HOUSE OF MIRRORS – A NOVEL
BY NAAZISH YARKHAN
Chapter 1
“Peep, Peep, Peeeeeeeep, Vroooooom,” trilled three-year-old Jahan, sweeping into the room, just as a gust of humid sea breeze blew into the apartment. Bottle-green curtains billowed as if pregnant with hope.
"Peep, peep, peep. Vroooooom," muttered the lanky little boy, now running around the cherry wood table.
Zayna stopped what she was doing, her eyes wide. Jahan and make-believe games? Could it really be? Tentatively, she crouched to meet his eyes. He had full cheeks, large brown eyes and eyelashes that kissed his brows. His curly hair had been neatly combed and parted to the left. Lathered in ghost-white baby powder, he smelled innocent and fragile. Wearing khaki shorts and a red t-shirt, he looked as normal as could be.
“Peep, peep, peep….” Jahan squirmed.
“You look so much like papa,” she whispered, wrapping her arms around him.
Nerve shattering shrieks drowned her words out.
Zayna clenched her eyes shut. Then, inhaling deeply, she heaved her son onto the dining table.
Jahan only grew shriller and began kicking.
“Mama’s not hurting you sweetheart.”
“Memsahib...,” came Roshini’s quiet voice.
Taking her son’s shoes from Roshini, Zayna struggled to slip them onto Jahan’s feet. "We are going out now, so no more screaming and no more running, okay?" She ran her hand over his head, only to have Jahan jerk away. Then, in a flash, he flung both shoes off. One sent a table lamp crashing to the floor, as Roshini hurried across the room for them.
Zayna winced. The baby of the family, Jahan was going to be an astronaut, a scientist, a writer, and a painter, thought Zayna. “And now, no play-school will have you,” she whispered under her breath. A lump caught in Zayna’s throat.
Her eyes flickered, searching Jahan’s face. Over the last six months, Jahan had traded speech for babble, shrank from their every touch and no longer knew them. Jahan, once, used to know what he wanted to wear each day, what he wanted for dinner, where everything in their house belonged. Where was that boy now? How does a three-year-old boy stop recognizing his own parents? Why did he cry whenever they tried to hold him? Just how was she going to explain things to Dr. Chandra, their latest doctor? No raging fever, traumatic injury, nor an accident, had set the change in motion. She had so many questions. A tear slid down her cheek. Where were the answers?
“Madam, I get sandwiches ready.”
Roshini was a blessing. Zayna trusted her with Jahan and was only too willing to raise her salary for helping with Jahan, besides taking care of cooking for the family. Roshini’s son, Rehman, was the same age as Jahan and often accompanied his mother to work, straddled at the hip. The little boy played with Jahan or with imaginary toys at his mother’s feet. Rehman and Jahan constantly caught fevers and colds from each other, but Roshini was careful not to overstep her bounds. She never let her son play with Jahan’s toys unless Zayna herself had handed them to the little boy. When Rehman was three years old, Zayna paid for him to go to an English-medium play school. Unlike her own child, Rehman flourished there.
"Shanta Bai!" Zayna paced the room.
A stout woman appeared, wiping wet palms down her sari-clad thighs.
“Get an auto-rickshaw. We need to go to the train station.” Zayna eyed the wall clock and caught sight of her reflection in the mirror beside it. A little lipstick, eyeliner and a dab of blush really made such a difference.
As Zayna pulled on her sandals, in flitted the unmistakable aroma of frying fish and strands of music from a remix of the Zeenat Aman oldie, "Aap Jaisa Koi". She loved how much Mumbai was draped in community, despite being such a throbbing, sprawling, metropolis. It gave the city its energy. It was unusual for anyone to cook at two in the afternoon, Zayna thought idly. It was an hour when mothers collected their unruly gaggle from school, while older housewives and the elderly watched blaring television sets. White haired 'aunties,' the title all married women were automatically bestowed with, lying on their sides, heads resting on bent arms, feet extended, absorbed in the on-screen drama. Bald, retired, 'uncles' in their pajamas, lost in the day’s newspapers; the TV simply background noise. For still others, it was siesta time.
