DO NOT ANSWER

THE HOUSE AND THE PEOPLE IN IT

Meera Joshi. 28. Home-care attendant from Pune. Six years on hospital wards. Has not cried for her brother.

Chinmay Joshi. 19. Her younger brother. Died four months ago in the Ghodi river. Called her once, at 2:07 a.m.

Kamalabai Ranade, “Mai”. 84. Bedridden and mute since a stroke two years ago. Has lived in the wada since 1962.

Aniket Ranade. 36. Her grandson. Construction company owner. Polite, precise, and sure that he is the responsible one.

Vasant kaka. 70s. The servant. Has been in the house since he was sixteen.

Shobha Gaikwad. 40s. The last woman to sit the night watch before Meera.

Sub-Inspector Sawant. Wai police station. A friend of the family.

Sunanda Kulkarni. Runs Sahara Home Care, the agency that sent Meera.

Bhau. Aniket’s driver, and more.

The Guest (the Pahuna). It came in the flood of 1962, when somebody knocked.

The Setting. Ranade Wada, Kelghar, Satara district. Last week of September. The monsoon is late leaving and the fortnight of the ancestors has begun.

The bus left her at the Kelghar stop at ten to five, and the sky had already gone the colour of an old bruise.

Meera Joshi stood under the tin shed with her duffel bag between her feet and watched the tail lights disappear around the bend. Nobody else had got off. The conductor had looked at her strangely when she said the name of the village, then looked away, the way people do when they’ve decided it isn’t their business.

It had been raining for eleven days. The last week of September, the monsoon should have been packing its bags, but the hills above her were still wrapped in cloud and the paddy fields below were brown lakes with green hair. Somewhere down there was the Ghodi river. She did not look in that direction. She had decided on the bus that she would not look in that direction.

“Meera madam?”

An old man had appeared at the edge of the shed, holding a black umbrella that had lost two ribs. He was thin as a broom handle, with a white cloth wrapped round his head and a face like dried mud. He didn’t smile.

“Vasant kaka?” she said. “Aniket sir told me you’d come.”

“Come,” he said. “Light is going.”

He took her bag before she could stop him and started up a lane of wet stone. She followed. It was twenty minutes of climbing, past shuttered houses, past a goat tied to a post that watched her go by with flat yellow eyes, past a tiny temple where somebody had left a lamp burning inside a plastic bottle cut in half. The village was strangely quiet. No radios, no children. Only the water running everywhere, in the gutters, down the walls, under her feet.

The wada stood at the very end of the lane, alone, with a wall of black stone around it and a tree behind it so old that its branches leaned over the roof like a hand held over a mouth.

It was bigger than she had expected. Two storeys, wooden pillars gone grey, a tiled roof sagging in the middle. The front door was made of dark wood studded with iron, and in the centre of it hung a brass knocker in the shape of a small closed fist.

Vasant kaka stopped in front of it, and for the first time he looked directly at her.

“You have done this work before? Old people, bedridden?”

“Six years. Mostly stroke patients. Some cancer.”

“Then you know how to sit through a night.”

“I know how to stay awake, yes.”

He nodded slowly, like she had given the wrong answer and the right one at the same time. Then he pushed the door open.

Inside it was cold and it smelled of camphor, wet stone and something under those, something sweetish, like flowers left too long in a vase. A long corridor ran back into the dark. On the left, a courtyard opened to the sky, and in the middle of it, ringed by a low wall, was a well. The rain fell straight into it without a sound.

“Do not lean over that,” Vasant kaka said, without turning. “Old stones. They slip.”

He led her along the corridor to a room on the north side. The door was already open, and a yellow light spilled out of it, and in the light, on a high wooden cot with a mosquito net folded back, lay a very small woman.

Kamalabai Ranade was eighty-four years old, and she looked like something carved from a bar of soap and left in the sun. Her white hair was drawn back tight. Her hands lay on top of the blanket, one open, one curled. Her eyes were wide open and fixed on the ceiling, and they did not move when Meera came in.

