Kamarul's Tales

UGANDA STORY - CHAPTER 5

2011-01-30T11:41:00.000-08:00

At the time of writing this final chapter, I will need to stop writing for a while. In all probability, there really is a presence in this room and I am writing this in the present tense because it is current. It is now. Two nights ago, I had a strange incident. A friend of mine, who I had not seen for some months, came by to visit and it was his first to this house. We talked for a while, downstairs, over coffee and over lighted cigarettes. Because he wanted to pray, I brought him to the room. Just short of 5 minutes, his face reddened clearly. There is something in this room, he said, his eyes moving from direction to direction, straining to see the cause of his nape hairs rising. Later that night, I sat at the desk and began recollecting the past events for this story. I retired to bed at about 3am. I had the player play some soft music to lull me to sleep. My wife slept on the bed. I switched off the side light but left the other light on. The balcony light was left on as this was my fixation before I doze off. As I rested, listening to the music, with my wife close to me on my right, the balcony light suddenly blacked out. I wanted to get up from the bed to try the switch again. I could not. Firm arms held my right arm strongly, in a tight grip, and I knew the blood could not flow this way. “Don’t go”, my wife said, softly. I turned around to my wife to explain why I had to get up from the bed. But it was not her. This was another a woman, a stranger to me, dressed differently, as in a white cloak and she had longer black hair and her hair was coarse. I could tell, because she was next to me, holding on to me. “Don’t go”, she said, her eyes closed and this was not the voice of my wife; the voice was coarse and firm in its resolve not to let me go. The grip was tight but the fright was tighter, as in a clenched fist that swelled in my heart and there was nothing I could do as my whole body froze.

I turned my head towards the balcony again and noticed that the balcony light was on again, the music still played and in that instant, I turned around to see the person next to me. I turned around in just enough time, to notice that the eyes that had opened and stared at me had closed again and when they closed, I saw my wife again, asleep, oblivious to the event. Was it a dream? I had barely closed my eyes and I was still listening to the music. Who was that woman and what was she doing here? For the next day, I was jittery, and my mind went through the analysis of the situation. Was it a paranormal activity? Was it real or was it the mind that had played its game on me? I checked my arm but there were no bruises. Was she the spirit that has been staying in this room? Was she the one creating the stealthy sounds. Who is she? Who is this demon? So, let’s get on with the remaining story in Uganda.

As the evening wore down to darkness, life outside the window, died down to a stupor. Just outside the apartment, darkness loomed and prevailed with consistent obstinance. The road just outside the apartment disappeared into the darkness, only to appear sporadically with the beams of light from occasional cars and motorcycles.. The quiet settled in and I sat with the Toshiba notebook in front of me, facing the window. Sometimes, the occasional breeze blew into the window and I savoured in the freshness of the air, although it was a little warm. Into my notebook I viewed, the notes from the data and information and the spreadsheet waiting for the financial assumptions to come through. I was into it for quite a while, stopping after an hour or so, to light up a cigarette and look at the darkness outside, at the vehicles passing by.

And then, all of a sudden, I was aware of a sensation at my back, as if someone was looking intensely at me. You can get that, when someone is watching you and the only recourse would be either to scratch your back lightly or to turn around. I opted to scratch my back, eyes still on the notebook. However the sensation did not go away. It burned in my mind. Numbers and assumptions receded to become only vague thoughts. Straining with my ears, I listened intently as I struggled to maintain the concentration on my work. Fear, like the cigarette smoke from the ashtray still crept up from where the sensation at the back was. From the spine, fear moved, and slithered up to the brain, into the mind, its tentacles grasping at all the brain cells so that all of them cried out for the body to flee. My muscles tensed as I fought the urge. And I could hear a soft sound, a scraping, like someone dragging a cloth on the floor; faint but noticeable. The sound grew nearer as the seconds passed.. To a person without fright, that sound could have been the equivalent of the sound of a cockroach scurrying across the floor in a hurry. So soft was the sound, but so audibly large it was, as fear amplified it a thousand times. I was not alone. I was not alone. I was not alone. The words drummed into my head. It drummed as fast as my pulse. Fear reached an intoxicating level. Fear killed all the senses to the legs as blood stopped and instead, rushed into my brain. I was not imagining this. There was someone or something behind me and it was advancing stealthily but not quiet enough. Fear said to me, flee or die.

I turned around and in a madness, from a lethal mixture of fear and sudden anger, I jumped. There was a figure, just a few feet away, as I glanced at it, a dark form, almost shapeless, but like a pillar. I passed it, in that nanoseconds, and crashed into a small table. The table broke but I was already up. The shadow drifted fast towards the kitchen, I picked up the sofa seats and threw them at it. Using the broken leg of the table I ran after it, slammed the door open and plunged myself into the kitchen. In that frenzy, I swung the table leg at everything. I hit the fridge, the oven and the kettle and the walls and even the floor. Noise reverberated forcefully, as if I was in a tractor; noise from my violent swings of my wooden weapon. The kettle flew in a clang, and the sharpness of the metal sound deafened everything. The noise enveloped me. There was only the focussed intent of murder. I lurched towards the back door, slammed it open and hit at the dark night and everything else, including some locusts, swearing and shouting and screaming as I went along.

When I came to and went back into the apartment, the air in it had returned to a quiet calm. I felt no danger, but exhausted from the rush of madness from the high dosage of adrenaline that the body had unleashed, settled on the sofa and blankly watched a blank television. I sat there for a while.

Slowly I picked up the pieces of the damaged table and threw them outside down to the ground below. I boiled some water and made coffee and resettled on the chair and lighted a cigarette. The hands still trembled and I relaxed and regressed into a mild stupor.

Suddenly the front door shook as apparent fists thumped the wood. Bang, bang, bang, the front door shook, and it shocked me to high alert. The door shook again, with the banging of hands on the door. I looked at my watch and it was 2 o’clock. I deliberated. I walked to the door and standing by the side of it, asked who it was. “It’s me Hafiz!”, said the voice behind the door. I paused to open the door. It could be somebody or something else. “Open the door!”, the voice said again. “You give me Salam and I will open the door”, I replied. The trembling voice gave the Salam and satisfied that it was familiar voice, I opened it.

Outside, Hafiz stood, panting. He was in some fear, as if he had been chased. “You have got to believe me”, he said, “There was something in my apartment!”, he said. “I felt it watching me”, he said, as he rushed into my apartment. The young man was obviously in fear. Fear had drove him out the apartment and fear had motivated him to run up the stairs to my apartment.

“You better sleep here then”, I said but did not mention to him that I had the same experience too. Maybe later I thought. At the very least, I could sleep peacefully as there was a colleague in the apartment.

The End.

UGANDA STORY- CHAPTER 4

2010-12-23T11:44:00.000-08:00

Can the recounting of an incident bring back the demons? Can the recounting of supernatural events create bridges for demons to enter the realm of the present? I don’t know. Perhaps. Plausible, if I may venture into a concluding remark. I will not negate the hypothetical thought entirely; not as yet. Whatever it is, things have happened. This nice cozy room with the fresh air has turned somehow, gradually if I may say, into a morose and dingy and unfriendly space. The air has turned, from that of freshness to one that was filled with presences, things that we could not see, things that my wife could not see, things that my children could not see. But. There is always a “but” to emphasise. In this sense, there is a real but, not created, not formed to dramatise, not imagined. But their presence was felt through sounds. Sounds of people walking, sounds of doors closing, chairs moving. It is not anywhere else, but here, in this room, where I sit to write past events. Can it be? I have asked myself these past few days. Is a memory a drawing force? Will they find the reader of this story? Will it happen to you? Like I have said, I am not sure.

And so things have happened, things of the nature that are only viewed through movies, as entertainment, on seeing frightened faces of actors and actresses, as evil is dramatized with gore, special effects and all. No, I am just exaggerating the events. Real events are never as good as in the movies but perhaps of a more refined danger. Nevertheless, my mind had been busy with the spate of events. I cannot write about this at this time.

The long pause between the chapters has been filled with some rituals to remove the entities. And now, I am writing again. And if events happen again, then I will definitely know, that remembering past events can cause recurrence. Let me finish this story and perhaps, this will be the final one. Perhaps, I can thrust these bad memories into a small attic in the mind and nail the door shut. Now back to the story.

When morning came, the grasshoppers at the back door entrance were all gone. I opened the door and saw not a trace of any insect on the floor and by the spiral staircase. What was ahead, was the anticipation of work.

An hour later, we were going up the elevator of the telecommunications building. I could recall my imagination of a data room, where all the documents for the Due Diligence would be. I could imagine then, the workload that was waiting for us. When it opened, there was the expansive floor space with barely any furniture. The consultants for Uganda Telecom waited for us. The windows were bare and scattered and some dead grasshoppers lay on the carpet. A European sat on a chair, behind a small desk, about as big as a desk for schoolchildren. On the desk, plastic files lay on their sides but even then, there was enough space at both ends of the desk. Upon my query of the data room, the man behind it replied, “These are the data records. This is it”. Disbelief entered me and I struggled to determine if the man was being sarcastic or he was actually curt and correct in his reply. In most likeliness, the other team members were also struggling like me, to attempt to accept the reality of ridiculousness. We have been so used to stacks of files on shelves and on floors from one wall to the next, but we had not anticipated the stark reality of data frugality. Leafing cursorily through the files, I realised that the Due Diligence study would have to be based on incomplete records for verification. Our disclaimer on assumptions would have to more comprehensive to protect our professional integrity.

UGANDA STORY - CHAPTER 3

2010-10-30T12:59:00.000-07:00

A friend shared with me his thought of my stories. There was no climax to each one of them, he said. Perhaps, then, I was not telling a story but merely reporting the events as they happened. In a real life situation, as opposed to fiction, things happen as they are and are reported as they are. I did not misplace the events into another coherent but false crescendo in order to create a certain climax. Caveat emptor. Let the reader beware in this sense. I wish I can be a better story teller who spices his stories with additional fiction. To add fiction to a non-fiction will only corrupt the non-fiction. So, let me get on with the story.

Time passed quickly, the sun set, the night arrived and the stomach signalled its hunger for food. It was already about 8 o’clock and I trudged up the dark staircase to go to my apartment. I had brought canned curry beef and an rice in plastic. I opened the door into the pantry and switched on the lights. Just beyond the pantry was the exit door to the back, where the spiral staircase would be in case of emergencies. Beside it, on each side, were windows with shutters and these were covered with a mosquito netting.

On the other side of this mosquito netting, locusts perched and sometimes on each other, alive, green underbellies exposed, seemingly resting and seemingly looking into the pantry, perhaps with the intention of coming in but unable to. They were like worms on legs and I felt squeamish looking at them. I walked to the off-white metal oven, a few paces to the left, to pick up the kettle which sat on one of the burners but when the head of a grasshopper in the kettle’s mouth came out of it, it startled me so much that I instantly unclasped my hand on the kettle handle and with a clanking noise, the kettle settled back on the oven. Thus, in my fear, I could not boil water to make coffee. Instead I decided to cook rice and while at it, thought of a plan to evict the trespassing grasshopper from the kettle. So, I went to the wash basin, across from the kettle, to wash my rice but reeled with shock upon noticing a grasshopper patiently perched on the tap. In my fear of it lurching towards me, I backed away and so I could not wash my rice and I could not cook. I returned to the oven behind me and thought of evicting the trespasser with some heat from the fire. I looked for the igniter to turn on the oven so that the grasshopper in the kettle would scurry away but then, there was another grasshopper perched on it. And so, in my fear, I could not light the oven. I could not open the back door either, if I were to chase away the grasshoppers because there were hundreds of them outside. All in all, it was almost a checkmate. The grasshoppers had everything planned. It would appear that the pantry was off limits. I found this unusual. I could not determine how these insects could have come in without the rest following. I had not opened the back door and there was insufficient space for them to crawl through the gap between the door and the floor. I closed the kitchen door behind me and settled on the couch in the living room, thinking. I was hungry and I was angry. Fear, anger and hunger collided and the mind gave a feeble suggestion. I went downstairs and met up with Zaidi and told him about the kitchen and grasshoppers.

He came. Here at last would be someone who would not be afraid of insects. However, this matter had no connection at all to insects. He came to help, to render any assistance as may be required. Though he had eaten a grasshopper earlier, that did not mean that he was not afraid. He too, showed his fear for those insects and in his fearfulness he giggled and laughed and I too, laughed and giggled in embarrassment. Zaidi came out with an idea. He rolled some pages of newspaper and using my lighter, torched it, he holding to the other end. The fire burnt heartily and he went in and closed the door behind him. There was this whooshing sounds as he, like a knight, jostled with the grasshoppers. After several whooshing, he came out and lighted another roll of paper and went in again. All clear, he said, perspiring from the jostling against the grasshoppers. I did not see any dead grasshoppers around. He could have opened the back door and let them out. I did not care. Finally I managed to make dinner and drink coffee. Zaidi stayed for a while and then left for his apartment.

I was lying on the bed in my room, reading the materials for the next day’s work, when a loud thud, as if a cow had fallen through the roof so that the floor shook. Seemingly, it came from the room next to mine. Immediately I peered into the dark room and without going in, groped with my hand for the switch to the fluorescent light. I looked up the ceiling, but it was still intact. I looked around and under the bed but nothing had been broken. I passed it off as a tree branch that had fallen on the roof and quickly retreated into my room, closed the door behind me and locked it. A mobile phone would have provided the assurance to call my colleagues but then, but this was a time when mobile phones were expensive and non of us had brought any. There was no fixed-line phone in the apartment either. I knew that there could not possibly be a tree branch that had fallen on the roof as there were no trees near enough. I remembered.

On further recall, the noise originated from something that had fallen on to the floor and not on the roof. The mind argued and quarrelled with itself and finally, I closed the subject matter as one caused by a monkey that had jumped on the roof from the nearby tree. That would be a sensible rationale of the strange thing. Nothing else happened that night but I slept uneasily with all the lights on.

UGANDA STORY - CHAPTER 2

2010-10-19T10:57:00.000-07:00

It was just after two o’clock in the afternoon, a few minutes after I had raised my left hand to the level of my eyes to check the time on the watch. I was still carrying the burden of tiredness from the sleeplessness of the day before at the Sheraton. Laying on the bed to rest but harbouring the forceful intention of avoiding sleep that should come with it, the cool breeze wafting through the louvres gently cajoled me into a mindless stupor with glazed eyes seeing through droopy eye lids. I quickly regressed into a deep sleep amid the warmth of the quiet afternoon.

However, sometime in my sleep, a part of me woke up. It was like having another self, a sort of thin photocopy residing within and this self was awake. It saw this self of mine, motionless with legs dangling by the sides of the bed, arms by the side, spectacles on the face. It saw the heaving of the torso with every breath the body took. It noticed the afternoon sunlight beaming through the window louvres which fell partly on the bed and partly on the body. It noticed the louvred windows which opened to the next apartment behind the block. It saw the wrinkles of bed sheet from the rudeness of my physical presence. And then it saw.