Zayna knotted her fingers. She too, ached to escape. Her childhood retreat had been the shady, hundred-year-old, tamarind tree in her grandparent’s courtyard. A swing hung from one sturdy branch. Zayna would scoot over and fade high into the cloudless blue and then swoosh down and back, only to rise up, up, up. Or she would lie on the stone bench beneath that tree, devouring Enid Blyton’s books about boarding schools and secret midnight picnics. Everything else would fade into oblivion.
"Is Jahan ready?" Ammi’s voice reeled Zayna back into the present.
Her mother was dressed in a mustard-yellow shalwar-kameez, with the kameez tailored in the A-line style fitting snug over her chest but falling loose and fluid over her ample hips and past her knees. The pajama-like shalwar, too, was baggy and comfortable. Ammi had tied her hair in a chignon, wore a light pink lipstick, a hint of kohl, a floral perfume and glass bangles that matched her clothes.
“Shanta bai has gone to get an auto,” said Zayna. With the sun crawling across the sky, the humidity had soared. It wrapped itself around Mumbai like a cloak, exhausting and draining its residents. The ceiling fan spun at full-speed. Leaves of indoor plants bobbed up and down. Pages of a magazine flicked from one to the next. Zayna wished aloud that they didn't have to leave the house when it was this muggy.
“We forget all those women, with babies slung across their backs, working at construction sites, picking through raddi or begging for food….” Ammi picked up her purse.
“Ma not now,” said Zayna with a sharp wave of her hand, just as Shanta bai returned. The black-and-yellow, three-wheeled auto-rickshaw was waiting.
Zayna took Jahan’s small, supple hand in hers and clasped it. "I want you to be a good boy," she said looking into his young face. She hoped silently that he could hear her, that he would listen, that he would understand and respond.
"We’ll see so many choo-choo trains!” Ammi spoke slowly and softly as though she were speaking a foreign language that her grandson would understand better if she enunciated better.
The moment his mother let him down, Jahan began running in circles around the table, his eyes fixed on the floor.
Zayna looked away to keep the tears at bay.
Their auto-rickshaw ride to the station was, fortunately, uneventful. And just as easily, they found seats in the ladies compartment on the local train heading to Churchgate Station. The train paused at stations for a mere 30 seconds only to return to its strangely calming, wobbly clacking, as it hurtled past suburb after suburb.
Zayna noticed that Jahan had begun playing intently with his fingers, and her brow folded into a crease. “Do you think this doctor is going to be any better than the pediatricians?”
Dr. Chandra had been recommended by a friend of a friend. He had an impeccable reputation as one of the best, if one of the most expensive, child psychologists in town.
Ammi glanced at Jahan. “We’ve had enough of, ‘It’s just a phase Mrs. Shah Alam,’ haven’t we?”
With a handkerchief, Zayna dabbed sweat off her nose and upper-lip. “I hope he has answers and a cure.” Privately, she imagined he’d also ask her why she hadn’t caught it sooner.
Over the train station’s PA system, a booming, loud voice announced their arrival at Churchgate station and the departure of two other trains, one to Malad and the other to Borivali, each a minute apart.
Passengers spilled off the train, and onto a platform that smelled like morning breath, and appeared in dire need of a thorough scrub. Zayna knew the undersides of her sandal-clad, open-toed feet would be a shade darker and dirtier by the time they’d return home.
At four o'clock in the evening, there weren't quite as many people as there would be an hour later, but Ammi dared not risk losing Jahan to the jostling crowds. Despite the hordes, the sound of talk was muted and indistinct. Ammi clutched her grandson’s wrist tighter, as they made their way towards the subway that led them out of the train station. Once out of the 1970's railway building that spat out two million passengers each day, commuters swarmed onto the streets, busy ants in the thralls of making a living and molding an existence.
"Careful baba." Every little boy was a Baba or a Chotu, when it came to terms of endearment in India, and Ammi used it for Jahan almost as much as his actual name.
