The Keeper: Prita
Fiction
The window was closed.
It had been closed for quite some time.
No, change that to quite some years.
Outside the closed window, there was a potted plant, and someone, someone, watered the plant assiduously every single day. The earth in the pot, which was very large, was black and luminous. At all times of the day, the month, and the year, there was one single bloom on it, of a waxy yellow colour and a fragrance that made anyone close to the building feel faint with an inexplicable sense of longing and cause them to break into a sweat. The large, oblong pot and the plant in it, was watered once, daily, usually at dusk, between the time the sun had set and darkness had not yet claimed the world.
Between Tian Restaurant and the public hospital, is where I live, she had told me, long, long ago, when she used to come and meet me. The second floor, she said, the side facing the road. Come and see me sometimes, she used to plead. Just so that I will know I have someone. But I never went to her house. Not once. Every time I passed the window, I used to gaze at the window, at the single yellow bloom, averting my eyes because I felt guilty that I had not visited her. Not once.
It was a rainy day. The kind of rain that happened only in Mumbai, a deluge pouring out of the heavens in a matter of minutes. Sitting in an auto rickshaw, on my daily commute to college, I distinctly remember praying, “God, don’t let the auto break down, or anything, please.” But perhaps I was not fervent enough or something, because just then, just three bus stops away from the college, the auto did stall. The auto driver did many complicated things and made a great deal of noise doing it, trying to get the recalcitrant machine to start again, and the only result was the noise and the quantity of exhaust smoke it belched forth. The driver looked at me apologetically and I looked back at him with resignation, then paid up the fare, and stepped out into the downpour. The auto driver stepping out himself began to push the battle-weary vehicle to the side of the road and out of the path of oncoming traffic.
There was a ‘cannon-ball’ tree on the side of the road and I hurried to stand beneath it, gazing ruefully at my rain-bespattered cotton saree. There was no means of conveyance immediately at hand, so I waited for one to come by, or the rain to stop, whichever occurred first. I looked around me. The bus stop housed a vagrant stretched full length on the metal bench meant for commuters awaiting buses. Apart from the vehicles zooming past me, there didn’t seem to be anyone stirring around me.
Rain dripped from the tree leaves and it sounded particularly mournful on that day. It was the fag end of the rainy season, and the monsoons were still battering Mumbai. I glanced down at my wristwatch, wondering when I would reach college, hoping that I wouldn’t be late for my lectures.
It was very strange, I thought when I looked at my watch. It seemed as though my wristwatch had moved backwards. Surely it was later than that? I had got out of the auto 15 minutes ago, and my watch showed the same time, yet the minute hand seemed to be moving. Strange, I mused. The analogue clock on my mobile showed an even earlier time, and I remember thinking that it was almost as though Hermione Granger had turned the hourglass once and we had moved back in time. Very soon, I told myself, I shall probably see the auto I had travelled in, coming towards me.
It was then that I heard my name called in a piercingly sibilant whisper. I jumped and whirled around. I could see no one. I pulled my saree around me. It had become, imperceptibly, much colder. I decided that it was my imagination playing tricks on me. “You didn’t actually hear that,” I scolded myself severely. My name was called again, and this time, with an urgent injunction, “Look up, at the building behind you!” I did as I was told, and at the second-floor window, stood Prita, just as I had seen her last, years and years ago. They were floor-length French windows and uncurtained, and she stepped out into the balcony, waving madly when she saw me looking up at her. ”Come up, Ma’am”, she called. I didn’t think of refusing. I could have excused myself giving numerous reasons: I am late, perhaps another time, lectures have to be conducted shortly, I need to reach college on time. I could have. But I said none of these things.
It was almost as though I had suspended thought. I entered the bungalow. She lived on the second floor. None of the lifts were working and I walked up two flights of stairs. The door was partly ajar. I pushed it open and it moaned in protest. As I entered, I batted at cobwebs that enveloped my hair and face in gossamer. The room I had walked into was full of furniture, some broken, others piled on top of one another and there was scarcely room to move.
In the centre of all of them, in the only available clear space, stood Prita, looking as radiant as ever, with those charming dimples on both her cheeks, smiling that warm, infectious smile. “Come in, Ma’am, come in,” she told me, “come to my room,” and she stretched out her hand to me. As I stretched out my hand to take hers, she drew it back at the last instant, and turning, walked out. She led me into the next room, beckoning that I should follow. The air in the room smelt heavy and languorous, with a kind of odour that I couldn’t place or pinpoint. It smelt of rotting flowers and the smell of moist earthwormy soil. There was also the smell of incense and camphor and of a burning wick that had been extinguished.
There was a bed in the room with rumpled bedclothes that looked like they were falling apart. A chair was drawn next to it and she patted it invitingly, gesturing that I should sit on it. She herself sat on the bed, her knees drawn up like any teenaged girl would.
“Tell me, ma’am,” she chirped brightly, “how are the students in college now? Are they as good as we were when we were in your class? Are they studious? Do they play pranks on you, like we used to?” A pause.
And then, “Did they love you, like we did?” She went on chattering and I tried my best to listen and respond to this seemingly artless chatter, sometimes in monosyllables. I was conscious of a strange kind of languor stealing over me, pervading all my limbs, almost paralysing me.
She leaned forward suddenly, her eyes now fever-bright. “I wanted to see you,” she rasped. “You are the only person I wanted to see from that hateful college. I was hoping that you would come. I know you missed me. I could tell…”
There was a noise from behind me, a very loud clatter, and an exclamation that penetrated even the zombie like state I was in.
I turned around and saw a man dressed in soiled, paint-be spattered clothes, who looked like a construction worker. “Memsahib, what are you doing in this empty house,” he asked me, sounding bewildered. I looked around, laughingly, at Prita, shaking my head in disbelief. “Empty, he says,” I began, but there was no Prita there. I looked around the room wildly, wondering where she had disappeared to, but she was nowhere to be seen. Where she had been sitting, on the bed, lay a fresh, waxy yellow flower, on a stem, with two dark green leaves. One single petal of the flower was not yellow. It was sluggishly oozing what seemed to be thick, clotted blood.
This is a response to an intriguing Fiction Prompt, the Daily Special, October 26th from Ravyne Hawke’s Promptly Written publication. “Something unusual happens on the way to work…”