Sitting at the far end of the bed, legs beneath her, was my mother-in-law in the traditional Malay attire. She sat there, looking at this body of mine but she did not smile and neither did she move. She sat there un flinching and appeared to look resentful, face stern and eyes menacing. She could have smiled, if what a mother-in-law could possibly do. She looked everything like my mother-in-law, in her style of clothes but because she did not look happy, it disturbed the self that was looking at her. That self, as it was connected to me, communicated in my sleep in the form of restlessness from some element of eeriness. I wanted to get up but I could not because the body had insisted on this rest. It was about four o’clock when I finally stirred back into life, sweaty from the heat of the sun but eyes wide open, expecting the apparition to be sitting on the edge of the bed. The uneasy feeling being watched lingered on like a sour taste. I immediately went downstairs to my colleagues on the ground floor, bringing with me my coffee powder and milk and to share with them the weird experience I had gone through. In all normalcy, they laughed. It could have been anyone else but the mother-on-law, they surmised and laughed again. I would have laughed sarcastically too if someone else had dreamt of his mother-in-law.

With the exchange of perceptions on Uganda, the matter quickly dissolved and soon there was the collective matter of browsing through the travel brochures on Uganda. Conversations quickly lighted up on white water rafting and finally the afternoon incident lost all relevance. Apparently, Uganda had one of the most endearingly dangerous white water rafting places in the world (so said the brochure) and so all we could think about was the excitement of going through the rapids intrepidly in the White Nile. Plans were made for the following weekend, after our due diligence exercise. For the rest of the day, we spent reading through the Information Memorandum, going through the information and data carefully and discussing which areas to focus on those matters which appear doubtful. Due Diligence is about ensuring that information provided complies with the truth. Explained in that way, it appears simple. However, things never represent themselves as simple in reality. While statistical data and information are committed into the written word in a document, truth appears in many different forms. For those people with experience, this is normal and there is nothing to be excited about but for the beginner, like a young analyst, this becomes an irritating matter of contention, of grave importance warranting a revisit of critical analyses of all data which, upon reflection are just wasted analytical endeavours. In this kind of world, truth is an imperfection, pimpled by data gathered from differing sources and there is such a thing as an acceptable level of error of reporting. There is no such thing as purely perfect data in company reports but it is the heart that knows the difference between deception and fact. The first thought that comes to mind in the analysis is very often the right deduction about the company.

UGANDA STORY - CHAPTER 1

2010-09-25T15:37:00.000-07:00

This is one experience of another ghostly nature which I need to share with you. I have searched my files but somehow, I was not able to find the story. I know that I have written it somewhere or perhaps I had thought of writing it and forgot about writing it. It has happened many years ago, but I can still remember it explicitly as if it was yesterday. The verbal telling and re-telling of the story to friends had indeed imprinted words and pictures in my memory so much so I could remember almost every detail.

I arrived in Kampala in the late afternoon, in a group of four, on the day just before President Clinton was to arrive for a visit. That would be March 22, 1998. I arrived in Kampala at a time when it was also deluged with locusts. It had rained locusts the day before and so, dead locusts, littered the streets instead of water from rain.

We were to spend two weeks undertaking a Due Diligence study on Uganda Telecoms, to analyse and finally to value the company for a possible strategic shareholding. Each person had his own function to perform. I headed the delegation, and also sought to undertake the financial Due Diligence of the company’s books, create a business model incorporating the business forecast, derive value and assess the viability of investment. Omar Saifuddin was the legal counsel who would undertake the legal Due Diligence on the company’s legal commitments in its contracts, Zaidi Karim was the telecommunications engineer who would assess the company’s current equipment and determine the required forecast capital expenditure for expansion based on the marketing forecast and then there was Hafiz Kassim, another investment analyst who would look at the liabilities and assist me in the business modelling. It was a trip which I could remember because I purposely left my camera behind, having no intention of capturing any images of Uganda. That was a mistake, considering the situation now but at that time, Uganda to me, was like any other country in the African continent. I could imagine it even before I landed. Every part of Africa had a reddish soil to it, every part of Africa was the same as the other.

We arrived at a time when the US President would be visiting and as such, all hotels in Kampala were fully booked. We only managed to stay one night at the Kampala Sheraton and after that, we would have to find another alternative place. Therefore the first day was the frantic search for hotels and motels and service apartments we could possibly find. Also, as most rooms were fully booked, we were each given the first floor overlooking the swimming pool. That night, the jazz bandstand was set up and the music rudely entered the walls and permeated the whole room, so that I was unable to adjust to the jet lag. I could not sleep for the most of the night.

The next day, much to our dismay, there were no other hotels that were available in the city. We leafed through the telephone directory at Sheraton and searched for apartments. We managed to find one, a service apartment, some few kilometres away, in the suburbs.

We boarded a taxi in the morning, prior to checking out, to scan Kampala and the suburbs, as part of the process of due diligence. Beyond Kampala, we could not tell the difference if we were in Africa or in Malaysia excepting the structures of houses and the people. Some places were full of tropical vegetation and in places where there were human habitat, only the bare red ground remained, sparse of trees, littered with playing children with the play of purposelessness and adults busy with intent and purpose. The suburbs had streets with no names which I noted. “We share the same postbox”, the taxi driver mentioned when I asked how people get mails if there were no street addresses. We drove past a post office and I saw the stacks of envelopes in postboxes. Postpaid billing would be difficult under such a circumstance and the possible solution would be for the telecommunications provider to call and inform the customer of the billing amount and a suspension of services after a certain period if the bill is not paid. I remember stopping by a concrete structure which denoted where the Equator passed through Uganda. We alighted and read the inscription at the base and after that, we moved on again on the road with houses by the side.

As for the taxi driver, who had now become our tourist guide, he would not be strange if he had carried Ugandans but as it was, he was strange to us. He spoke good English, his skin was dark and oily and he was jovial. Those were the things that were not strange to us. What was strange, was the thing he kept by my side, as I sat in front. Once in a while, he would reach with left hand into it, and take out a dead grasshopper and put it in his mouth to munch, as if it was a biscuit. There had already been locusts scattered on the ground, millions of them, and here, the locust were piled in a clear plastic bag to be consumed.

“How did you get the grasshopper?” I asked, pointing to the things in the plastic bag. “Oh, people pick the dead grasshoppers from the ground and fry them”, he said. “This is my lunch” he continued. I estimated a few hundred dead grasshoppers in the bag. A few looked like they died many days before. Nodding a few times, I imagined people picking up dead locusts and putting them into frying pans containing boiling oil and from frying pans into plastic bags to be sold. It was a new thing to me. Locusts were seen as the destroyer of crops, but eventually, in the grand scheme of things they too became food, from a lively yellow to a brown and oily dead insect for human consumption. He took out a grasshopper with his left thumb and forefinger and offered me and I saw the dead eyes but, shaking my head, I refused and he put it in his mouth and I heard the crunching as legs and wings broke under the grinding of his molars. Other than the cockroach, there is also my aversion for the grasshopper. The cockroach and the grasshopper has a common trait, each is unpredictable in its direction of movement and each has legs with spines and claws. Each is capable of attaching itself to one’s shirt, each is capable of flying into one’s face and in most cases, each is likely to do both, to me. It is the most likely outcome when there is a cockroach or grasshopper near me.

Zaidi was curious and asked for one. He paused for a while before putting the whole thing in his mouth. “Tastes like prawn”, he said, much to the horror of the team. The taxi driver drove and ate and talked and soon, no grasshopper was left in the plastic bag.

I could not recall the journey to the apartment but I scantily remembered taking the winding roads, with people by the roadsides. The equator went through Kampala and so, with it, the familiar warmth and tropical humidity that I was accustomed to. The taxi turned to the left, and entered through a gate with a sentry post but without any security personnel. There were two apartment blocks, within a gated parameter of well tendered grass. The walls, a dark yellow, immediately looked aged but the interiors were clean. A man came and welcomed us warmly to Selena Homes. We had an initial inspection of the apartment on the ground floor and being satisfied with the conditions, agreed to lease the apartments. He gave us the keys upon receiving the lease payment in US dollars. The Presidential visit had an inflationary effect on all things, and as such, the apartment rental was equivalent to any hotel rate in Kampala. I could not recall the amount we gave him but we took the lease on a weekly basis, reserving the option of getting another in case of changing circumstances. I chose the top floor, of the four floors. The place had no elevator and so I trudged up the unlighted staircase of stark cement. Hafidz chose the second floor, just two floors below mine and Omar and Zaidi shared an apartment on the ground floor. The ground floor apartment became our daily rendezvous for our meals as we cooked our food and ate and joked and told stories.

In that afternoon, after trudging with heavy luggage upstairs, I lay on the bed in one of two rooms. The apartment had two rooms, each with a king-sized bed, a small toilet, a kitchen, a living room. Each room was small, with just some space for the bed and the wardrobe. The windows from the living room opened to the courtyard below and beyond the fence, was the street. Slightly beyond the street, just above the Eucalyptus trees, was a small dusty gravel road, and there, I could see people trudging down, as if from work. From the room that I chose to sleep, the windows opened to the courtyard but beyond the fence, were ramshackle huts, built so close together with zinc roofs and bits and pieces of plank. Through these dwellings, the gaps in between them created alleys where people walked and met and talked and argued with each other. Beyond the slum, was a bare open space, where hawkers sat on paper and nylon sheets to sell vegetables and meat.

The Internet Chat

2010-04-16T01:22:00.001-07:00

This incident occurred in January 2005 in a certain building in Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur on the 7th Floor. This building has 56 floors, the last one being left empty. Cases have been reported of computer keyboards being tapped although no one was at the cubicles and of footsteps at the alleys along the cubicles. This happened in a Strategy Division of the company and there were about ten people, namely the author, Kamarul Shahrin, Rahmah, Rosmawaty, Anna, Wardi, Shahril, Zamil. Other than the author’s name, other names have been replaced by fictitious names to protect their identities and reputations.

It has to be acknowledged that the day after the event occurred, Rahmah reported to the System Administrator and Security Department of the internet chat incident. Ths system administrator confirmed that the IP address came from a particular computer at the office. Security administration confirmed, with security cameras and ID card sensors that no one was in the office although the IP protocol confirmed that the chat line originated from a computer in a cubicle at level 7. That computer belonged to a female Officer, Anna. Security cameras did not capture any images of people during that time. No unlawful entries were recorded in that time and security personnel confirmed that no office lights were switched on when they inspected the office periodically in the night.

Rahmah was at her home doing her internet chatting with her other friends when she received a prompt from a chat line. In the time, between 2.34am until 3.48am, Rahmah engaged in a conversation with “Anna”.

The chat lines provided below have not been adulterated and filtered in any way. Words in brackets represent the English translation of the conversation. Please look carefully at the answers provided by “Anna”. In most instances, there appeared to be 2 answers at any time to each query by Rahmah. Although the chat appeared to originate from Anna’s PC, Anna was not at the office at the time. This is the first ever event when demons communicated with a human using the computer. Enjoy your reading.

Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:34:30 AM): Anna? (Anna?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:34:51 AM): hhahahahah (laughter)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:34:59 AM): sapa Anna? (Who is Anna?)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:35:15 AM): Anna adalah sejenis hantu suka merayau malam2 (Anna is a type of demon who likes to loiter around at night)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:35:20 AM): hehehehhehehehhehehheeeeeeeeeeeeee..
Anna (2/1/2005 2:35:57 AM): yerrrr.......btul tuh.. (Yes, agree)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:36:17 AM): saya pun ader mendengar tentang hantu tuh..dier slalu online kan pc di tingkat 7 (I have heard of such a demon. It is always on line with the PC on Level 7)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:36:23 AM): thehehhehehehhhhhhhhhheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:36:26 AM): huhuhuhu
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:36:35 AM): sib baik aku dah kluo dari ting 7 (I am lucky to be able to move out of Level 7)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:39:55 AM): mmm.....
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:40:09 AM): hantu cam biskut (a ghost is like a biscuit)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:40:12 AM): knapa tak tido lagi ibu? (Why are you not asleep yet, madam?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:40:17 AM): hahhahahah
Anna (2/1/2005 2:40:28 AM): biasala...tadi pegi pc org lain...(It is normal. Just now I went to another PC at another cubicle)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:40:35 AM): sebelah pc Anna...(The PC next to Anna)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:40:40 AM): hahhaha
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:40:47 AM): ni kat opis ke (Are you in the office?)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:40:51 AM): kat cc ke (Are you at the cubicle?)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:40:55 AM): kat mana ni merayap2 (What are you doing, walking around?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:40:56 AM): alamak.. (Oh, no)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:41:01 AM): cc ker...
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:41:12 AM): u wat pe kat cc kol 2.45 pag (what are you doing at the cubicle at 2.45 in the morning?)i
Anna (2/1/2005 2:41:12 AM): kat rumah la beb...tingkat 7 (I am at home. Level 7)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:41:16 AM): hoh
Anna (2/1/2005 2:41:18 AM): maner lagi... (Where else?)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:41:23 AM): sama sape (Who are you with?)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:41:36 AM): sape lagi hantu2 korporat trajedi(who are the other ghosts of Corporate Strategy?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:41:42 AM): kang nak pegi tgkt 14 ader org marah...(Now want to go to Level 14 as someone is angry)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:41:48 AM): mm...
Time lapse of 6 minutes
Anna (2/1/2005 2:41:54 AM): budak2 jer... (Kids only)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:42:01 AM): u all buat apa kat situ (What are you people doing there?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:42:04 AM): mak kitorang kat tingkat lain (Our mother is at another floor of the building)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:42:07 AM): tgk 14 ada ape (What is at Level 14?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:42:22 AM): ayah pun..kat sini tmpt budak2 main... (Father. This level is for kids to play)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:42:49 AM): budak badan kaler hijau, buncit, mata merah, kuku panjang? (Such as green looking boy, red eyes and long nails?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:43:01 AM): tak la (Of course not)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:43:05 AM): manede..kitorang biasa jer... (It is not. We are normal)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:43:16 AM): ada apa event kat menara ni (is there an event happening at the office building?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:43:18 AM): itu toyol..tak kawanlah ngan depa.. (the boy you described is the toyol and we do not befriend them in answering to Rahmah’s description above)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:43:30 AM): mmm manede event.. (No. There is no event)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:43:33 AM): memang slalu duduk sini aper... (we are always here)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:43:44 AM): dulu pc u pun kiter on jugak..(we used to switch on your PC)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:44:03 AM): tapi skang ni budak tuh pakai laptop..so tak boleh on lah.. (but ever since you guys use laptops, we cannot access the computers)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:44:15 AM): dier bwk balik rumah...(they bring their laptops home)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:44:17 AM):
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:44:22 AM): mak bapak kat tng 14 wat pe? (Your parents on Level 14, what are they doing?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:44:46 AM): bukan mak bapak kat tingkat 56. (No, they are not on Level 14, they are on Level 56)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:44:52 AM): bukan 14 ( Not level 14?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:45:03 AM): diorang duduk kat situ la (No, they just stay there)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:45:04 AM): ting 14 apa sape? ting 56 wat pe lak (What do they do at Level 56?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:45:15 AM): budak2 tak boleh campur..(Children are not allowed to be there on Level 56)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:45:23 AM): 14.....takde dah (No more at Level 14)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:45:30 AM): dah tak boleh masuk.. (We cannot enter Level 14 nowadays)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:45:36 AM): dulu ader la.. (Last time, we could)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:45:41 AM): nenek (our grandmother)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:45:45 AM): hoh
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:45:53 AM): cakap betul2 la (please tell me the truth, don’t lie)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:45:57 AM): menyeramkan la (this is eerie)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:46:03 AM): yela... (Yes it is)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:46:12 AM): sape lagi ada kat opis ni (Who else is at the office?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:46:17 AM): itu kan dulu semua orang tahu.. (That was last time. Everyone knew)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:46:23 AM): tingkat 7? (At level 7?)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:46:27 AM): a ah (yes)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:46:39 AM): hmmm dulu wardi ader bwk kawan sorang. (Last time, Wardi brought a “friend” to the office).
Anna (2/1/2005 2:46:44 AM): tapi dah balik dah (But it has since gone home)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:47:06 AM): rumah dier jauh...tak biasa duk jauh2 dgn mak ayah. (Its house was very far, and it was not comfortable staying away from its parents).
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:47:15 AM): kawan sape (Whose friend?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:47:19 AM): nak buat macam mana terpaksa la dier balik (what to do, it has to go home)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:47:29 AM): kawan kitorang la (Our friend)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:47:31 AM): habis tu sape lagi teman u all (who else is your friend?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:47:48 AM): mmm..sekarang berdua jer.. (Now, there is only the 2 of us)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:47:58 AM): sama sape (With whom?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:48:07 AM): Anna ni slalu jugak kerja malam.. (Anna used to stay late in the office)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:48:07 AM): kadang2 dier ader la.. (Sometimes she is around)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:48:16 AM): sorang2..(Alone by herself)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:48:31 AM): takkan sampai dekat 4 pagi (Don’t tell me till 4am?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:48:32 AM): dier diam2 jer.. (She works quietly by herself)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:48:49 AM): sekarang Anna sorang2 kat opis? (Now, Anna is alone at the office?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:49:04 AM): lagu pun tak pasang...so kitorang tak kisah (She did not put on any music and so we do not bother)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:49:04 AM): eh takde la (No, this is not her)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:49:04 AM): dier sampai pukul 11 paling lama (Nowadays she stays only until 11pm)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:49:09 AM): kalau group biz plan ader la.. (Only when it comes to Group Business Planning time)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:49:27 AM): eh takdela..(No)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:49:28 AM): Anna takde kat opis. (Anna is not in the office right now)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:49:28 AM): dier cuti hari ni (She is on leave today)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:49:34 AM): habis tu ni sape (Then, who are you, really?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:49:47 AM): tak dtg pun... (She did not come)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:49:48 AM): semua orang takde kat opis.. (There is no one in the office at this time)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:49:57 AM): kitorang berdua jerrrrrrr..... (just the 2 of us)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:50:03 AM): kitaorg tu sape (What do you mean by “us”?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:50:04 AM): eh kater tadi tahu (Just now, you said you know)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:50:10 AM): mmmmm...
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:50:12 AM): dah konfius (I am confused)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:50:15 AM): kitorang la.. (It is us)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:50:19 AM): sape (who?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:50:33 AM): kitorang teman setia tingkat 7 (we are the loyal ones at Level 7)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:50:43 AM): budak2 kecil yg slalu bermain.. (just small children who always play)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:50:46 AM): korang main ym? (You people play?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:50:48 AM):
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:50:53 AM): huhuhuhuhuh
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:50:55 AM): cool
Anna (2/1/2005 2:51:00 AM): tapi tak mahu kacau orang la (but we do not want to disturb anyone)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:51:04 AM): diorang tuh semua baik...(the office people are nice people)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:51:07 AM): elok la jgn kacau (it is good that we do not disturb)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:51:14 AM): ha ah
Anna (2/1/2005 2:51:19 AM): sembahyang.. (office people are pious, they pray)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:51:28 AM): tapi ader sekerat dua yang malas.. (but then, there are one or two who neglect to pray)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:51:34 AM): ada yg tak semayang ke kat situ (are there people who are not praying at the office?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:51:41 AM): adeeee...(Yes)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:51:44 AM): sape (Who?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:51:49 AM): tapi biarla mereka..(let them)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:51:53 AM): sape (Who?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:52:02 AM): lambat laun sedar jugak..(sooner or later, they will repent)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:52:12 AM): kami tak mahu ambil tahu (we do not want to bother)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:52:17 AM): ooo ok (OK)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:52:24 AM): kami nak bermain sahaja..(we just want to play)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:52:28 AM): lallalll lallall lalalla
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:52:34 AM): kak ros mana (where is Rosmawati?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:52:53 AM): kak ros...takde kat rumah la (she is not in office. She should be at home)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:53:08 AM): die sekarang ader baby dalam perut..tak boleh dekat (She is pregnant now, a baby in her and so we cannot come near)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:53:08 AM): dia dtg keje tak arini (did she come to work today?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:53:14 AM): tak elokla (it is not good to disturb her)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:53:15 AM): pesla takleh dekat (why can’t you be near her?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:53:34 AM): kak ros...mmmm rasenya tak datang (she did not come)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:53:49 AM): dia sehat tak (is she all right?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:53:56 AM): tapi biasala..dier slalu keluar jugak kalau datang (As usual. She would go out if she comes to work anyway)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:54:01 AM): sihat..(Yes, Rosmawati is fine)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:54:06 AM): tak boleh dekat..(but we cannot come near her)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:54:11 AM): tolong jaga dia (please take care of her)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:54:11 AM): tak baik (not good)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:54:14 AM): tgk2 kan (Please monitor her?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:54:16 AM): nanti kitorang kena pindah..(If we disturb her, we have to move)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:54:19 AM): dari jauh je (monitor from afar?)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:54:22 AM): pindah mana (where do you plan to move to?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:54:31 AM): tak mahu kena pindah (we do not want to move)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:54:36 AM): duduk sini best la (it is nice staying here)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:54:45 AM): kena pindah mana? (Where do you need to move?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:54:51 AM): ha ah (laughter)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:54:56 AM): okla (OK)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:55:01 AM): pindah..tak tah.. (Move. Don’t know)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:55:02 AM): pindah mana (where are you going to move to?)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:55:08 AM): sape suruh pindah (who asks to move?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:55:19 AM): tapi ustaz ckp jgn kacau.. (but the religious teacher said to us not to disturb anybody)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:55:39 AM): camne korang leh reti guna komputer (How did you know how to use the computer?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:55:46 AM): takut dgn ustaz.. (we are afraid of the religious teacher)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:55:54 AM): ustaz mana satu (which religious teacher is that?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:55:55 AM): mmm....biasala... (the usual)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:56:04 AM): baru lagi kitorang ni. (We are still new here)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:56:11 AM): dulu pun pakai.. (Last time, used to wear/have (?))
Anna (2/1/2005 2:56:16 AM): ustaz.. (the religious teacher)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:56:23 AM): yang datang haritu.. (the one that came the other day)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:56:28 AM): apa nama dia (what was his name?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:56:41 AM): mase tu kakak kerja lagi di corporate strategy.. (last time when you were still attached to Corporate strategy)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:56:51 AM): tak nak la takut sebut name dier.. (we are afraid to mention his name)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:56:59 AM): dah lama sangat tu (that was sometime ago)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:57:11 AM): masa aku keje sana korang lepak2 mana (when I worked there, where did you people stay?)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:57:20 AM): ada kacau aku tak (did you disturb me?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:58:09 AM): takdela (No we did not)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:58:20 AM): pesal (why?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:58:24 AM): mase tu kitorang duduk satu family lagi (the last time, we were a family)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:58:31 AM): bukan kat tingkat 7 (But not at Level 7)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:58:41 AM): tingkat 7 orang lain.. (somebody else’s Level 7)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:58:41 AM): pesal korang pilih tingkat 7 (why did you choose Level 7 to stay?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:58:47 AM): jahat (evil)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:58:52 AM): sape jahat (Who is evil?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:58:53 AM): dier suka kacau orang (It likes to disturb people)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:59:02 AM): yang dulu la (the one before us)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:59:08 AM): kat tgkt 7 (at level 7)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:59:15 AM): tgkt 7 best (Level 7 is nice)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:59:18 AM): dah kena halau? (Has it been asked to leave?)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:59:22 AM): apa yg best (what is good about staying at Level 7?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:59:27 AM): ha ah...mungkin (ha. Ha. Maybe)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:59:33 AM): best la. (it is best)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 2:59:38 AM): best cam ne (Best based on what?)
Anna (2/1/2005 2:59:53 AM): sebab semua orang tak bergaul....antara satu sama lain. (Because nobody here likes to mingle but work alone . .
Anna (2/1/2005 3:00:01 AM): buat hal masing2. (Doing their own thing).
Anna (2/1/2005 3:00:12 AM): lagi pun tempat terlindung... (anyway, this place is quite secluded)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:00:25 AM): korang selalu lepak tempat sape? Anna je? (Which part of Level 7 are you at?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:00:44 AM): mmm...Anna... (at Anna’s place)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:00:50 AM): lagi farah.. (Also at Farah’s place)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:00:55 AM): kadang2.. (sometimes...)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:01:04 AM): zamil.. (at Zamil’s place)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:01:06 AM): izlin? (What about at Izlin’s place?”)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:01:17 AM): tapi tempat kitorang paling suka tempat kamarul. (But we like Kamarul Shahrin’s office the best)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:01:34 AM): izlin lagi best...ader byk pemandangan.. (But Izlin’s place is the very best, because there are sceneries to see)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:01:37 AM): pesal kamarul (what about Kamarul?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:01:37 AM): menarik.. (He is interesting)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:01:46 AM): rozairi tak kaau? (Do you ever disturb Rozairi?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:01:48 AM): Anna....byk barang..kartun.. (Anna. She has many cartoon characters/dolls at her place)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:01:52 AM): kaau = kacau
Anna (2/1/2005 3:02:01 AM): kamarul..bersepah (Kamarul Shahrin’s place is a mess)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:02:07 AM): gelap.. (and his office is always dark)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:02:12 AM): suka jenguk die.. (We like to see him)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:02:19 AM): main2 dgn dier.. (Play with him)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:02:25 AM): sape dier (Who?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:02:32 AM): kamarul.. (Kamarul)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:02:38 AM): dia tahu kroang ada? (Does he know you exist?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:02:55 AM): kamarul tahu.. (He knows)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:03:03 AM): zamil tahu (Zamil knows too)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:03:09 AM): izlin tak tahu (Izlin doesn’t know)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:03:09 AM): Anna tahu? (Does Anna know?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:03:13 AM): farah tak tahu (Farah does not know)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:03:18 AM): tak gi tempat faridah? (Do you go to Faridah’s place?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:03:19 AM): Anna tak tahu (Anna does not know)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:03:36 AM): tapi dier slalu ckp jgn kacau dier.. (but she always says not to disturb her)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:03:48 AM): dia sedo korang ada ke (does she know of your presence?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:03:54 AM): kami tak kacau...suka tgk dier.. (We do not disturb her, just looking at her that is all)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:04:06 AM): tgk fridah? (Do you like to look at Faridah?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:04:06 AM): diorang tak sedar..tapi tahu kami wujud. (She does not know but theoretically accepts the knowledge of our existence).
Anna (2/1/2005 3:04:15 AM): faridah...tak mahu (Faridah, we don’t want to see her )
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:04:24 AM): pesla takmo kat faridah (Why not her?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:04:33 AM): takut (Afraid)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:04:36 AM): pesal suka tengok Anna (because you like to look at Anna?)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:04:46 AM): pesla takut ngan faridah (why are you afraid of Faridah?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:04:57 AM): Anna...(Anna)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:05:05 AM): suka (Like)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:05:11 AM): faridah buat apa kat korang sampai takut (what did Faridah do to make you people afraid?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:05:29 AM): sebab dier paling suka duduk tempat dier.. (because she likes to stay at her place)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:05:42 AM): sape (Who?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:05:46 AM): ala faridah nanti dengar ayat sucila (Because she likes to listen to the Quranic verses being read)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:06:06 AM): kat faridah je takut? (Are you afraid of Faridah only?)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:06:54 AM): dekat syahril tak takut? (Are you afraid of Shahril?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:07:16 AM): takut jugak.. Sort of)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:07:25 AM): tapi dier bersepah (but he is also a messy person)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:07:37 AM): suka tempat bersepah ke (You like a messy office?)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:07:50 AM): en rosli tak bersepah? (What about Rosli’s place. Messy too?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:08:13 AM): bersepah jugak (Yes, messy also)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:08:34 AM): jgn kacau en rosli (Don’t disturb Rosli)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:08:38 AM): dia baik (he is a nice person)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:08:55 AM): tahu.. (We know)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:09:02 AM): kitorang tak kacau (We do not disturb him)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:09:09 AM): suka tgk je.. (We just like to look at him)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:09:12 AM): sape paling korang tak suka kat situ (Who do you dislike at the office?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:09:32 AM): mmmm......saper yer.. (Not sure)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:09:40 AM): sobri? (Sobri?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:09:48 AM): sama je.. (No. Usual)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:09:55 AM): tapi kiter suka tgk Anna (but we like to see Anna)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:10:01 AM): pesal (why?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:10:01 AM): dulu dier slalu bawak bende. (because last time she used to bring something (a demon))
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:10:12 AM): dah lama korang tgk2 dia? (How long have you been looking at her?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:10:12 AM): dtg skali dgn dier ke opis..(that thing would come with her to the office)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:10:17 AM): bende apa (what is that thing?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:10:27 AM): lama jugak. (for some time we have been looking at her)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:10:44 AM): dia bawak bende apa (What did she bring?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:10:50 AM): tapi sekarang bende tu dah tak ada lagi.. (Now that thing is no longer around)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:10:52 AM): mungkin dah buang.. (Maybe it has been discarded away)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:10:57 AM): bende camne (what kind of thing?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:11:28 AM): kesian dier.. (we pity her)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:11:28 AM): hati dier dulu tak tetap..kesian...(she was always troubled then, it’s a pity)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:12:01 AM): mana aku keje situ.... ada tak bende apa2 kat aku (Is there anything with me?)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:12:08 AM): mana = masa
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:12:19 AM): pesal ngan hati dia (what is her problem?)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:12:26 AM): bende tu rupe camne (how does that thing look like?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:12:40 AM): bende..itu dengan die.. (the thing is with her)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:12:40 AM): tapi dier tak sedar.. (but she is not aware of its presence)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:12:42 AM): slalu tengok dier menangis..(we always see her crying)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:12:48 AM): bende tu dari mana (where is that thing from?)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:13:01 AM): Anna nangis kat opis? (You mean, Anna always cry at the office?)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:13:03 AM): kenape? (Why?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:13:06 AM): tapi dier tak sedar (but she did not know)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:13:21 AM): bende tu jahat tak? (Was that thing evil?)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:15:02 AM): jawab la (Please answer)
Long pause. 10 minutes passed
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:24:55 AM): korang buat pe tu (What are you people doing?)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:24:58 AM): cam busy je (Sounds like you people are busy)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:37:13 AM): jawab la (Please answer)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:37:17 AM): korang tgh buat pe tu (what are you people doing?0
Anna (2/1/2005 3:37:39 AM): tgh main2 .. (we are playing)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:37:45 AM): jawab aper? (Answer what?)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:38:09 AM): main2 kat mana (Where are you people playing?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:38:16 AM): kat alley (at the alley. Note: There was a narrow alley in between the cubicles. Staff had reported running footsteps to and fro at the alley even in the daytime)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:38:30 AM): masa aku keje situ..ko kada kacau? (While I was working there, did you guys ever disturb me?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:38:48 AM): takde (No)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:38:53 AM): pesal (why?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:39:06 AM): elok la (it is a good thing not to be disturbed)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:39:15 AM): apa yg elok (what is good?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:39:16 AM): kitorang memang tak kacau (that we did not disturb you)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:39:21 AM): nak ker kena kacau (do you want us to disturb you?)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:39:26 AM): takmo (No)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:39:32 AM): kang aku pangge ustaz (or I call the religious teacher)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:39:37 AM): jgn la (Please don’t)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:39:43 AM): takut.. (Afraid)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:39:44 AM):
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:39:53 AM): korang tgk ada bende pelik kat aku tak (Do you sense any strange thing on me?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:40:05 AM): kitorang tak kaca..suka tgk orang dan main cak2 je. (we don’t disturb but do some hide and seek only)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:40:10 AM): takde.. (There is nothing on you)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:40:15 AM): kau takde. (Nothing on you)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:40:17 AM): sape lagi ada bende pelik (who else has got a strange thing?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:40:24 AM): Anna sorang jer ader dulu.. (Only Anna has it)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:40:33 AM): aku tak tahu sapa bagi dier..(I do not know who gave it to her)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:40:45 AM): sekarang ada? (She has now?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:40:58 AM): tapi yang pasti orang tu nak jaga Anna (for certain, someone wanted Anna to be monitored closely)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:41:09 AM): dia sayang Anna kot (maybe that thing loves Na?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:41:14 AM): awasi. (No, but just to monitor)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:41:18 AM): bende tu tak jahat? (Is that thing evil?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:41:21 AM): mungkin. (Maybe)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:41:26 AM): jahat. (Yes it is evil)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:41:32 AM): kitorang tak suka dier.. (we don’t like him)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:41:36 AM): pesal (why?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:41:38 AM): dier hodoh (He is monstrously ugly)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:41:48 AM): ada tanduk? (Has it got horns?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:41:54 AM): dier..menyusahkan Anna..(it gave problems to Anna)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:42:04 AM): buat dier lalai. (To make her careless)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:42:13 AM): takde la tanduk.. (No, it has no horns)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:42:16 AM): dia buat macam mana (how did the thing do it to Na?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:42:21 AM): tapi... hodoh.. (but, monstrously ugly)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:42:37 AM): kaler apa (what colour was it?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:42:38 AM): dier tutup mata Anna (it does it to Anna by closing her eyes (meaning cloaking or putting magic in Anna’s eyes)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:42:48 AM): pesal dia buat camtu (why does it do that?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:42:54 AM): menyerupai.. (to appear as something else (or to manifest as something in her sight))
Anna (2/1/2005 3:43:05 AM): kitorang tak tahu.. (we do not know)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:43:18 AM): lama dier duduk dgn Anna..(That thing has been staying long with Anna)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:43:25 AM): sejak biler dia takde (since when was thing gone from Anna?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:43:29 AM): tapi Anna tak sedar.. (but Anna was not aware)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:43:47 AM): bln ogos tak silap..(In the month of August, I think)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:43:53 AM): kitorang happy (we were so happy that the thing was gone)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:43:54 AM): oo ok
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:44:19 AM): en mat camne (How is Mat?)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:44:22 AM): dia ok? (Is he all right?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:44:35 AM): ok (He is all right)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:44:44 AM): kak aida? (How about Aida?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:45:05 AM): ok (She is all right)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:45:19 AM): kak halimah? (What about Halimah?)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:45:34 AM): korang jangan kacau kakak-kakak tu (please don’t disturb the old lady)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:46:39 AM): kitorang tak kacau la (we do not disturb her)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:46:53 AM): ok..aku percaya cakap korang (OK, I believe in what you have just said)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:47:02 AM): okla.
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:47:05 AM): korang tak pergi ting lain ke (Don’t you guys ever go to other levels?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:47:09 AM): nak pegi main la (for playing, yes)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:47:10 AM): tingkat 6 ke (how about Level 6?)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:47:16 AM): jawab la dulu aku soal tu (please answer my question)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:47:17 AM): kawan dah tunggu (Our friends are waiting)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:47:24 AM): tak nak (don’t want)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:47:30 AM): kat sibi dah ok (It is Ok here)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:47:31 AM): kawan ramai? (Do you have plenty of friends?)
Anna (2/1/2005 3:47:38 AM): okla bye kakak.. (OK goodbye sister)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:47:59 AM): bye (farewell)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:48:02 AM): jaga diri (take care)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:48:07 AM): jgn merayap-rayap (don’t loiter around)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:48:12 AM): main elok2 (play nicely)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:48:18 AM): jangan kacau tempat orang (don’t disturb other people’s places)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:48:23 AM): tengokkan Anna (please observe Anna)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 3:48:34 AM): kalau ada yang kaau dia cakap tau (If there is anything, please inform me)
Rahmah (2/1/2005 10:47:17 AM): Anna?