They stepped into the subway and breathed in its stench of sweat and urine. Zayna tugged at the edge of her sari and drew it over her nose. Bare 60-watt light bulbs shone over vendors against both sides of the subway wall. Fake Rolex watches, counterfeit Ray-Bans, pirated music CD’s and stuffed toys vied for the commuters’ attention. The vendors dusted, arranged and re-arranged their merchandise on plastic sheets, calling out their wares in coarse, loud voices. Some passengers stopped to shop but most strode past without a backward glance.
Bobbing along between his mother and grandmother, Jahan slurped hard at the remaining drops of his Mango Frooti and the empty juice box let out a gasp as it bowed inwards. Zayna smiled down at him. Looking at her mother, she crossed her fingers, “Please God. No tantrums.”
The glare of daylight, a noisy spate of honking cars and milling crowds greeted them as they stepped out. This side of Mumbai, to Zayna, was home. Memories from her youth were tucked into every street corner. Out of habit, Zayna glanced across the road to see which movie was running at the Eros Cinema. The sum total of Zayna’s entertainment, as a teenager, comprised of watching movies at either the Eros Cinema or at the Metro Cinema, inaugurated four months later. It had been built on land leased for the princely sum of one rupee a year, for the next 999 years! During college, Zayna was here for the first show of every new movie.
“Did you know mama was just a little older than you are now when she saw ‘Ape and Super-Ape’ there?” Ammi pointed at the cinema. She never quite forgot her daughter’s astonished discovery of tribes of people whose dinner lived inside anthills.
Zayna caught sight of Jahan has he cocked his face up at his grandmother. Was that recognition in his eyes? Was he actually listening?
A row of black and yellow cabs stood at the taxi stand along the Oval Maidan cricket field. Strangers queued up, some about to share a ride to a common destination. Zayna, Ammi and Jahan joined the line. Jahan fidgeted, rubbing his neck.
In its heyday, the Oval Maidan grounds had been a walking and a horse-riding track. Now crab grass and puddles filled the field’s seven cricket pitches. With eventide, couples would descend to indulge in lazy conversation, munching boiled peanuts that the chokra-boys sold.
After what seemed like an inordinately long wait, though in reality no more than five minutes, it was their turn. Zayna offered to pay double of what the taxi-meter registered so that the taxi driver would agree to take them the short distance. Jahan, however, wouldn’t budge. Zayna turned crimson as Jahan struggled. Soon he was screaming, attracting passersby who stopped to stare.
“Baba, I’ll give you a chocolate if you come in this nice uncle’s car.”
Zayna’s coaxing fell on deaf ears.
A small group of onlookers had gathered, their gaze burning.
"Next time … Sultan can bring him…" Zayna grew red-faced with embarrassment. Ten minutes later, she had lifted a still screaming Jahan into the car and banged the taxi door shut. The metal trident shaped ornament hanging from the rear view mirror shook.
"Madam, the door is not closed," the taxi driver mumbled in Hindi. Zayna pushed it open, then shut it again with a loud bang.
Ammi hastily got in on the other side.
“Subu say kuch nahi khaya,” said a beggar woman in her thirties, hovering at the window. She thrust her creased palm through the taxi window.
Zayna turned away, frazzled.
“Professional beggars,” the driver snorted, pulling away. “Mumbai’s beggars all give quotas of their earnings to gang lords and criminals.”
One-and-a-half kilometers away, Ammi tapped the khaki-uniformed taxi-driver on the shoulder. "Bhaiya idhar roko." The taxi stopped.
Jahan stepped out behind Ammi, this time without any resistance. Immediately, Ammi took his hand in hers, clasped it tight. Despite a crosswalk, none of the cars stopped to let them pass, forcing them to inch their way avoiding cars that zoomed down the road.
530 White Springs was one of the older buildings in the city. Each flat in the building had enough square feet area to house three flats currently being built anywhere in the Mumbai or Greater Mumbai area.
