnote—she was asking Irawati because all her other volunteers were too terrified to go to a notoriously haunted place every day.
She began recounting how the construction of the building on Plot Number 119 had abruptly halted a decade ago. There had been unexplained accidents, as well as peculiar sounds heard by passers-by. The site workers had claimed to have made bizarre sightings which, they were sure, were ghosts. The stories around the oddities had only snowballed, and the workers were too scared to continue work. Eventually, the construction halted. All that remained was an incomplete cement structure, with trees growing passionately around it. Irawati listened to the entire story patiently, fixated on the word haunted. Her rational mind scoffed at this. On a stubborn will, she told the Dog Lady that she would start that very evening.
The next morning, as she prepared food for the animals, she realized that she had not slept well. All she could think of was what the Dog Lady had told her, and the inexplicable churn of her stomach as she stood in front of that large, forlorn gate. She admonished herself to stop worrying and reached the site at about 11am with food for the animals. The only people who had continued living there even after the construction had stopped were the watchman and his wife. They lived in a small room with Champa and Mali, the dogs and two nameless cats.
From that day onwards, feeding these animals became a chore for Irawati, one which she dreaded, despite her love for animals. On top of that, it involved dealing with the watchman’s partially deaf wife. The site was guarded by a flimsy tin gate which she had to profusely bang on till the woman would hear her. By this time, pedestrians would be suspiciously staring at her while the gang of dogs in the vicinity would bark till they reached a noisy crescendo. Each day, she banged at the tin gate and peeped through the crack, desperately hoping that the deaf woman would hurry up. Watching her sluggishly lift her face from her cooking when she finally heard the pounding and then observing her trudging toward the gate, made Irawati feel like she was watching a slow-motion movie. Sometimes, Irawati suspected the woman deliberately prolonged this ritual. The idea irritated her more than it should have. Yet, on most days, the two women were the only human contact for each other.
****
Even as a child, Irawati could not recall a single moment she did not feel empty, and slightly nauseous. Her childhood was one of utter confusion, neglect, fear, and an everlasting feeling of an absolute loss of control. But like any other naïve young person, she too thought that things would get better if she could just grow up and have some control over her own life – she told herself that she would not have a bad marriage like her parents, that she would not neglect or terrify her own children the way her parents did. More importantly, she would be happy—as if happy was something that one could simply decide to be.
Every day, the woman asked Irawati the same questions:
“Have you got chicken for them?”
“Yes”
“Did you get food for the cats?”
“Yes”
“Will you be coming in the evening?”
“No. I have enough food for both times.”
One day though, she broke the pattern.
“What is your name?”
“Irawati”
“What?!”
“I..ra..wati!”
This was the only exchange they had for many months. Each day, Irawati would be angry and impatient. Her lungs would feel worn out, hollering answers at her. But more than that, there was something about the old woman’s presence that agonized her. Every day, she wondered who this old woman was, how had she come to be in this dilapidated locale and why she had such a distressing effect on her.
One particularly difficult day, while Irawati was feeding the dogs, the old woman painstakingly walked up to her and asked her if she was doing okay. Irawati was taken aback and she suddenly felt guilty about her behaviour towards the old woman. She decided to try having a real conversation with her. So that day, sitting on a jagged, misshapen slab of cement that served as a makeshift bench, the old woman told her that she was from Solapur and was married off when she was 16. She proudly announced that she had borne the family five boys. Irawati listened, feeling steadily worse, and not quite able to understand why she was feeling that way. But this at least, was familiar. Even as she had grown up, things always seemed refractory. She felt doomed most of the time, but strangely enough, her optimism for the future was unwavering. She knew that she was better than her parents and most adults that she had grown up around—adults who only wanted to control, coerce, and abuse others in mostly direct, and many times, in subliminal ways. She knew she was not one of them. But the pit in her gut, the deep-seated unhappiness, the crippling anxiety, and the constant, numb stomach-ache refused to leave.
The old woman continued telling her how she had lived through the deaths of four of her five sons- two to accidents, one to alcohol, and the youngest to a heart attack at 32. She told her all about them, droning on in a mundane, almost nonchalant manner. It was almost as if she was recounting someone else’s life story. Irawati told her how sorry she was, but the old woman barely noticed. Irawati stared into her blank eyes for the first time and saw a strangely relatable loneliness. Her eyes wandered over the woman’s face, taking in details she had never noticed in all this time. She suddenly grasped that the old lady wore the same gown every day- a torn navy blue one with bright yellow flowers. Again, she felt the familiar churn in her stomach – a strange anxiety over everything and nothing. She regretted having this conversation at all.