THE FINAL CHAPTER

2009-08-17T05:31:00.000-07:00

As the days wore on, our fears thinned out from the expectation that we were going home. If the demons could read our body language, or even understood our conversations, they would have been dismayed that their disturbances had brought them nothing. They had lost the house and were now only given the compound. They did not come with any proposal of a bilateral agreement much earlier or this thing would not have happened.

They made attempts. The car began to smell horribly and we could not locate the source of the smell. It smelled like rotting flesh. And so there was the rush to the shops to buy two containers of air fresheners. Zadar remembered that we still had some remnants of the blessed water. And so the car was blessed.

The container people came and brought loads of cardboard boxes for the transportation of our things. Evenings and nights were spent putting in things into the boxes. Nights were spent with well wishers who gave us dinners. The tinge of sadness was of course, there. There were the people we have made friends with.

As the days wore on, the house became more empty, as most of our things had been packed into the boxes. Boxes lay on top of each other in the living room, the dining room, in the store room, in the lower main hall and the rooms above. The house was dusty but we did not bother. Everyone was looking at the final destination, which was home in Malaysia.

Rain in Karachi was far and between. I was already about to sleep, but heard the rain pelting the marble stairs outside in the courtyard. Then I heard the noise. I checked the watch, and it showed two in the morning. I heard the commotion again, and it sounded like it came from the kitchen. Somebody was cooking something. There were the sounds of pots and pans. I mulled over the sounds, to go or not to go. Curiosity won and I opened my door furtively, looking left and right. The kitchen door was closed but the sounds were there. As I neared it, the sounds stopped. I stopped too.

My mind told me, "since the sounds have stopped, just make the turn and go back to bed". Decisions like that could easily be made by anybody. But I was still curious. Besides, I could get myself a Nescafe once I am in the kitchen.

And so I continued walking and opened the door. The kitchen lights were on but there was nobody around. I was barely in the kitchen, when my wife jumped on me from behind the fridge and I jumped with some fright. I hated being jumped on like that. She was wide awake, and she had purposely make the noises to attract me. I told her, I was not afraid and that was why I came to check. She promptly made two cups of coffee and beckoned me to go to the main door. I followed. It was strange of her. And I thought that she looked strange, with that gleam in her eyes. She opened the door wide and sat and beckoned me to do the same. We sat down. Then she asked me to listen because she had heard it from upstairs. In the midst of the drizzle, a woman was crying. She was wailing, as if in distress. She was wailing as if her baby had just died. In that silent night, when everybody would have found refuge in dreams, this woman was crying. It occurred to me that this was the woman we heard before a few months back. We heard her ranting from the balcony upstairs.

We sat there and talked and smoked. And then we stopped to listen again. If it was the same woman that we heard before, her wailing had taken on a different tone. She sounded very sad indeed. In the quietness of the night, she wailed and wailed without stopping. It went on for an hour that we were there. But we noticed that the sound though appearing distant, appeared to come from one corner of the courtyard, where the bush was, where the commotion was much earlier.

It was peaceful. The drizzle calmed us and we were not afraid. She wailed for another hour. Our coffee cups were empty now, and we had smoked a few cigarettes. The drizzle almost stopped. We finally closed the door on the wailing and went to our own beds.

The end

CHAPTER 15 OF HOUSE NO.32

2009-05-14T10:22:00.000-07:00

The next morning I awoke with some exuberance. That pleasant excitement was justified from the firm belief that the house was now shielded from the unwarranted entry of demons. The strenuous task of paying stringent attention to detail in ensuring that the blessed water had drenched all parts of the walls and the hammering of nails into the floor at twenty doors resulting in blistered fingers and bloodied fingers had created sufficient belief that the efforts had to succeed. My mind envisaged rays of invisible bars around the house. I envisaged demons getting their hands and bodies scalded from their feeble attempts at coming in.

I went to the living room door, rubbed the floor with my left foot but could not feel any sharp thing, except for the coldness of the marble. I knelt down, felt the floor with my left palm and I could not feel the metal of the nails. The nails were there and this was not a dream. The family woke up, and each had a talisman around his or her person’s neck. From that day on, I would always check that the children would not forget to wear the talisman. Psychological victory prevailed and every one of us felt confident. The house was now eliminated of its demons. But it had been many months. Events other than the house had happened. There were the bombings and the riots and the misdemeanours of the office for which I was not able to obtain any assistance from Head Office. One of the perils of working in a public listed company was that embezzlements needed to be swept under the carpet at the expense of safety to those who had reported them. I had expressed my concerns for the family’s safety to the Head Office but there was clearly no response. Finally, flustered and frustrated, I appealed to the Group Chief Financial Officer for his consideration instead, and after a while, received a positive response from him that something was being done. The GCFO would bypass the subsidiary company and work through with the Human Resource Division of the Head Office. When I broke the news, the family cheered loudly, hands raised up, danced about, jubilant, at being able to return home, leaving me pleasantly surprised that I was not made aware of their intense dislike to stay on. There were warm smiles all around. The wife especially, was happy and began almost immediately for preparations to leave the country, although this was not confirmed. She merrily went about collecting boxes from shops. The children were like little lambs, skipping about in glee.

We won against the demons but we retreated from Karachi. Sometimes, I do wonder whether it was fate that brought us to Karachi for the sole reason to exorcise the demons from the house.

The house began to assume a brighter outlook, but then, it could just be psychological. I felt safe, everyone felt safe, to walk its corridors again, no matter what the time. If anyone was to come into the house then, he or she would be able to see photostated paper in plastic lamination, plastered on each wall facing a door, talismans in leather pouches around necks and faintly feel the heads of nails embedded at each door.

There were no haunting events from that day on. For a while.

Then things happened.

There was one night while I was taking my bath, I heard a commotion outside. I heard pattering footsteps running past the window, some shouts and heard Ajab’s voice. I quickly stopped bathing and went to the backyard but found no one. I ran out to the left of the house and saw Ajab at the front yard holding a stick. My wife was standing at the alley between the wall and the side of the house, her face, quite ashen with some fear.

The wife recounted that she was just peeking out the backdoor, and was talking to Ajab who was seated at the door to his room. Suddenly, a sizeable pebble shot out from the darkness, from the corner of the house but missed Ajab. Ajab shouted in surprise, took his stick an and ran towards the dark corner. Curious, my wife followed. Ajab hit around with his stick at the vegetation at the corner but there was nothing. He ran to the front yard to check. My wife was just about to walk the unlighted alley to go to the front yard when something brushed past, almost shoving her aside but she could not see anything . Her eyes followed to the front yard and she swore that the bush growing at the corner of the front yard, shook violently, as if something had entered it. She called on Ajab who promptly hit around the bush with his stick but there was nothing there.

It was barely a day after the incident that another event happened. It was past twelve and the family had gone asleep. I had turned on the mini HIFI in my room with some rhythm and blues music. I was only past ten minutes into listening when there was a thunderous noise coming from the window near the bed. The wall shook from that thunderous clap on the window. That sound almost shocked me from my skin so that I just stood fixated at my place near the Hifi. I switched the Hifi off, went to the window but could not see anything outside.

Despite having the house exorcised, I remained making my rounds in the evening. I was at the car porch and was looking back towards the backyard. It was my intention to walk there and that was why I was looking at the backyard. All of a sudden, about fifteen feet away from me, a stone, as big as a fist, appeared about seven or eight feet above the ground. It hovered for a while, as if afloat and then, the rock moved swiftly in my direction, as if thrown by an unseen hand. I dodged the missile and it whisked past my head, to drop about five feet away behind me. If that missile had hit its mark, I would have been seriously injured. This was a clear and present threat, even in the late afternoon, when there was still light. I could still remember it now, that rock. It was not there and then, it appeared as if coming out from a cloak to appear before being thrown at me. I related the story to the family but informed them that a piece of roti was thrown at me, so as to soften the fear.

We fortified the house but failed to do it for the courtyard. The courtyard had suddenly become a dangerous place to venture to in the night. It had begun to assume the same aura of animosity like the house before this. When the nights came, everyone stayed indoors. Even Ajab. And even Zadar. (To be continued)

The Upper Living room

2009-04-18T22:50:00.000-07:00

Nikon D100. The living room upstairs. The door in the background opened to the back balcony where clothes, fresh from being washed, were hung.

House No. 32

2009-04-18T22:29:00.000-07:00

Nikon D100. The front gates of House No. 32. The small window belonged to the security room. One would need to peer through this window to see anyone at the gate.

CHAPTER 14 OF HOUSE NO. 32

2009-04-17T12:37:00.001-07:00

The event of the day before, provided the impetus to pester the Imam again. I did not share the event with the family, preferring to minimise group fear. Desperation for assistance reached another notched too, not out of fear, of course but out of the necessity to remove the family from the stress of sharing the same abode with another.

Ajab continued to have his share of experiences of being pelted now and then, with small pebbles. Somehow, the family has resorted to living in the community room, leaving the living room downstairs empty for most of the time. The house itself had gradually darkened into a perpetual sombre mood. Half of the house was already dead. Shadows and silence played about in the empty rooms.

Daylight was the only time we enjoyed ourselves, feeling well at home, feeling comfortable. I had also acquired another habit, which I did not share with the family. I would go from room to room, with an angry face, full of bitterness, fists clenched and lips curled to unleash a few threats and bad words, just so to register my immense displeasure with those things we could not see. Fear and bravery can be on each side of the coin but sometimes, they could also be on the same page, intermixed, until I could not define the feelings I had nor the ridiculousness of my behaviour. It had to be done anyway, to placate the self that was already high on paranoia. Every sound and every incident was met with caution.

Finally, the mobile phone calls came through. Three days later, in the late afternoon, Zadar and me were in the car, on the way to the Imam’s house. The roads were rough and narrow and dusty with lorries laden with heavy goods plying them. I went in and out of consciousness as Zadar drove quietly. It was already dark when we reached the housing community. There was a name to this village town but I could not remember it. I could not also remember how we got there.