“This is just the kind of place one wouldn't be surprised to find mice. It doesn’t seem as if fresh air ever gets in." Zayna pinched her nose shut.
They scanned the list of tenants and their corresponding floors and office numbers by the entrance – white paint flaking off the wooden board.
“The stairs seem safer.” Zayna glanced uncertainly at the elevator. “Jahan may feel claustrophobic inside, or its floor may give way if he jumps.”
Before she could protest further, both grandmother and grandson were inside.
Hesitating, Zayna joined them.
The elevator creaked, sounding like aged bones, as the well-worn pulley and chains hauled the wooden box up the shaft. Jahan began to stomp on the wooden floor just as his mother had predicted.
Zayna’s eyes widened. Her eyebrows raised, she crossed her arms across her chest and opened her mouth to remonstrate.
Ammi, however, was quicker. Lifting a finger to her lips, she shook her head. “Calm down.”
After the darkened corridors of the building, Zayna was grateful for the tall halogen lamp that immersed the entire waiting room in a shower of bright light. She was especially relieved that they seemed to be the last appointment for the day. She fidgeted with her gold wedding band, twisting and turning it around her clammy finger. The ring felt tighter lately. Zayna noticed that Jahan, too, sat playing with his fingers, engrossed with knotting and unknotting them. It reminded her of a poem she once sang to him, while folding her palms as if in prayer, and then unfolding them to show "people." "This is the Church; this is the steeple; open the doors and see all the people…" The lines echoed in her head.
Dr. Chandra, a white-haired gentleman in his early seventies, met with them shortly. With the slightly hunched gait of the elderly, he held the edge of his writing table as he maneuvered his way behind it.
Zayna took a deep breath. Seated across from him, she felt like a seven-year-old hauled into the principal’s office. She was glad her husband had already forwarded Jahan’s medical records to him but wished Sultan had come for the appointment as well. “He misbehaves, he’s aggressive. It breaks my heart to admit it, but I doubt there’s any boy as unpopular as Jahan,” she struggled to say by way of introduction.
BY NAAZISH YARKHAN
Chapter 1
“Peep, Peep, Peeeeeeeep, Vroooooom,” trilled three-year-old Jahan, sweeping into the room, just as a gust of humid sea breeze blew into the apartment. Bottle-green curtains billowed as if pregnant with hope.
"Peep, peep, peep. Vroooooom," muttered the lanky little boy, now running around the cherry wood table.
Zayna stopped what she was doing, her eyes wide. Jahan and make-believe games? Could it really be? Tentatively, she crouched to meet his eyes. He had full cheeks, large brown eyes and eyelashes that kissed his brows. His curly hair had been neatly combed and parted to the left. Lathered in ghost-white baby powder, he smelled innocent and fragile. Wearing khaki shorts and a red t-shirt, he looked as normal as could be.
“Peep, peep, peep….” Jahan squirmed.
“You look so much like papa,” she whispered, wrapping her arms around him.
Nerve shattering shrieks drowned her words out.
Zayna clenched her eyes shut. Then, inhaling deeply, she heaved her son onto the dining table.
Jahan only grew shriller and began kicking.
“Mama’s not hurting you sweetheart.”
“Memsahib...,” came Roshini’s quiet voice.
Taking her son’s shoes from Roshini, Zayna struggled to slip them onto Jahan’s feet. "We are going out now, so no more screaming and no more running, okay?" She ran her hand over his head, only to have Jahan jerk away. Then, in a flash, he flung both shoes off. One sent a table lamp crashing to the floor, as Roshini hurried across the room for them.
Zayna winced. The baby of the family, Jahan was going to be an astronaut, a scientist, a writer, and a painter, thought Zayna. “And now, no play-school will have you,” she whispered under her breath. A lump caught in Zayna’s throat.