Irawati had once believed there was a future where she would be loved, understood, and respected, where people would not vigorously wring her into something she wasn’t. Then came a defining moment in her life, when her seemingly perfect marriage broke down, her make-believe world and optimism came crashing down, leaving her shaken and with an acute awareness of all the oppression that had led her to this point. At 34 she was alone, divorced, jobless, depressed, and had not managed to tick a single box on the checklist of worldly success. She had to teach herself to live alone for the first time—to live with her thoughts of shame, and guilt, a state of mind closely bordering on insanity, while also pretending to be a fully functional adult. She learned how to pay the electricity bill, and change the LPG cylinder, to confront debilitating questions about money and security, and not run. But such was life – and for the most part, Irawati thought she had done a remarkable job of getting a hold on it. But now, sitting in an old empty, compound, listening to the strange stories of this old woman, she felt herself slipping again.
All of a sudden, without any warning, the old woman got up, and started heading up a cement staircase while beckoning her. Irawati followed her meekly. When they reached the top, she showed her a quaint garden that she had been tending to for many years—chickoo, papaya, guava, and mango occupied the centre stage. She pointed out that she was growing mogra and aloe too. “Did you know that the aloe plant protects you from bad spirits?” Irawati’s cogent self was withering away internally as she briskly nodded, no. The discomfort in her chest was growing steadily harder to ignore. This was how most of her mornings began, Irawati realized—the hasty awareness of a racing heart in her chest; a cold, prickly sweat sweeping across her like a hurricane; and a final jolt that her body involuntarily gave to dump her into reality. She would lie in bed and wonder if everyone felt this uncomfortable in their bodies as soon as they woke up.
She blankly gazed at the old woman as she silently moved from tree to tree. She realized that she had goosebumps on the back of her neck. She could hear her heart pound in her chest, and her armpits felt damp. There was a persistent itch somewhere in her body but she couldn’t place it. Finally, she could not take it anymore. As calmly as she could, she told her companion that she had to leave and turned toward the staircase. The old woman followed her at an excruciatingly slow pace, “I have fallen off this staircase multiple times.” Irawati felt her ears burning – by now she was sweating profusely. All she wanted to do was go home, away from this presence. When they reached the bottom of the staircase, Irawati turned around to wave her customary goodbye. The old lady smiled her toothless smile at her while yelling, “Champi, Ba, Ba,” summoning Champa to finish her food.
She was almost at the gates, but something made her stop again, and look back at the woman. She found herself wondering what the old woman did the whole day. She wondered if she felt lonesome and frightened in that rundown place that she called home. By that time, the old woman had already sauntered off to her makeshift kitchen. Irawati shook her head to clear her thoughts and looked around her to process where she was. The eerie silence pierced through her ears. She found herself walking toward the kitchen. She peeped inside and asked, “Ajji, do you think this place is haunted?” The old woman responded without batting an eyelid, “Oh yes, it always has been.” She stared at Irawati as if to say something else but said nothing. Irawati expected to feel scared, for her survival instincts to finally take over and run. Instead, she felt a lump in her throat. It took a colossal amount of effort to make herself turn around and head for the gates.
****
The next day she returned with dabbas full of food. She banged at the tin gate like she performed each day. This time, however, there was no one she could see through the crack, no smoke from the chulha that she could smell, and no noise from the kitchen that she could hear. She banged for a while and then gave up. She managed to open the gate by forcing her hand into the crack. As soon as she got in, the site seemed like it had been cleaned overnight—there was no sign of humans ever having lived there. The couple’s room was locked. The chulha was gone; the burnt ash around it had been wiped clean; the scorched firewood was no longer there, and the clothes which had been hung out to dry were nowehere to be seen. It was like no one had ever lived there. She felt as if she had an out-of-body experience, that all of it was just that, an out-of-body experience. She frantically hunted the whole site hoping to catch sight of a petite, frail woman in a navy blue gown. But she was nowhere to be found. Irawati came back near the gate and just stood for a while with no purpose. As she gathered herself, she saw two dogs and two cats glaring at her for food.
Illustration : Prapti Roy