There were rows of wooden houses, most of which were painted with blue paint. Untarred alleys drew gaps between blocks and rows of houses where cars and motorcycles could go through. There were not many cars then but there were people walking home from work or children walking about. This was a Pakistani village. I could not remember much, hazy from the tiredness. Everything seemed to sway and everything was dark. Zadar had some trouble finding the house. He stopped once to twice to ask people for directions. At last he stopped the car by the side of the alley and beckoned me to follow him. It was a short walk, on loose sand when I finally entered a narrow door into a small area littered with praying mats on the floor and holy books piled in one corner. This was the Imam’s mosque and this mosque, which constituted a large part of his house, provided the services for the community. He lived perhaps, in one small room. I climbed a short staircase, like a platform, and here was the Imam, seated with legs crossed behind a small table. People came to him for consultation. He was attending to a few people but bade us welcome with a large smile. To the left, was a small doorway, with a curtain, and from the chatter I heard, this was the family’s abode or the kitchen. The wife sat behind this curtain and an assistant came to bring glasses of hot tea. It was customary for the wife to remain unseen so as to maintain her modesty as a Muslim woman.

A child came out from the door and sat on the Imam’s lap, presumably his son. Around the young boy of about five, hung a few cords and each cord held a small leather bag. I understood them to be talismans. The Imam began conversation with Zadar, in Urdu and there were words being said by Zadar. I hoped that Zadar would be able to describe the incidents in detail and with much melodrama. It had to be so, I thought, to emphasise in order to solicit assistance of the highest order. The Imam brought out a worn small package from the drawer of his desk and opened it to reveal the nails. He talked to to Zadar and Zadar turned to me, and in broken English, spoke to me of what had to be done. There were 21 nails in all, and all had to be used except one. He has also gave me two bottles of mineral water and holding them, said some words to Zadar and Zadar in turn, said to me that the water had to be used first prior to the nails. The water had to be sprinkled in some way in the house, to oust the creatures from the house before the nails could be used.

Then he brought out small pieces of tracing paper and a ball pen. The talismans needed to be worn, the Imam said, through Zadar’s interpretation. The Imam asked for my children’s names and I gave them. In dire circumstances, there was indeed a need to work through with talismans despite the consensus from religious circles that it would indeed be wrong to wear them. The talismans were part of the process of the remedy. Repercussions may happen when the rituals were done and the Imam had his concerns for my children. Though the Imam had wanted to write the talismans only for the children, I insisted on having one for the wife and also for myself, the rationale being that we can fortify ourselves with verses and all but at certain times we could forget or we could be careless. A few days later, Zadar and me stopped by a shoe repairer and asked that the pieces of paper be put into small leather bags to be worn around the necks.

We arrived home late that night and the ritual had to be postponed to the next day. The next day in the late afternoon, my wife and the children left for the shops, while I stayed behind as I had some work to be done. It was a Sunday. I stayed in the room for all the time, until the day turned to dusk, for occasionally, I looked through the window at the courtyard. Ajab had taken leave and I was alone in the house.

Dusk turned to night. I was still doing some work, when I heard the gate being opened and the car coming in to be parked at the porch. I heard the excited voices of the children as the key turned to unlock the front door. Still with the sounds of the excited voices, the door closed and the sounds trailed to the kitchen, without any knock on the door. The children must be helping the mother carry some stuff, I thought. The voices died down, and I was still wondering why none of my children come knocking on my door. It was habitual of them to come knocking, showing off what they had bought at the shops or with stories to tell. After a few minutes, I decided to join them. I opened my door but was met with utter darkness. I called but there were no replies. Nobody was home except me. I swore to myself, that I heard them, after all, my room was just next to the main door. I switched on the corridor light and walked to the main door, opened it and peered outside. There was no car. I switched on the porch lights, the living room lights and calmly walked back to my room and sat down and lighted a cigarette.

The demons were at it again. This time, it was a different methodology, they had mimicked the voices of my children, the sounds of the car and the doors opening and closing. I remembered what my father told me a long time ago. He was in the small coastal town of Lumut staying with his friend as he was stationed there for few days. His friend possessed a strange habit of going fishing late at night with his small sampan out at the estuary. He would return home by two or three o’clock in the morning, with fish fresh from the sea, fry them and would call on my father to partake in the supper. One night however, my father heard the door opened and then some noises in the kitchen. He heard the usual hissing of the hot oil as it fried the fish. However, after some time, his friend did not wake him up. Curious, he got out and went out to the kitchen. His friend had not returned. When his friend indeed returned, he related his story. "The sea spirits were just playing around with you", the friend said to him. I remembered that story as I was experiencing it then. The demons were making a mockery of me. Either that or they were already around me, inserting their hands and fingers in my head, playing around with the memories. I felt insulted, and then afraid and then both.

I waited anxiously in anticipation for the family to return, for I could no longer wait for any more experiences to come my way. The remedy was in dire need to be implemented as soon as possible. When the family came home, I did not tell them the experience but waited for dinner to end and for Ajab and Zadar to be sufficiently rested. I explained to the family and they stayed upstairs.

The first ritual was that we had to pour the water along the base of the wall commencing from the front door. The water was supposedly the barricade to prevent entry of demons through the walls. There was not supposed to be a breakage in the line or it would allow for the demons to slip through. The inner walls of the house was being fortified this way. The night was warm and it was not easy. Bending down and to ensure that there were no gaps or breakages, the water had to be carefully sprayed with a spray bottle along the space where the floor met the wall. I went at it first, covering the living room walls, while Ajab and Zadar looked on. Perhaps I was doing it so slowly but Ajab insisted on doing it and he took it upon himself to do the whole house. It took about three hours just to do it and we were tired watching Ajab bending down and inching slowly along the walls until he returned to the same spot I started from, thus, completing a complete loop. When that was finished, we adjourned upstairs and the ritual was repeated, commencing from the door to the balcony, and in an anti-clockwise direction, covered the walls until a loop was made. As there was insufficient water from the mineral water bottles, we mixed the water with tap water. It was also the prelude to the final ritual, that of the nails. As we were doing this, I thought too, that if this ritual could keep the demons away from the house but it too would imprison any demons in it if any was left behind once the loops were completed.

The hard thing that was left to do was to embed a pair of nails at each door, at the base, right into the marble floor. Each nail was to be driven a quarter of the length of the door, seemingly to form a spiritual barricade from any demon that would want to come in through the door. That was indeed the hardest thing to do. Marble was tough enough and we only had a small hammer to drive the concrete nails in. I began from the door at the living room next to the main door. My first nail that I drove in, barely managed to keep straight. I struck the nail with the hammer again and the nail head bent. In my despair, I repeatedly hit the bent nail until it could not be seen anymore. I used my foot to feel the floor around the nail, and it was smooth. The first nail was thoroughly embedded. The next tenant, I mused, would feel strange that there were nails embedded at every door. Perhaps, that would go to the owner too. I struck the second nail into the floor and after that, Ajab insisted on taking over the situation. So, he went about hitting nails for the next nineteen doors. (To be continued)

Front facade of House No. 32

2009-03-30T06:44:00.000-07:00

In the foreground were the windows of my room. My room faced the front courtyard. Above this room was the balcony and the family stayed upstairs just above.

CHAPTER 13 OF HOUSE NO. 32

2009-03-30T06:29:00.000-07:00

As told, living in House No. 32 was an adventure by itself, with new occurrences to be presented almost daily. I lived downstairs on the ground floor, being the self-appointed watchman that I had become. A door on the left of the corridor from the main door, opened to my room. My desk sat nearest to this door, so that I could at the very least, hear any noises emanating upstairs and respond accordingly. It was at this place that I did my office work after office hours, facing an off-white blank wall. All the walls were empty, because we had not had time to look for any artwork that could qualify to be hanged. As soon as the family slept, I would commence with my work, keeping myself awake for another hour or so that I could be on hand to react to any untoward incident. Being attentive to sounds was difficult, because, as I had described earlier, there was a truck embedded in the wall to provide the air-conditioning, so that once it was turned on, any external sounds would be completely obliterated.

Internet connection was pretty ineffective in Karachi, unless one could have the patience of a turtle. My office people had frequented this room of mine for many times, to settle the issue on broadband but nothing could work. I had lost track of who came because the office kept sending technical people and there were many. The signal would rise and decline within minutes. Every person offered different reasons with firm convictions and confidence and with utmost seriousness: the signal was poor because of the distance, the DSLAM port was overcrowded, the copper wires were poor, etc, etc. I, in turn, accepted these reasons with the utmost seriousness, appearing to fully believe them, with a firm conviction every time. I needed it badly to communicate with the Group CFO as the office hour communication with the Head Office was being monitored by the locals and there were things that needed to be reported. It was rather unusual that it had to be this way but the Group CFO had paid special attention to this requirement when it came to this company and we had even resorted to writing in the Malay language so that our e-mails could not be understood. Perhaps, he knew something that I did not. Other than that, good internet connectivity would have made expatriate life in Karachi, a little more bearable and meaningful.

Once the family had settled into their own comforts of the blankets and bed, I would walk down the staircase to this room. Before commencing with work, I would take the night shower to refreshen. To take a shower in my room would be to take all precautions. The bathroom itself was huge. A triangular bathtub rested in the right-hand corner, so that there was some space between it and a small window, which was always drawn close, for obvious reasons. The water closet sat closest to the bathroom door, and this was the most logical thing to have. The washbasin sat on a wooden pine wood panel with the huge mirror with the lights. It would take twenty paces for me to jump from the bathtub to the door. I have had a few incidents of black-outs during showers, and when that happened, the drawn window with the curtains, and the closed door, would obliterate any light from outside so that I would be caught in the sheer darkness and in sheer silence. As such, taking a shower was an unnerving situation, the one that required quick reflexes and a cool mind. Two other equipments would accompany me and that would be the lighter on the washbasin, and the emergency lamp close by.

One this night, there was something different. I was preparing to take a shower when there was a knock on the door. Grudgingly, I opened the door, thinking it to be the wife or the boys but there was nothing outside and I closed it, without thinking of anything else. My thoughts were on work and I had not paid attention to anything that had just happened. I was not questioning why the door was knocked on. Before taking the shower, I turned on the mini hi-fi that rested on a rattan shelf just near the door. There were some things on it, like the stainless steel dolphin bottle opener which I bought in Hong Kong. When I came out from the shower, I almost stumbled on them. I noticed that these things were already on the rug on the floor by the rattan shelf. Quickly I blamed myself for being forgetful but just as quickly, the mind returned to some rationality. It could not be of my doing. My room was locked from the inside. Thus, the family had been absolved from partaking in the wrong doing. Secondly, I had turned on the Hifi set before going into the bathroom, and if I had placed these things on the floor before switching it on, I would have noticed them. I would have stumbled upon them when I rushed to open the door to answer to the knocks.

After the shower, I put to rest the thought to the back of my mind and commenced doing some work by the desk. With the desk facing the wall, the only thing behind me was the bed. The hours wore on. I was wrestling with some accounting problems that needed some adjustments. It was close to one o’clock in the morning as I lifted up my left arm to see the watch.

As I was about to touch the keypad again, I heard the bed creaked. It was followed by another creak. It was as if someone had just put himself on it rather gently, perhaps furtively. I heard but did not turn to look but my countenance changed to that from droopy eyes and the nonchalant look to that of a flustered person, eyes wide open, muscles tensed, poising for the sudden burst of movement. The notebook and the desk that the notebook rested on dissolved into a Gaussian blur and there was only the empty wall in front of me. The mind constricted into one single vortex of thought while the little hairs on the neck rose as if there was much static in the air. The wall in front of me crudely reminded me of how trapped I felt.

I sensed another presence in the room then, like someone was watching me intently. I continued my work but the mind could not be reined in to focus on the screen, preferring to create speculations instead. The fingers stopped typing. Hands rested on the keyboard. The mind speculated on the possibilities behind me. There could be an old ugly hag making her way, from the bed to the floor towards me and advancing ever so softly with withered hands and sharp nails outstretched, an unshapely mouth revealing yellowish fangs, thick saliva oozing down a crooked chin. Or there could be more of them, like her, the room full of them now, with the same gestures, dragging their feet slowly but surely, intent of devouring this flesh. Or there could be a man with a ski mask wielding a big sharp knife, walking slowly. I could turn to the left and make for the door. I could jump up and scream and run helter skelter. It went on for a while until cold sweat formed and the back of the neck burned with this unseen force that was looking at me. I felt that someone was intently watching me and not letting go of his sight.

Time was of no consequence, time was in a different plane of existence. What stood between me and something behind, appeared very near. There was no distance but there was the long pause of time. Fear opened previous memories. Fear leafed through pages of occurrences, Ajab’s demise, the stones, the screaming woman, the broken pipes, the broken handles, the sighting of the wife. I was deluged with recent incidences until the recent incident of the knocks on the door and the things I stumbled upon after the shower. I had opened the door and something had come in, something that I could not see and this something was behind me now. I was alone and nobody could hear me, above the air-conditioning. The heart furiously pumped blood into my brain and the blood refused to move down so that my hands and feet became numb. Everything was blurring and there was only the wall in front. There was only one other thought that seeped through the blurriness. Karachi’s electricity could go out. At any time now, the city could experience a black-out and I would be in the most vulnerable and terrifying situation ever.

Suddenly I jumped. I turned and caught my foot in one of the chair’s legs, knocking it off so that it fell violently. Adrenalin removed the sharp pain at the ankle. I leaped a few steps and jumped with my strong left leg. I jumped, headlong and full-bodied, arms outstretched. In those nanoseconds, as I floated on the air, feet up, head down, down below me was a dark but translucent shadow like a fluid cloak on the bed. In those nanoseconds, as everything seemed to slow down into a suspended animation, as body hit the bed, frame by frame and as the bed bent and roared and screamed to receive the full force of an 80kg body, I turned to fall on my back. The bed snapped back in a roar from the tremendous force of my weight. The shadow slipped out from underneath me, quicker than I was, airborne above, over the bed, pausing in one nanosecond, seemingly to look at me and then, in one fluid motion, flew through the window and disappeared through it without as much as pushing the curtains aside. I lay there for quite a while, summoned all the fear and then let loose an array of bad words in bad grammar in all kinds of languages that I knew. I paused, breathed in and then shouted again and again, until the fear in me had been loosely transformed into anger and that anger had been loosely transformed into names and words of the bad kind. The very end of fear was indeed, courage. Sleep was not my friend that day, and not for that day alone. The thing was making itself known to me now and it was not going away. The war had moved another notch. (To be continued)

On the Roof

2009-03-26T12:07:00.000-07:00

Ajab, Zadar and Arif on the roof of House No. 32.

CHAPTER 12 OF HOUSE NO. 32

2009-03-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

Work on breaking the concrete wall to repair the broken pipe within it, left debris and dust stains of masons’ footprints so that for all of us, there was the necessity to wear slippers in the house. Dust and sand were not new in the house, because the dry Karachi air carried them in but with the masons at work, the amount of fine sand increased in magnitude. Worn slippers on floors began to churn crunchy sounds, as if walking on tiny glass. The masons would leave and would return the next day to complete the work and there were five of them.

It was only a day after the masons had completed their job and the cleaner came to clean up the debris. The cleaner, Jason was his name (I think) was a thin mustachioed and dark man with jet black hair, who did his work discreetly. He would come by in the mid-morning, with his antiquated red bicycle. As this bicycle did not have a stand, he would lean it to the wall by the side of the porch. Later, his bicycle would become the norm to be seen leaning on the wall. One day I took a photograph of it, having noticed some likeable pattern of red against the whitewash wall.