Her eyes flickered, searching Jahan’s face. Over the last six months, Jahan had traded speech for babble, shrank from their every touch and no longer knew them. Jahan, once, used to know what he wanted to wear each day, what he wanted for dinner, where everything in their house belonged. Where was that boy now? How does a three-year-old boy stop recognizing his own parents? Why did he cry whenever they tried to hold him? Just how was she going to explain things to Dr. Chandra, their latest doctor? No raging fever, traumatic injury, nor an accident, had set the change in motion. She had so many questions. A tear slid down her cheek. Where were the answers?
“Madam, I get sandwiches ready.”
Roshini was a blessing. Zayna trusted her with Jahan and was only too willing to raise her salary for helping with Jahan, besides taking care of cooking for the family. Roshini’s son, Rehman, was the same age as Jahan and often accompanied his mother to work, straddled at the hip. The little boy played with Jahan or with imaginary toys at his mother’s feet. Rehman and Jahan constantly caught fevers and colds from each other, but Roshini was careful not to overstep her bounds. She never let her son play with Jahan’s toys unless Zayna herself had handed them to the little boy. When Rehman was three years old, Zayna paid for him to go to an English-medium play school. Unlike her own child, Rehman flourished there.
"Shanta Bai!" Zayna paced the room.
A stout woman appeared, wiping wet palms down her sari-clad thighs.
“Get an auto-rickshaw. We need to go to the train station.” Zayna eyed the wall clock and caught sight of her reflection in the mirror beside it. A little lipstick, eyeliner and a dab of blush really made such a difference.
As Zayna pulled on her sandals, in flitted the unmistakable aroma of frying fish and strands of music from a remix of the Zeenat Aman oldie, "Aap Jaisa Koi". She loved how much Mumbai was draped in community, despite being such a throbbing, sprawling, metropolis. It gave the city its energy. It was unusual for anyone to cook at two in the afternoon, Zayna thought idly. It was an hour when mothers collected their unruly gaggle from school, while older housewives and the elderly watched blaring television sets. White haired 'aunties,' the title all married women were automatically bestowed with, lying on their sides, heads resting on bent arms, feet extended, absorbed in the on-screen drama. Bald, retired, 'uncles' in their pajamas, lost in the day’s newspapers; the TV simply background noise. For still others, it was siesta time.
Zayna knotted her fingers. She too, ached to escape. Her childhood retreat had been the shady, hundred-year-old, tamarind tree in her grandparent’s courtyard. A swing hung from one sturdy branch. Zayna would scoot over and fade high into the cloudless blue and then swoosh down and back, only to rise up, up, up. Or she would lie on the stone bench beneath that tree, devouring Enid Blyton’s books about boarding schools and secret midnight picnics. Everything else would fade into oblivion.
"Is Jahan ready?" Ammi’s voice reeled Zayna back into the present.
Her mother was dressed in a mustard-yellow shalwar-kameez, with the kameez tailored in the A-line style fitting snug over her chest but falling loose and fluid over her ample hips and past her knees. The pajama-like shalwar, too, was baggy and comfortable. Ammi had tied her hair in a chignon, wore a light pink lipstick, a hint of kohl, a floral perfume and glass bangles that matched her clothes.
“Shanta bai has gone to get an auto,” said Zayna. With the sun crawling across the sky, the humidity had soared. It wrapped itself around Mumbai like a cloak, exhausting and draining its residents. The ceiling fan spun at full-speed. Leaves of indoor plants bobbed up and down. Pages of a magazine flicked from one to the next. Zayna wished aloud that they didn't have to leave the house when it was this muggy.
“We forget all those women, with babies slung across their backs, working at construction sites, picking through raddi or begging for food….” Ammi picked up her purse.
“Ma not now,” said Zayna with a sharp wave of her hand, just as Shanta bai returned. The black-and-yellow, three-wheeled auto-rickshaw was waiting.
Zayna took Jahan’s small, supple hand in hers and clasped it. "I want you to be a good boy," she said looking into his young face. She hoped silently that he could hear her, that he would listen, that he would understand and respond.
"We’ll see so many choo-choo trains!” Ammi spoke slowly and softly as though she were speaking a foreign language that her grandson would understand better if she enunciated better.