“Mai,” said Vasant kaka, in a much softer voice than he had used with her. “The new bai has come.”

Nothing. Not a blink.

“Stroke, two years ago,” he said. “She hears, I think. She does not talk. Only the left hand moves a little.” He pointed at the curled fingers. “You will see.”

Meera went to the bed and put two fingers on the old woman’s wrist. Pulse thin but steady, skin dry and cool. She checked the pillow, the pressure points, the drip stand that wasn’t there because the old woman was not on a drip. Everything was clean. Somebody had looked after her well.

Around Mai’s neck, on a black thread, hung an iron key as long as a finger.

“That is the door key,” Vasant kaka said. He had seen where she was looking. “At sunset I lock the front door. The key goes round Mai’s neck. Not with you. On her.”

“Why?”

“Aniket sir’s order.”

“But if there’s a fire or—“

“There is no fire.” He said it flatly. “There is one more thing.”

He crossed to the wall by the bed and unhooked a small wooden frame that hung beside a picture of a goddess. Under the glass was a card, printed in neat black type. He handed it to her the way you hand someone a prescription.

She read it standing next to the lamp.

THE RULES OF THE HOUSE

1. Mai is never to be left alone between midnight and the first crow. 2. The lamp in the north window stays lit until morning. 3. The front door is not opened after dark, for anyone, for any reason. 4. The room at the top of the stairs is not to be entered. 5. After midnight, do not answer any voice. Not even one you love.

She read it twice. When she looked up, Vasant kaka was already at the door.

“Kaka, wait. What does five mean? Mai doesn’t talk. Who would be talking?”

“You are a sensible girl,” he said. “Aniket sir said so. Sensible girls follow rules.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“No,” he agreed. “Sunset is in ten minutes. I sleep in the cowshed across the yard. I do not come into the house after dark. Tea is in the flask. Rice and dal in the kitchen, under the steel lid.” He paused in the doorway, and his eyes went to the ceiling above the bed, to the dark upstairs, and came back. “I will see you in the morning, if it is a good morning.”

Then he was gone. She heard his slippers slap down the corridor. She heard the front door close. She heard the big iron bolt slide across, and then, a moment later, the smaller sound of the lock, and then his footsteps going away across the yard, and then only the rain.

She sat down on the stool beside the bed and let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding.

“Well, Mai,” she said, to the woman’s profile. “Looks like it’s just the two of us.”

The eyes stayed on the ceiling. In the north window the lamp, a brass oil lamp with a tall glass chimney, made a small steady flame.

She had taken this job for three reasons. The pay was double what Sahara Home Care usually offered. The employer, a grandson called Aniket Ranade who lived in Pune and spoke over the phone in a smooth, tired voice, had said she could have the whole month if she wanted. And it was far away from every place that knew her name.

That was the third reason, and the only one she’d have admitted to at three in the morning.

Four months and two weeks ago, in the first big rain of June, her brother Chinmay had gone on a weekend trek with six friends from his engineering college, got separated from them in a storm, and been found the next morning in the Ghodi river, three kilometres downstream from a village she’d never heard of.

Nineteen years old. He’d been in first year. He had called her from a stranger’s phone once a week, to complain about hostel food.

She had been on a night shift in a private ward in Pune that night, her own phone switched to silent inside a locker, because the patients complained about the buzzing. At 6 a.m. she had opened the locker and seen it.

One missed call. Chinu. 2:07 a.m.

No message. No voice note. Just the missed call, and a dead boy in a river.

She had not cried at the funeral. She hadn’t cried after it either. She had gone back to work and worked every shift she could get, and if she ever wondered why the village on the police report sounded so familiar, she made herself stop wondering. Kelghar was a big district. There were a hundred Ghodi-side villages. It was a coincidence.

She turned her phone over. One bar of signal, flickering. 9:40 p.m.