Jason would bring his own bottle of water and would not partake in any food when offered. I had never seen him eat as he preferred to eat discreetly too. It could take him almost a day to clean the whole house. He was an honest and quiet man. Jason was quiet because he really did not know the English language. We gave hand instructions to communicate.

As he vacuumed under the bed, the vacuum nozzle got entangled into a used and soiled shawal khameez under the wife’s bed. He took the clothing and showed it to Zadar. Zadar took it upon himself to reach the masons to enquire of the blue clothing. None of the masons owned up to owning the clothing and insisted that they only brought their tools and their clothes about them. This was a strange thing indeed. Apparently in the working party, there was evidently a person who had worked alongside with them and who had gone missing without his clothes. It may appear to be so trivial, but it was not so. The clothing on a man with no material substance, is important, so that it could not be neglected. A Pakistani mason works on a day to day basis, sometimes with no work at all in a day. One could find them, sitting by the roadsides, with tools in front of them, so that they could be picked up for masonry work. As such, clothing is a material to the man and nothing should be left behind after work has been done. Amongst ourselves, the speculation was that one mason went missing or one mason was not really one of them, transforming into something else. At this juncture, with all the happenings, with all the stresses, minds opened up to every single suggestion, however, trivial or nonsensical it may seem. The disposed shawal khameez thus, became a topic of lively conversations for many days.

The incidence of roof water tank being robbed of its water was still another perplexing subject matter and till this day, it had remained a mystery. From that day onwards, Ajab had made it a habit of his to inspect water in the tank in the mornings. He would climb up the spiral staircase, go up the roof, walk to the manhole and open its lid to peer in and subjectively check the water level. It was another Saturday, when I was disturbed from my afternoon nap. Zadar came around to tell me, standing at the door, and grudgingly I opened it and listened to his rambling of excitement. He insisted that I follow him up the roof. This I did, with much anticipation, thinking of what could possibly be happening on the roof. I climbed the narrow spiral staircase, noticing the dirt on its steps, the whitewash on its walls staining my trousers when they happened to rub against them. My fear was that, someone had been found dead and had decomposed in the tank, remains of the missing mason with the missing clothes. There was also the dread that something mystical or unusual was down there and they wanted me to see it. The day was excruciatingly warm and as I finally reached the roof, the heat was staggering, as if I was climbing onto a stove. Looking ahead, I saw Ajab, with a little smile on his face, eyes seemingly in a merriment, intently noticing the man who had grudgingly staggered up the staircase.

Ajab stood by the rectangular manhole, its iron cast lid, lay beside. I walked slowly, with imaginations, running through the mind, like flipping pages of a magazine. There were many possibilities and none were comedic. Both men conversed in earnest, in Urdu, the excitement had not left them but had waited for my presence to proceed into a higher crescendo.

I looked at Ajab and Zadar, who was now standing next to Ajab, paused, took a deep breath and peered inside. At first, I could not see anything and wondered out loud, almost complaining even. Since I could not understand Urdu, I was left to guess and the guessing part was not something I anticipated. Grudgingly, I peered deeper and saw the dark foreboding inside of the tank and still could not see anything. I could not see what I was supposed to see. Noticing my apparent failure, Zadar bent down and nudged me with his hands so that I turned my head. Then I saw them, when I took some time to look into the water below.

Footprints. Fresh footprints, larger than my feet, imprinted on the fine dirt in the water that had collected at the base of the tank. Ajab handed me a torchlight and I peered even further in where the light from the manhole could not reach. There were footprints, all over the bottom, as if someone had pranced and danced around in the tank. These were huge naked footprints. The person who had those, could possibly be larger or taller than me, unless of course he was a midget who had large feet. To wander in, this seemingly large person would have to bend forwards as there was insufficient height in the tank to allow a full grown person to walk upright. There was an eerie feeling to see those things but then, of course, the eeriness must have commenced from the gross inability to rationalise. All three of us, Ajab and Zadar and myself, shared our eerie feelings. My only reasoning was that someone had come in and danced and bathed in the water tank in the roof. Ajab assertively confirmed that no one came up the roof. I peered at the footprints again, as clear as day, imprinted on the settling dirt that had formed at the base, large footprints, seemingly belonging to someone who should have been taller or larger than any one of us. Zadar rubbed his left arm, seemingly feeling the cold of eeriness. We stayed awhile, while I inspected the roof for any other signs but I could remember one single thought which until today, was my best logic for it. A wayfarer wandered by, had to take a bath after so many days, so he went through the security unnoticed. He climbed the eight foot wall, and found the staircase at the back. He went up and found the manhole, lifted the lid and was astounded by the clear water that waited below. He took off his clothes, jumped in and had a whale of a time, to wash himself. Meanwhile, the winds had been strong, so strong that it carried his clothes, and threw them through the balcony door and into the wife’s room until it would be found by the cleaner later. So, this man, who had taken to the water, finally finished his job but could not find his clothes. In the night, naked, he stole down the staircase, climbed up the eight-foot wall and disappeared into the night. Yes, that was the story that went into my mind that day and until today, I could still remember the story line of my rationalisation. One had to rationalise something coherently so as not to be swept off into paranoia by the strangeness. However, there was one fatal flaw to the imagination. The shawal khameez was found much earlier, perhaps, three days earlier. Ajab had taken upon himself the daily task of inspecting the roof tank every morning to check the water level. As such, he would have found the footprints earlier. (To be continued)

The road by the beach

2009-03-16T11:42:00.000-07:00

The road by the coast ran a few kilometres. Weather-beaten houses corroded by salt from the sea, stood stoically facing it. At nights, people would come by this area to relax by the beach.

CHAPTER 11 OF HOUSE NO. 32

2009-03-16T11:14:00.000-07:00

The pungence of marine saltiness in the cool and crispy night air grew stronger as Zadar drove closer to the sea. Lighted streets were deserted and shops had closed. Further ahead, was the beach. Almost every night we would drive past that long stretch of beach, casually observing the crowd through our car windows; people who would come out of their houses to sit by the sea to let their children play while they engage in idle and serious talk. Scores of cars and motorcycles would park by the roadside, paying nominal sums for the privilege. Hawkers and beggars and child beggars and thieves also thronged the area to sell food and snacks and to beg and to steal. Adults carried about them some food in plastic wrappers and drinks in plastic bottles and mats to sit on. People sat on the sand, some ran about, playing by the Arabian Sea, illuminated by the flood lights. Karachi was indeed hot in the day but its nights offered cool respites and the beach with the calm waves offered the calmness to the soul. Some people in their mirth, would wade in the waters and play about, drenching themselves.

This time, Zadar was not driving to the coast but veered to another road, leading to a private hospital which sat close by. It was near to midnight, and as the car pulled to a stop at the porch, only a nurse or two were seen. The pain had eased a little. I walked in and was asked to lie on one of the beds to wait for the doctor to come. The boys stood close to the bed with the wife. Two other patients lay on other beds in the same waiting room talking and discussing with much fervour, behind closed curtains. A female doctor finally came. Holding my wrist, she checked my pulse, and then my blood pressure and also listened to my heart with the stethoscope. Stress she concluded, some heart palpitation, she said. She wrote some prescription and told me to go to the pharmacist at the next counter. I checked out with some medication, one of which was the sleeping pill to assist me to calm down. Earlier in the day, the heart had some episodes of pain, like some pins needling the meat. They came inconsistently but the discomfort ruined my focus on the work. I found myself clutching my chest. The concoction of worry, lack of sleep, bitterness and anger, had finally exacted a heavy and threatening toll on the heart.

With the two days medical leave, I made calls to the Malaysian student. He had been to Lahore, he said, on some visit to some villages for some missionary work and that was the reason I could not contact him as reception was poor. I went with Zadar to the hardware shop in the late evening for the nails as requested by the Imam. Measuring about three inches long, some nails were already rusting and I counted exactly 21 nails before putting them back in a small white paper. There were also the two bottles of mineral water to be given. On Sunday, Zadar would send the nails to the Imam at the mosque.

In the housing area, piped water only came once a week. There was simply not enough water supply to cater to all houses in Karachi. As such, water for the house, like all other houses in the residential area, depended on water tankers to bring the water supply from the outskirts. In the early months, during Fayaz’s administration, the price of a 3,000 gallons of water was rather expensive. Under Ajab’s administration, the water was cleaner and inexpensive. Ajab would always request that I inspect the water before it was downloaded into the water tank under the car porch. To do this. I had to climb up the small ladder at the back of the lorry, peer into the manhole, reach in and touch the water to smell and feel it to decide that it was clean and clear. During Fayaz’s time, we have had experiences of water smelling like excrement and at other times, the water seemed oily. I did witness that Fayaz arranged for the receipt to be made a distance away from the house, with the lorry man. On the day that he was evacuated, he had with him a few blank receipts which were already pre-prepared for eventual submission. Fayaz had quickly risen from being a chowkidar to an arbitrage dealer. His supply of water could have come from a polluted river or so.

Upon review and agreement, the tanker man would bring out a long and wide PVC pipe which he would attach to a nozzle at the base of the tank and he would bring the other end into a manhole at the porch. Turning the tap at the nozzle, the water would drain from the tanker into a huge water tank built under the car porch. Putting in 3,000 gallons of water into it was not sufficient to fill this tank. Once the water had been pooled into the tank below, a process which would take a good twenty minutes, Ajab would enter the security guard house which contained the water pump. With much noise, like an old engine, the water pump would push the water from the water tank to the roof water tank.

It was just another day after the lorry tanker came to provide the water. However, when I woke up on the Saturday morning to wash myself, no water gushed out from the tap. I tried another tap and it was the same thing. I tried another, going from room to room, accumulating sizeable angriness as I went along. Finally, I complained to the chowkidar. In response, Ajab went up with Zadar to the roof while I waited below, They discovered that the water tank was dry. They went to the car porch and opened the manhole and found that dry too. All of us were perplexed at this phenomenon. 3,000 gallons of water had disappeared overnight. If a tap were to be turned on, it would have taken many hours to drain out the water. None of the family members recalled waking up to use the toilet.

How can that happen? I asked and perhaps, each of us, in that house asked his or herself. Standing there, we scratched heads, looked down and above, furiously trying to rationalise a suitable deduction. Finally, Ajab said that last night, he heard the sound of the water pump and he thought that someone in the house was using a toilet and it went on for some time. I went around to all bathrooms, and each sink and tub was dry and there was not at all any trace of dampness. Apparently, the water had gone somewhere else and no rational explanation was sufficiently valid to counter the inevitable conclusion. Since it was a weekend, it was difficult to get a tanker to come by. Zadar made many calls from his mobile, furiously talking in Urdu. Fortunately, he had a cousin who was a tanker supplier but then, since it was a weekend, the water would only be transported in the evening. The whole day was spoilt, food could not be cooked and baths had to be deferred. The main question remained unanswered.

A few days later, the wife’s room was inundated with water. The water pipe broke in the wall, and the water seeped through. The family moved to the community room and it became their abode for a few days. Although we had four other bedrooms, the family insisted on sleeping in the community room. Why they chose that room instead of the children’s room, I did not have time to understand. There was work at the office and at the same time, the craftsmen had to be informed and repair work had to be done. Day after day, the workmen would come and Ajab would stand close by them as they engaged in the work of repairing. They did a good job of repairing and in Karachi, the craftsmen and workmen were disciplined and paid close attention to detail. The wall looked like it was, as if nothing had happened.

Still, the thought gnawed at my being, like an ant that had been trapped in my brain and was desperately trying to come out. Almost every situation in the house involved water. There was the water tank which burst and flooded the room upstairs, the shower heads broke, the water disappeared, the children heard somebody playing in their bathroom and the loss of water from the tank. The sequence of events could happen to any house but only sparingly with large intervals of time in between. But not in this house. House No. 32 was exceptional. (To be continued).

CHAPTER 10 OF HOUSE NO. 32

2009-03-11T11:46:00.000-07:00

With the passing of days, despair climbed a steep incline. Pictures taken of me, by my wife and sons, depicted a forlorn countenance of droopy lips, sunken eyes, and loose clothes hanging on a body that had lost much weight. There was the day job and there was the night job as the watchman. I was already envying people who had no problems of this sort. Life would be a breeze for them, I suppose while I was indeed walking in thick mud up to my knees. Everything seemed so hard, so difficult. Karachi had become a divine tribulation, my mind went, a punishment of sorts, my mind went on. Everything was difficult. Unnoticed by the family, I would go from one room to the next and hurled curses in both English and Bahasa Malaysia at lurkers I could not see.

We lived in a prison, with inmates we could not see and then, this prison resided in a bigger prison called Karachi. It was not easy to move about with the car outside of Karachi, for the driver warned us of armed highway bandits and armed territorial tribesmen. Other major cities were hundreds of kilometres away. So, over the many days, we became more claustrophobic. Karachi was just an arid flat desert filled with concrete houses with walls with roadworks which never seemed to be completed. The question has all too often been provided to me, as frequent as the Muslim greeting is provided : "So how do you like Karachi?". The question at once reverts me to one of making a conclusion after having devouring a food. Karachi is not food. It is a life. The question calls for a judgement, however light it may seem. Karachi is not an experience of having food and saying yes it is tasty and nice and whether one can have seconds. One can plainly see as my mind struggles to answer as faithfully as possible, the stammering as the answer is not a judgement. It have come to be answered as a curt "OK". Of course, one cannot discern Karachi as it is. This is after all, a big city, populated by 16 million people. Karachi would be like a maze. It is like a layer after layer of towns and lives. Just when I thought I had seen Karachi, I saw another facet of it, completely different from the other. So how did I see Karachi? I will probably say that it was a city that had been growing without any planning. It had been left to grow like a wild plant and as such, it grew haphazardly, without any notion of sense and direction. Or I can describe it as a cake which has been cooked by an undecided chef with layers and upon layers of new cake while the lower layers have gone bad. Or I can also describe it as a humongous housing community simply because there are more houses than there are to office buildings. Of course to the person who has asked the simplistic question, I can come out with a barrage of many answers and descriptions until he will move away, carrying the judgement that I have been confused. It does not matter to me one bit. For, in no way can I answer a stupid question. I could simply answer it as Karachi being the arse of Pakistan while Islamabad was its mouth. I could also describe the stench in the air, reminiscent of a fish cannery, for the sea was near. On certain days, it would be like having the air filled with the smell of unwarranted fart, which lingers and will not go away so that we would blame each other for the malodour when travelling in the car. On other days, it would be like being in the hairy armpit of a labourer. It depends on what the sea brings in. "Sea-O" or "samandar" as it is referred to in Urdu. One should see the beach at Clifton and see what the sea has returned after what has been thrown into it. It repelled rubbish. The long stretch of beach was full of rubbish, yet people waded in its muddy waters. What could be our tranquillity from the morbid imprisonment was full of smelly rubbish. Nobody here in Karachi had actually fathomed the idea that the sea loathed rubbish. What you throw in, will come back to you.