The moment his mother let him down, Jahan began running in circles around the table, his eyes fixed on the floor.
Zayna looked away to keep the tears at bay.
Their auto-rickshaw ride to the station was, fortunately, uneventful. And just as easily, they found seats in the ladies compartment on the local train heading to Churchgate Station. The train paused at stations for a mere 30 seconds only to return to its strangely calming, wobbly clacking, as it hurtled past suburb after suburb.
Zayna noticed that Jahan had begun playing intently with his fingers, and her brow folded into a crease. “Do you think this doctor is going to be any better than the pediatricians?”
Dr. Chandra had been recommended by a friend of a friend. He had an impeccable reputation as one of the best, if one of the most expensive, child psychologists in town.
Ammi glanced at Jahan. “We’ve had enough of, ‘It’s just a phase Mrs. Shah Alam,’ haven’t we?”
With a handkerchief, Zayna dabbed sweat off her nose and upper-lip. “I hope he has answers and a cure.” Privately, she imagined he’d also ask her why she hadn’t caught it sooner.
Over the train station’s PA system, a booming, loud voice announced their arrival at Churchgate station and the departure of two other trains, one to Malad and the other to Borivali, each a minute apart.
Passengers spilled off the train, and onto a platform that smelled like morning breath, and appeared in dire need of a thorough scrub. Zayna knew the undersides of her sandal-clad, open-toed feet would be a shade darker and dirtier by the time they’d return home.
At four o'clock in the evening, there weren't quite as many people as there would be an hour later, but Ammi dared not risk losing Jahan to the jostling crowds. Despite the hordes, the sound of talk was muted and indistinct. Ammi clutched her grandson’s wrist tighter, as they made their way towards the subway that led them out of the train station. Once out of the 1970's railway building that spat out two million passengers each day, commuters swarmed onto the streets, busy ants in the thralls of making a living and molding an existence.
"Careful baba." Every little boy was a Baba or a Chotu, when it came to terms of endearment in India, and Ammi used it for Jahan almost as much as his actual name.
They stepped into the subway and breathed in its stench of sweat and urine. Zayna tugged at the edge of her sari and drew it over her nose. Bare 60-watt light bulbs shone over vendors against both sides of the subway wall. Fake Rolex watches, counterfeit Ray-Bans, pirated music CD’s and stuffed toys vied for the commuters’ attention. The vendors dusted, arranged and re-arranged their merchandise on plastic sheets, calling out their wares in coarse, loud voices. Some passengers stopped to shop but most strode past without a backward glance.
Bobbing along between his mother and grandmother, Jahan slurped hard at the remaining drops of his Mango Frooti and the empty juice box let out a gasp as it bowed inwards. Zayna smiled down at him. Looking at her mother, she crossed her fingers, “Please God. No tantrums.”
The glare of daylight, a noisy spate of honking cars and milling crowds greeted them as they stepped out. This side of Mumbai, to Zayna, was home. Memories from her youth were tucked into every street corner. Out of habit, Zayna glanced across the road to see which movie was running at the Eros Cinema. The sum total of Zayna’s entertainment, as a teenager, comprised of watching movies at either the Eros Cinema or at the Metro Cinema, inaugurated four months later. It had been built on land leased for the princely sum of one rupee a year, for the next 999 years! During college, Zayna was here for the first show of every new movie.
“Did you know mama was just a little older than you are now when she saw ‘Ape and Super-Ape’ there?” Ammi pointed at the cinema. She never quite forgot her daughter’s astonished discovery of tribes of people whose dinner lived inside anthills.
Zayna caught sight of Jahan has he cocked his face up at his grandmother. Was that recognition in his eyes? Was he actually listening?
A row of black and yellow cabs stood at the taxi stand along the Oval Maidan cricket field. Strangers queued up, some about to share a ride to a common destination. Zayna, Ammi and Jahan joined the line. Jahan fidgeted, rubbing his neck.