She fed Mai, or rather she spooned dal-rice paste into her mouth and wiped it away when most of it came back. She turned her. She changed the sheet. She talked the whole time in the low, cheerful voice she used for every patient, telling the old woman about the bus and the goat and the temple with the bottle lamp. When she finally sat down again, it was past eleven.

At midnight she checked rule one and rule two. Mai was on the bed. The lamp was lit. She made herself a cup of tea from the flask and sat with her back straight and her eyes open.

Twelve-thirty. One. The rain thickened. There was a gutter somewhere on the roof that gargled every few minutes, as if clearing its throat.

At half past one her eyelids went heavy, and she stood up and walked around the cot, and pinched the web of her thumb. It was just a house. Old houses ticked and settled. The wind came through the gaps in the doors and made noises like whispering.

She was ready for the whispering.

She was not ready for the knock.

It came from the front of the house, from the far end of the long corridor, and it came so cleanly through the noise of the rain that for a second she thought it was inside her own head.

Knock.

Knock.

Knock.

Three. Slow. Even. The sound of a knuckle on old wood.

She did not move. Her hand had closed on the edge of the cot.

Then, faintly, so faintly that she had to stop breathing to hear it, a voice.

“Didu?”

Everything in her went still.

Nobody had called her that in four months. Nobody alive had ever called her that except one person. Chinmay had started it when he was three and couldn’t say Didi, and it had stuck all through his childhood, and when he turned sixteen and decided it was embarrassing he only used it when he was scared or wanted money.

“Didu, it’s me.” The voice was shaking with cold. It was a little hoarse, the way it got when he had a cold. “Didu, please. Open the door. It’s raining so hard. I can’t feel my hands.”

She looked at the clock on her phone. 2:07 a.m.

She had already started walking. She did not remember deciding to. She was at the door of Mai’s room, and then in the corridor, and the cold stone floor was under her bare feet, and the corridor stretched in front of her, ending in that dark iron-studded door where the brass fist hung.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

“Didu, I know you’re there. I can see the light.”

“Chinu?” It came out of her as a breath, not a word. She caught it, clapped a hand over her own mouth. Rule five. After midnight, do not answer any voice. Not even one you love.

She stood there shaking. It isn’t him, said the sensible part of her, the part that had got her through six years of hospital wards. He’s dead. You saw him. You identified him. It isn’t him.

“I’m so cold, Didu.” Then, smaller: “Why didn’t you pick up?”

That broke something. She turned and ran back down the corridor, into Mai’s room, straight to the bed. Her fingers found the black thread around the old woman’s neck. The iron key lay warm against the papery skin, and she had it, she was lifting it over Mai’s head, she was going to open that door, she was going to see for herself—

Mai’s eyes were on her.

They had been fixed on the ceiling when she left the room. Now they were turned, the whole wet dark iris of each one, and they looked directly into hers. Not empty. Not confused. Perfectly, terribly clear.

Meera let the key drop.

The knocking stopped.

The rain went on. The gutter gargled. In the sudden quiet she could hear her own pulse in her ears, and, under it, something else. A small, dry click from the old woman’s throat. Then Mai’s eyes rolled slowly back to the ceiling, and her face went slack, as if whoever had looked out of it had gone home.

Meera backed away from the bed until her shoulders touched the wall.

It was a trick. A prank. A recording. Somebody in the village had heard about the new girl and her dead brother and thought it would be funny. It was cruel and it was human and she could deal with a thing that was human.

She stood in the light of the lamp for a long time, counting her breaths. Sixty. A hundred. The sky outside the north window was still black.

Then, above her head, from the upper floor of the house, from the direction of the stairs and the room she was not allowed to enter, something knocked.

Once. Slowly.

Twice.

Three times.

And the voice came again, but it was not at the front door any more, and it was no longer cold or begging. It was calm, and close, and happy.

“Didu,” said Chinmay, from directly overhead. “I’m already inside.”