The quarrel

The days went on as usual but all of us knew that the haunting had begun again. The demons had never left. One night, there was a commotion at the back. The two men, Zadar and Ajab were screaming harsh words at each other although I could not understand. The wife insisted that I went to check. I came close and heard the thumping sounds, the struggling on the floor. I quickly opened the door and both men were on the mattress. Zadar immediately regained his composure and mentioned that they were just playing. He left a little later to return to his home and Ajab was left all alone. The next day, Zadar told me that they quarrelled because Zadar accused Ajab of throwing a stone that hit him squarely on the temple. He was about to lock the gate when it happened. Ajab denied he had done it because he was in his room all along.

I enquired further and asked Zadar whether he saw Ajab do it and he replied that he did not. They had played before, like two small boys and that was the reason, Zadar suspected that Ajab did it. Ajab, on the other hand, vehemently resented the accusation, as he maintained that he had not done it.

I rationalised the incident with the two men. It was already night then and dark. I told Zadar that it was almost impossible for him to get hit by the pebble. First, the distance from the backyard to the gate was about a hundred and twenty feet. Then there were the car porch and the car. The pebble must have been thrown with such force and perfection, to travel a hundred and fifty feet, in the dark, missing the car by mere inches before reaching a moving target. If that had not been the case, then Ajab would have to throw the pebble from under five feet away from Zadar. It was thus not possible for Ajab to stand furtively close to Zadar, threw the stone and in that time, run speedily to the backyard without being noticed. The both of them acquiesced with my rationality and tempers softened to light laughter and from light laughter to small jokes and the mirth and merriment returned, albeit a small amount of suspicion still lingered in Zadar’s mind.

A few days later, Ajab was also pelted with a stone. It hit the back of his neck as he closed the gate to let Zadar out. For a few days, he was disturbed by stones. One such incident was when he was in the toilet answering to nature’s call, when stones were pelted on the door. In that time, Zadar could not have done it as it was past midnight and he had already gone home. I did look for the pebbles, as they should logically be strewn about just outside the toilet but they could not be found. On the matter of stones, I could recall a Malay folklore of a female spirit. It was said that this female demon appearing as a woman, would haunt the neighbourhood by pelting stones on houses. (To be Continued)

The corridor

2009-03-06T21:09:00.000-08:00

The corridor was bright in the daytime from the light streaming through the open door. In the night time, it took another character altogether, being dark and foreboding. My room was on the right. In the foreground was the door into the dining room. In the background, sligtly on the left, was the door to the living room.

The new moon of the Ramadhan

2009-03-06T21:03:00.000-08:00

The new moon of the Ramadhan taken from the balcony of House. No.32.

Arif and the cat

2009-03-06T20:58:00.000-08:00

Arif playing with a tabby that had come to befriend him. There was some strangeness to the cat. He came for the companionship, avoided all food provided to him and would go home wherever that was, when night returned. At one time, the children locked him in one of the empty rooms because they wanted to adopt him. He disappeared. He would return again the next day.

CHAPTER 9 OF HOUSE NO. 32

2009-03-06T20:34:00.000-08:00

While we went through the turmoil in the house, Pakistan too, had its own. On October 8, 2005, a devastating earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale, rocked the northern region in and around Islamabad. Entire villages sitting on hill slopes, with its men, women and children, were wiped out. The initial number of dead people began from 20,000. As days passed, the numbers rose gradually and local newspapers reported the increasing deaths. Being a mountainous area, help was slow in coming from negotiating the rough terrain. Winter had already arrived with the cold. 79,000 people died in that Great Pakistan earthquake although some newspapers reported at 200,000. Whatever the case, the tragedy was wrenching on most hearts.

Makeshift relief aid centres sprouted overnight in Karachi to appeal to the Karachi people for food and clothing for the victims. Papers ran through weeks of the same story. We watched CNN.

A few days later, Karachi experienced its own tremors. Almost the whole of Pakistan was shifting on the tectonic plates. The Malaysian High Commission, put all Malaysians on high alert for the possible evacuation. There was a valid cause to worry as Karachi had experienced tsunamis and earthquakes in the past. Karachi lies very close to a major fault line, where the Indian tectonic plate meets the Arabian tectonic plate. Close to the city, lies a major fault line, situated close to four other minor faults. The first is called the Allah Bund fault which passes through the coastal town of Shah Bundar and runs through eastern parts of the city ending near Cape Monz. Another fault lies near Sindh’s southeastern border with India. The third, the Pubb fault lies near the Mekran coast west of the city while a fourth fault line runs near the Dadu district on the northern boundary of Karachi. In a way, Karachi had fault lines running around it, so that it was a city with a death sentence. To compound that situation, parts of Karachi lay below sea level, especially at the Clifton and Defence areas. House No. 32 lies in the Defence housing area, about two kilometres from the Arabian sea. Without drainage, it was speculated that the sea would be able to penetrate and engulf Karachi five or six kilometres inland.

A Malaysian army plane arrived and was on standby. Karachi was bracing for a major earthquake like the one in Islamabad, as forecasted by geologists. A movement of one tectonic plate would also lead to the movement of neighbouring tectonic plates. It is likened to dinner plates resting slightly on each other by their sides. If one plate is roughly displaced from underneath the other plates, the rest would follow. Rumours were rife, as to the timing of that possible outcome. As for us, the Malaysian High Commission appealed for all Malaysians to be on alert. As such, our luggage sat at the corridor, for days on end, for that eventuality. Numerous times, we received the notification calls from the Commission to brace for the big earthquake and in response, we would standing outside the house, on the road. Houses in Karachi, were not built to withstand a major earthquake, and with such an occurrence, houses would fall like decks of cards, burying the occupants within. House No. 32 would not be strong enough to withstand a 7.6 Richter scale earthquake.

As such, on top of the office politics, the haunting, we also had the anticipation of the earthquake. I have also failed to mention the bombings, amongst other things. To mention that will probably dilute the interest out of the story. It is likened to a photograph in that sense. In the foreground I am giving you this picture of the haunting and behind us, in the background, we have the bombings, the earthquakes, the riots, the office politics and the fraudulent cases and robberies. Something like that.

To summarise the story on the bombings, when we arrived in Karachi in June 2005, several mosques in Karachi were already going through bombing sprees. Newspapers depicted pictures of dismembered bodies and torn and bloodied arms and legs, and splatters of blood. People were being bombed as they were performing their prayers. When our container arrived on September 6, the whole neighbourhood rocked for a few seconds under deafening blasts. Simultaneous bomb blasts hit McDonalds and KFC near the beach at about 12.30am, about 2 kilometres away from our house. We had frequented those places for our dinners prior to the bombings, oblivious to the possibility of a terrorist attack. Two months later, a car bomb exploded in front of KFC, killing three people and damaging parts of the Sheraton hotel across the road. The impact left a huge crater in front of KFC. I used to frequent the place after office hours to bring back fried chicken for the family.

The Woman on the tree

The episode of the screaming woman died and there was none of it after that. It only happened that night. House No. 32 resided in a gated and guarded community of villas. This housing area sat near an immense park which contained a skating rink and trees and benches. At nights, the Karachians would come by and drive in and pay a small token to walk around the well-lit park. As Karachi was hot in the day, the people would only come by in groups of families or as couples to walk in the park at nights.

To get into the housing community, there were two roads. There was one road at one end, near the public park and the other, at the opposite end. At this other end, sat a very small grassy area and a water fountain and some benches bordered by flower plants and full grown shady trees. There was perhaps, just about two kilometres of road in between the gates. As I did not possess a valid Pakistani licence, I could not drive and totally depend on the driver to drive us around. The inability to drive was perhaps irritating at times and one night I chose to drive the car to this garden. We could have walked.

Walking a short distance from the car parked by the side, my wife and I sat on a bench while the children ran around playfully. We were the only ones, and it was about 11 o’clock or so. We saw nobody else although the small area was surrounded by other houses with high walls. It was quite strange that the neighbours kept to themselves and did not bother to walk around in the safe haven. We did not stay long and walked to the car because there was some discomfort to it, as if we were in some danger or threat. It was a feeling which I attested to the cold air that wafted between the walls. I walked briskly in front. As I opened the door, the boys were already scrambling to climb in, ashen with fear, especially Arif, the youngest son. There was a long-haired woman perched on a branch of the tree just above the car, the boys shouted and screamed. Hakim did not see but insisted that he saw a white garment on the tree while Arif insisted that he glanced a woman clothed in a white garb and perched on a branch and this woman was looking intently at them from above. Despite their obvious shivering, I scoffed lightly at them for their delusions, for their hallucinations but did not share the eeriness I felt. Honestly, on driving the short distance back to the house, I stole frequent glances at the rear view mirror. (To be continued)

On the Roof

2009-03-05T10:59:00.000-08:00

Ajab, Arif and Zadar on the roof of House No. 32.

CHAPTER 8 OF HOUSE NO. 32

2009-03-05T10:38:00.000-08:00

Whilst the Ramadhan offered us a respite for thirty days, post-festivity haunting began with renewed vigour as if there was an annual performance target to be achieved. The haunting entered with a much greater urgency and fervour. The battle had moved another scale up.

Asfar, the gardener was finally asked to leave in the best manner. I gave him some severance pay so that he would have some reserves before getting another job as gardener. As long as Asfar was around, the suspicion would abound, and we knew Fayaz could still command his demons to do his bidding wherever he was.

On my side, there was renewed enthusiasm to not give in. Office work and office politics, both in Karachi and at home were hitting me on one front while the haunting hit me on the other. There was simply no more room to manoeuver out of, I was backed into a corner and I had no choice but to fight everything in front of me, both office and house. The exorcism ritual became a daily night event. I had begun to wear a stern look about me, out of a necessity to enter into a seriousness to things that we could not see but who could see us. Appetite soured, so that there was no more enjoyment to food. To add to the dilemma, the wife suffered a nervous breakdown of sorts; being a career person, she was not ready to wear the apron. She was unable to excite the family with new recipes. She was like a bird in the cage, unable to come to terms with the mentality of other housewives, unable to fit in and so, was lonely.

Hakim

There was one night, after we had dinner and I had requested Hakim to fetch Ajab to do something for me. We were in the kitchen. He went through the backdoor to go to Ajab’s room. He returned quickly, ashen-faced, stuttering that he saw something. Hakim reported that as he walked out of the door, he saw a shadow on Ajab’s door, clearly defined. He described having seen a silhouette of a man on Ajab’s door and that man was bald but the apparition dissipated quickly.

In another instance, I had requested Hakim to fetch my cigarettes from my room. I was in the living room and it was quite near. He emerged with the cigarettes but informed that my room was unusually freezing although the air-conditioning was not turned on and was not turned on previously.

The event instigated me to call the Malaysian student on touching base with the Imam for the next remedy. However, the Malaysian student was away in Lahore, and it would take another week to contact the Imam. When the call finally came, I passed the mobile phone to Zadar, who was able to converse in Urdu. The imam requested 21 nails as part of the remedy and these nails were to be given to him. When he came the other day, he had counted the doors and these nails were meant for these doors. At that point of time, I could not envisage how nails could do the job. I did spend some time speculating about that. I could not visualise how the nails would be used. Zadar offered to get the nails and send them to the Imam.

The Knocks

Incidences of knocks on the door became an almost nightly affair as the haunting intensified. It would always come at the point when one was about to go to sleep. Initially the children had replied thinking that it was I who was knocking. They opened the door to the mother’s bedroom but found no one there. I cautioned them to not reply until there was the utterance of the Salam. As such, we took to saying our salams and the people on the other side of the door would reply the salams before opening the door. The devil cannot say the salam and cannot reply to it, as such, the need to say those things. Our daily behaviour evolved to counter the incidences.

Although I had admonished the children for falling prey to the door knocks, I too, however had succumbed to the same mistake. One night, as I was about to sleep, there were furious knocks on my door and these were loud and harsh, seemingly done in an urgent manner as if there was a tremendous urgency. The wooden door shuddered with those knocks. Endless possibilities ran through the mind and suspecting that an undesirable circumstance had occurred to the family, I ran to the door, unlocked and opened it. There was nobody there, the corridor was its usual self of darkness, there was calmness and there was nobody. Closing the door again, I called my wife through the mobile phone and this woke her sleep. No, she said grudgingly, she did not do it nor the children as they were all asleep.

Going back to sleep again, took some time, due to the sudden rush of adrenalin on responding to the knocks. With the incidence, fear fed dread into the imagination. The room was big and I had only one exit, which was the door. There simply was no other way to run out of. The room, which was uncomfortably expansive before had taken another dimension of being bigger and longer. With my back to the wall, I had to face the door on my side, anticipating the possible worst. When fear had no more option, the only other thing to do was to wait, covered in the blanket and finally to fall asleep.

The screams

With the increase in the intensity of the haunting, my daily incantations of the Surah Yasin became a daily ritual and this would be done after the last prayer of the day in the upper hall. I called the Imam every other day but could not manage to contact him. Even the Malaysian student did not answer his call. I was anxious of what had become of the nails.

The family had to be protected. Seemingly, we were stranded on an island where we did not have any friends who we could turn to for assistance. It was indeed difficult to explain in detail. We made friends and acquaintances, but for the feeling of imposition and the fear of being turned away, we kept our experiences to ourselves. I wrote to my brothers but my stories became humour in passing. I could not get past the second sentence before scepticism set in. My mother would have listened but her interest would have been eroded by my rational father, who would, at any time, scoff at the idea of ghosts and demons, although he acknowledged and had experienced them himself. I scantily remembered opening up the topic when we were back in Malaysia but then the sentences just faded away from my father’s remarks of illusions, imaginations, exaggerations and stress of coping with life in Karachi.

I remembered what my eldest brother said, as reported by my third brother, “Kamarul has always got two problems in his life, one problem is a lousy boss, and the other, a bad ghost”. To that fact, I did have that same pattern with the first part, not because I have a bad attitude, but I have a tendency to bring out the worst in people. Excrements that have been carefully buried and forgotten seem to have their own ability to come out to the surface when I am around. On the second part about ghosts, I did not pick House No. 32. With regard to an earlier experience in Malaysia, I did not pick the house to rent in USJ, my wife did. I did not pick the current house, my wife did that too. In that sense, I totally absolve myself of any wrongdoing in choosing the wrong house. Just ask my wife. Though agnostically religious in not believing anything negatively spiritual other than God and the angels, she is indeed a divination stick in choosing the haunted establishments.

To all of us in the Karachi house, the haunting were real, as real as the sun and the moon, as real as the day and night but outside this house, our complaints were met by rationalised but subtle derision in Malaysia. Once you see a UFO for example, it is not worth your while to talk about it. People stopped just short of using the words like “silly” or “being overly imaginative” or “dreaming”, or whatnots but one could see the cynicism in their eyes, that gleams and glows of distrust, of not believing. As I have written earlier, when I write this, I have no qualms about wanting anyone who is reading it to disbelieve. I am writing this because I need to download it out of my system, to cleanse myself, seemingly to bathe in the spiritual river, defecating myself of past spiritual dirt.

To experience a haunting is an affliction, there simply is no glamour to it. There are no clinics and no doctors in clinics to attend to such affliction. Such an affliction is dependent on our faith and our practice of it, to provide the remedy. I want the reader to experience it too, hopefully to create a fear from reading my story, so that it can be recreated in the reader’s own house, so that there is no more derision, no more sarcasm. Yes, I want you to believe it and experience it. Please. Now to continue this story, now that I have told you of my intentions. The next time you hear your bed squeak behind you, or hear the sound of something crawling slowly in the ceiling just above you, please, by all means, look. Go up the ceiling with a torch light and see the cause. Go to the bed and see and understand why the bed has to make that noise at that particular time or so. Look under it. See the indentations on the mattress for any signs of a physical presence. Please satisfy your curiosity. Rationalise everything as if science has created this world, as if the law of physics can explain away anything. Go ahead.

