Sunehri by Nidhi Ajay

Many summers ago I visited the summer house of my departed wife’s parents to accompany them while they made some repairs and got some time away from the crowded streets of Varanasi. The house was built in red stone, the repairs were to be done by skilled craftsmen that had been summoned from Calcutta and were residing with us along with a butler from the village who ensured the staples of grains, electricity, water supply etc. were taken care of while we resided in the mansion.

The entrance led to a courtyard which was called the aangan, the pillars surrounding the aangan were magnificently carved depicting the Hindu gods in different poses of dance and mirth. It felt like the house was holding its breath and crawling into itself, even the brightest afternoons were dulled by the intricate panelling and patterned windows such that any light or sound seemed to come back to us delayed and stale, the house was screening what reached us.

The memory of my beloved wife falling from the third floor into the stone panelled aangan while I ran hoping to catch her was fresh. In hindsight, I should have trusted my first instinct, to keep away from that sinister mess, but my need for rationality had overcome me, unaware that the house could hurt me still.
I spent a fair amount of time reading by the pond. Listening to the breeze brush by the silence of the water, the birds chirping happily, my solitude enriched by the verses of Rumi.

One day after my detour to the pond, while I returning to the mansion I saw a beautiful girl dressed in a red frock, her golden hair like hay in the summer. A figment of my imagination, maybe I was reading too many novels about fair girls. I brushed the thought aside and walked back to the mansion to find my in laws had gone away to visit a relative and would only be back the next night.

Me, the butler and the artists fixing the house were overjoyed like children who were about to have their first night alone. A feast of roasted pigeon was prepared with shiraa for dessert and a barrel of the village’s best port along with logs for the bonfire. Our butler arranged it all as I had agreed to pay for this little festivity and when the sun set, the camp fire was lit. The drinking was rampant, we were happy little teenagers high on our first drink. It was the first time after my wife’s passing that I was enjoying myself without the guilt that weighed heavily upon me at such time. That’s when our butler started telling us tales from the village.

“Legend has it that during the Raj, there was a kaharin, a woman whose job was to fill water from the river and bring it to the villagers. Her husband had passed when she was sixteen and she had spent more than ten years, lugging water and making a living through it. She would often pick up the odd job of cleaning the dishes or washing the cattle to make a little extra money.

One night the kaharin was stranded by the pond, that’s when an Angrez Sahib rescued her, he was there for inspection, a civil servant of the British Empire. She was grateful for his help and started doing his household chores. Well she did more chores than were expected from her.”

“What do you mean?”

“Her belly started growing, people started asking questions but she would dismiss them saying she was only getting fat. She would wake up in the early hours to bathe in the pond so nobody would notice her growing belly. This continued for a long time until one night she was found dead with a little girl crying at the edge of the pond, the umbilical cord intact, the baby red and wriggling like a worm.

She was rescued, the kaharin had no kin so a widowed man decided to take her in his custody, in this house right here. She grew up like the other village girls except that she had hair golden like the sun, skin so smooth, it stirred every person who saw her, she was like her father. The villagers called her sunehri, the one with the golden hair. The man was a reputed scholar who was posted here by the Raj. As the girl grew, she became as secluded as her father, living by herself and never leaving the house unless it
was absolutely necessary.

One fateful evening, a village boy found her at the pond and tried to trick her into some romance, he told her that she was everyone’s dream and she told him that she would be everyone’s nightmare. ”

It was getting late and I didn’t think I wanted to hear the end of the story. But our butler was in character, his plot fastening.

“The next morning, she was found dead, right here in this courtyard, her face blue, her body scattered out of its shell as if a giant had stamped its feet on her.”

“That’s disgusting and I’m sure it is untrue. You have been drinking too much. We should all go to sleep now.”

“Listen to the end Sahib, three days after her death, her foster father killed himself, flinging himself from the roof into the aangan. She still walks sahib, with her golden hair and whoever sees her they say, their nightmares come true.”

I wasn’t conscious of my breath, the world turned faded around me as the fear of what I had heard took hold of me. I shook my head and took a deep breath.

“Perhaps I have had too much to drink too. I’m going to bed now”

We all parted ways, made my way to my room. It was chilly and comforting for a hot day. Sleep came to me like never before and enveloped me into its soft embrace. I hadn’t slept so well in so long, my body was engulfed as if in a spell, I was in that space between complete sleep and consciousness when I was awakened by a thud.

I ran outside wondering where the unholy noise and emanated from when I saw with eyes as true as yours my wife, fell from the third floor, her body scattering, her blood glistened on the grey stoned floor of the aangan. In a loop that showed no sign of relenting, the love of my life, the light of my soul kept falling down the unholy height, splattering without any grace. Tears kept rolling down my unblinking eye, I screamed in hopes that someone would save me, save us from this place where god had forsaken us.

I don’t know if I lost consciousness or if my memory has betrayed me but the rest of the night is a tale I heard of the next day, I was rescued by our butler and I left at the first light.