In its heyday, the Oval Maidan grounds had been a walking and a horse-riding track. Now crab grass and puddles filled the field’s seven cricket pitches. With eventide, couples would descend to indulge in lazy conversation, munching boiled peanuts that the chokra-boys sold.
After what seemed like an inordinately long wait, though in reality no more than five minutes, it was their turn. Zayna offered to pay double of what the taxi-meter registered so that the taxi driver would agree to take them the short distance. Jahan, however, wouldn’t budge. Zayna turned crimson as Jahan struggled. Soon he was screaming, attracting passersby who stopped to stare.
“Baba, I’ll give you a chocolate if you come in this nice uncle’s car.”
Zayna’s coaxing fell on deaf ears.
A small group of onlookers had gathered, their gaze burning.
"Next time … Sultan can bring him…" Zayna grew red-faced with embarrassment. Ten minutes later, she had lifted a still screaming Jahan into the car and banged the taxi door shut. The metal trident shaped ornament hanging from the rear view mirror shook.
"Madam, the door is not closed," the taxi driver mumbled in Hindi. Zayna pushed it open, then shut it again with a loud bang.
Ammi hastily got in on the other side.
“Subu say kuch nahi khaya,” said a beggar woman in her thirties, hovering at the window. She thrust her creased palm through the taxi window.
Zayna turned away, frazzled.
“Professional beggars,” the driver snorted, pulling away. “Mumbai’s beggars all give quotas of their earnings to gang lords and criminals.”
One-and-a-half kilometers away, Ammi tapped the khaki-uniformed taxi-driver on the shoulder. "Bhaiya idhar roko." The taxi stopped.
Jahan stepped out behind Ammi, this time without any resistance. Immediately, Ammi took his hand in hers, clasped it tight. Despite a crosswalk, none of the cars stopped to let them pass, forcing them to inch their way avoiding cars that zoomed down the road.
530 White Springs was one of the older buildings in the city. Each flat in the building had enough square feet area to house three flats currently being built anywhere in the Mumbai or Greater Mumbai area.
“This is just the kind of place one wouldn't be surprised to find mice. It doesn’t seem as if fresh air ever gets in." Zayna pinched her nose shut.
They scanned the list of tenants and their corresponding floors and office numbers by the entrance – white paint flaking off the wooden board.
“The stairs seem safer.” Zayna glanced uncertainly at the elevator. “Jahan may feel claustrophobic inside, or its floor may give way if he jumps.”
Before she could protest further, both grandmother and grandson were inside.
Hesitating, Zayna joined them.
The elevator creaked, sounding like aged bones, as the well-worn pulley and chains hauled the wooden box up the shaft. Jahan began to stomp on the wooden floor just as his mother had predicted.
Zayna’s eyes widened. Her eyebrows raised, she crossed her arms across her chest and opened her mouth to remonstrate.
Ammi, however, was quicker. Lifting a finger to her lips, she shook her head. “Calm down.”
After the darkened corridors of the building, Zayna was grateful for the tall halogen lamp that immersed the entire waiting room in a shower of bright light. She was especially relieved that they seemed to be the last appointment for the day. She fidgeted with her gold wedding band, twisting and turning it around her clammy finger. The ring felt tighter lately. Zayna noticed that Jahan, too, sat playing with his fingers, engrossed with knotting and unknotting them. It reminded her of a poem she once sang to him, while folding her palms as if in prayer, and then unfolding them to show "people." "This is the Church; this is the steeple; open the doors and see all the people…" The lines echoed in her head.
Dr. Chandra, a white-haired gentleman in his early seventies, met with them shortly. With the slightly hunched gait of the elderly, he held the edge of his writing table as he maneuvered his way behind it.
Zayna took a deep breath. Seated across from him, she felt like a seven-year-old hauled into the principal’s office. She was glad her husband had already forwarded Jahan’s medical records to him but wished Sultan had come for the appointment as well. “He misbehaves, he’s aggressive. It breaks my heart to admit it, but I doubt there’s any boy as unpopular as Jahan,” she struggled to say by way of introduction.
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