Karachi was uncomfortably warm at nights and as such, I would normally leave the balcony doors open to provide the ventilation while leaving the windows open near the back balcony opposite it. The ventilation did help significantly with gusts of cool breeze streaming through the doors. It was close to twelve o’clock that night, and we were about to retire. The neighbourhood was quiet.

Then it started. In that silent atmosphere when all eyes were supposed to be closed, when dreams were supposed to arrive and enter the mind, when snores were supposed to be expressed arrogantly without fear of losing modesty, somewhere in the vicinity of the neighbourhood, a woman was deliriously ranting and moaning and screaming. Her dissonance came brazenly over the wall, climbed up the balcony and rushed into the open door to reverberate in the hall. She sounded as if she was in the utmost distress, as if there was a death in the family and she was grieving. She also sounded like she was delirious. The unusual part was, she kept on moaning and screaming for almost four hours. Another unusual thing was if she could be heard a distance away, it would have been too loud for her neighbours not to complain. In that time, we made coffee, the children drank their milk, the husband and wife smoked cigarettes, read magazines, talked a little, gossiped a little, smoked a little, and then smoked some more, and lay about on the bed and mattress. And in that time, the howling, the ranting, the screaming did not stop, even to rest for a minute.

We concluded that it would not be possible to continuously scream and rant for more than an hour because an ordinary person would have croaked after such time and totally lose her voice after that. But this person, screamed and ranted in the late hours of the night, and when we walked out to the balcony to listen, there seemed to be no response at all from any neighbours. The town was in a distance but it seemed that there were no sounds of assistance like the wailing of the ambulance or police car of any sort. Even our neighbours did not appear to show any interest. They remained locked in their own world. We developed conjectures. A woman could have been struck by a car or she could have lost her baby or she could have lost money in the stock market, she could have been withdrawing from a drug addiction or she could have simply been mad.

That night, I lay on the floor, in the wife’s room, on the mattress, casually listening to the drone, trying to keep myself awake. Courage is not exactly a straight thin line but has its troughs and inclines. For that night, there was some comfort to be with the family. We had one humongous house, and yet we huddled together in one single room. It was pathetic.

The community room

2009-02-28T19:31:00.000-08:00

Here was where we used to sit and watch television, do homework, eat snacks, and access the personal computer.

Ramadhan activity

2009-02-26T10:42:00.000-08:00

The family, the mother-in-law, Zadar, Ajab and the cleaner at the backyard, in the late afternoon, preparing for the upcoming festivity.

CHAPTER 7 OF HOUSE NO.32

2009-02-26T10:33:00.000-08:00

I need to reiterate, if I had not done so, that many words have been said about this house No. 32. I had not imagined that this would be so, as I had thought earlier that it would be a story consisting of only one or two paragraphs. Apparently I am wrong and I am surprised myself at the length of this story.

Bones

Days in Karachi were almost equal to each other because the weather did not waver between extremes. There were the occasional rains, and the streets would be flooded and wet for lack of drainage. On most occasions, I took the opportunity of the rain to wash the balcony of the thick accumulation of grime previously left behind by the daily dust. This washing of the balcony did not go unnoticed. Wealthy Pakistanis frown on those tenants or dwellers who humbly hold the broom or carry the garbage. However, my washing inspired the occupants of the house in front of me, the house that was adjacent to the American diplomat. As I washed, his chowkidar washed although we did not acknowledge each other’s physical existence. Indeed, those will be the times when there was a lull to the stress of managing a haunted house. There were questions of the same nature, that were posed to me as to why we did not move out of the house and I curtly replied that we were Malaysians. Truthfully, the prospect of moving out was hampered by the lengthy waste of time and the tremendous effort to pack and unpack. I needed to focus on the job.

As the days passed, I developed a new habit out of the necessity to be defensive from the many incidents that had happened. Upon returning from work, I did not immediately enter the house but circumnavigated it and inspected almost everything that I came across in the compound. I was looking for anomalies or anything that could explain away the strange encounters. Just outside the window of my room, there was the blue tent, set up by the boys and which had been unattended to, so that it lay on its side. It had been sitting there for three months or so. The spirited winds had played about with it, so that it would sit on its side one day and on another, would totally be upside down.

It was just a day after Fayaz had been removed and I was going about my inspections that I noticed an anomaly in the house compound. It was not altogether glaringly obvious though. It would need a keen eye to see such a thing. There was a small bone of an animal on the front yard by the children's tent, lying in the grass and the grass almost covered it. I did not pick it up but wondered whether the boys had eaten some chicken and thrown the pieces in the yard. Some sentences were already building up in the mind for the eventual admonishment. Words of admonishment correctly arranged with correct grammar do provide for the listener's understanding rather than to let loose a flurry of incomprehensible words of anger. Of course, this is not always the case, when anger cuts through the bureaucracy and crashes into the tongue. Children and their playfulness are really quite capable of removing the red tape.

I walked a little further and found another bone about five feet away from the first one. I walked a little further and found another, also about five feet away. I walked further and found another bone until I came to the backyard near the chowkidar’s room. I could discern a trail, from the front gate to the backyard. I felt that this was relevant although the boys needed to be questioned first. That I did shortly after and both of them fervently denied doing such thing. I believed them as they had never walked around eating their main meal except for the potato chips and biscuits in wrappers.

I thought that the gardener should have been able to see this and remove the bones. Some pieces were obvious enough to be stumbled upon. However, there is a twist to it. The gardener was actually Fayaz’s younger brother, Asfar.

The morning after Fayaz had been removed, Asfar came in as usual to do his work as if nothing had happened although we were very sure that his brother had informed him of his termination. I could not summon the courage to dismiss the gardener on account that he was related to the chowkidar. It would not be fair. So, I let him come around. The presence of the bones and the subsequent denial of the children, however, changed my perception radically. There was feeling of something amiss about this. I looked back at the gate. If I were to own a dog, and I wanted it to follow me, I would create a trail so that it would follow the bones. That was the scenario that went into my mind, after deducting the previous scenario of the boys childishly throwing the bones. It could not possibly be a dog that had come in to lay these bones in the yard. They could be chicken bones. The apprehension returned with fresh fervour. Things were about to happen, I thought.

Ajab

It was only after three days that Ajab commenced to work. It was morning then when the driver anxiously came to see me; he stumbled and staggered with his words and sentences, not out of fear but out of an urgency and out of a lack of English words to describe what had transpired. Ajab wanted to leave immediately. I anxiously asked why. This was his story.

Ajab made his rounds the night before. After that, he left his sandals at the door, went in and locked it and settled comfortably on the mattress to sleep. He did not switch off the lights. He let the lights on and was lulled to sleep with the whirring of the overhead fan.

Suddenly he awoke to find that he was in pitch darkness. The fan had stopped. The air hovered still. And then, the room was filled with loud whistling, not from any instrument but appeared to be made by someone, originating from the cement shelf about two feet away in front of him. Before he could do anything, the whistling came just above him where the fan would be, as if someone was hanging to the fan. Traumatized, Ajab could not do anything but froze in extreme fear. Ajab could not determine how long it went on but in that kind of situation, a minute could feel like a year. The lights went on again and the fan started to rotate again. Ajab found that he was alone. There was no one at the shelf and the room door remained locked and closed.

I quickly went to the room after Zadar explained what had happened the night before. Ajab was clearly agitated, looking fearful but he was clearly ashamed of his fear. He maintained his need to resign and leave. He mentioned that he could fight anything that stood before him as long as it was flesh and bones but this one, was something that he could not deal with. This I believed because this was one tough person. He mentioned it again and then again, stressing the need to be understood and perhaps, to dilute the shame. Personally, I would have fared worst in that kind of situation. I would have crashed through the door, pissed in my pants, screamed in a frenzy and jumped out the eight-foot wall. But then, it did not happen to me and as such, the possibility remains a mere conjecture.

Ajab went on to mention that two nights before, as he was asleep when the door was furiously knocked on. He had thought that I had done it and mulled that it must have been urgent because it was already late in the night. He answered, opened the door to come out and found his sandals missing. He found the backdoor locked and thought that I may have gone in. He thought nothing of it then and returned to continue his sleep, concluding that he was dreaming. In the morning, he found the sandals in the backyard, further away from the door.

I checked. There was no way that someone could put his arm through the window and unlock the door. There was no power blackout that night because the air-conditioning was still on in every occupied room. Zadar talked furiously to Ajab, consoling him and asking him to stay. From that day on, Ajab and Zadar became closer friends. Zadar moved in with Ajab, as a material ondition that he stayed.

The Calamity in the Kitchen

Nights were spent watching television in the community room. In this square room of about ten by ten feet, the television sat in the corner which was nearest the door and close to the opposite wall facing the door was a small table on which sat my wife’s computer. My wife would normally sit here at the table chatting or sending e-mails although the wireless CDMA connection was poor. As such, we turned to the television for amusement. In Karachi, there were about 92 programmes to choose from and the monthly fees were very cheap, being re-broadcasted programmes taken from other satellite television providers elsewhere in the world. Next to the television, stood one of the four emergency lamps because black-outs could happen at any time. The house did not have its own power back-up unit and it was the only house in the neighbourhood that did not have this. As such, there was a reason to have an emergency lamp nearby to ride the blackouts.

It was a typical night of watching television after dinner that something strange happened. The whole house suddenly plunged into total darkness from a black-out. Though near, there was some searching for the emergency lamp. In that time, we were also rudely surprised with sudden noises in the kitchen below. Pots and pans clanked noisily as if thrown on the floor and plates and glasses shattered. Pans fell, pots fell, plates fell and broke on the floor. It went on for a few minutes and then quietened down. The electricity came in again.

We quickly went down the staircase anxiously. I was thinking that a cat may have got itself trapped in the house and was causing havoc in the kitchen. I opened the door, while the wife followed closely behind and then the children behind her and switched on the kitchen lights. There was nothing. Everything was in its own place. All of us were very sure that the sounds came from the kitchen and the state of orderliness in the kitchen, baffled us.

Appliances began to fail

It was a nightly affair to wash the clothes. The washing machine whirred and droned but after a while, it clanked heavily and then died. A mechanic came upon being called. And then the machine stirred alive again. Just another day would pass before it would heave heavily again before dying again.

The kitchen light began to flicker at times. The ceiling lamp at the corridor to the main door, died. We called the technician but the kitchen light would still flicker at times. I had the bulb changed at the corridor but it failed after two days. The changing of bulbs became more frequent. I found myself cursing the manufacturers of these light bulbs for their low quality. I also cursed the electricity company for its incapability to need the demands for electricity since black-outs happened every day and this probably reduced the lifespan of the light bulbs. If indeed this was the reason, then all the light bulbs in the house should have failed at about the same time but this was not the case. Only that corridor was having this problem and my rational mind suspected that it was the wiring that was at fault. A dark corridor was not exactly a nice place to walk through. The house, having drawn curtains and all, lacked the necessary light to brighten its interior. As such, the house again began to look darkly depressing and at the same time, threatening.

The Driver’s room

In the previous chapter, I have described the backyard and the spiral staircase and there was mention of the unoccupied driver’s room on the first floor before the staircase ascended to the roof. Zadar politely refused to stay in this room. I myself had inspected it and found it to be quite strategic. There was only one entry, from the spiral staircase and one exit, which was also the same staircase. As such, it was strategic to focus on only one point of entry. On the other hand, it was also not strategic to stay in the room. Its entrance was also its exit. Later, as events passed and were recollected and stories shared, there was a story to this room. Ajab always ensured that doors remained closed. However, this room would always have its door opened in the morning. There was therefore a special reason why Zadar would stay in the same room with Ajab. Despite this, I reassured them that this was caused by the expansion and contraction at night. At night, the lowered temperature would cool the walls so that they contract, so that there would be some space for the door to open by itself. Such was my predisposition to rationalise every strange occurrence. (To be continued)

Ajab and Zadar

2009-02-26T10:20:00.000-08:00

The best of friends who grew up together as children in their village, three days away by road, west from Karachi.

CHAPTER 6 OF HOUSE NO. 32

2009-02-22T11:04:00.000-08:00

The Place of Offering

We all slept together in the wife’s room after the old man left. The next morning, I awoke early in the warm Karachi morning, remembering what the old man had said about the offering that the chowkidar would provide to the demons. There was a place of offering and I needed to find it to satisfy my confidence in the old man. I went into every room, and looked into every drawer and opened every closet. I used chairs to climb up and check the top shelves of these tall closets. I checked the kitchen. I was already on the verge of not believing the old man. The mind, being the sceptic, was already plastering condescending remarks on the wall. I went at it again, this time, extending my search to every nook and corner and to the outside parameter. I even lifted out the sofa chairs to see underneath, looked behind the washing machine at the utility room. I went outside and checked the storeroom beside the chowkidar’s toilet. I went about the backyard, looking about every bush. I went to the front and entered the security guard room just beside the gate and looked around intently. I went to the balcony too and perspiring from the activity, I sat down at the balcony door and smoked a cigarette in order to enter contemplation, in order to distance myself from the situation. I was already on the verge of disbelief.

There was one other place which I had neglected to search. Since it was never used, it had become an object of oblivion to all of us. I came to the secondary kitchen and opened the drawers and the cabinets until I came to the last overhead cabinet. There they were, as described by the old man. There were some biscuits and some roti, arranged in an orderly manner. The roti already looked like it had been eaten. Fayaz, the chowkidar, whose name I now remember, had used this cabinet as the place of offering then.

The presence of the Imam and the old man, gave psychological relief to all of us. The termination of Fayaz, was also a relief. The haunting would finally meet its end, I thought. It felt good, the air was a little crispier, the air about the house appeared cool and the walls appeared unthreatening. It was a good feeling. Maybe it was psychologically good to go through such rituals, I thought.

Zada went about to get his good friend to become the new chowkidar. Ajab, the new chowkidar was as tall as Zadar but darker and sported bristles on his face. While Fayaz was bloated and pot-bellied, Ajab was muscular and lean. However, like Fayaz, he could not understand any English.

Ajab was always on alert for any requirements although he took a slighting towards washing the dishes. Washing dishes depressed the man, and we did not understand his state of mind until Zada told us. Apparently, Pakistani men do not wash dishes. My wife had casually asked the man to assist her without understanding the psychological culture of the Pakistani man. Zada and Ajab had earlier found it strange to find me washing dishes. Since then, Ajab no longer washed dishes.

With Ajab around, Zadar would stay longer at the house to be with his friend. Normally Zadar would make his way home after dinner but eventually, he stayed on and sometimes slept in the same room with Ajab. They were like two young boys who would play pranks on each other. Their cheerfulness and their mirth, more so from Zada, managed to allay and dilute the tense atmosphere. From the back balcony, which I used to hang damp washed clothes, I could hear their laughter late at nights from their lively conversations.

The Children

At this juncture, I need to return to a previous chapter; to insert this part of the story which is also relevant. Previously, I mentioned that the children decided to sleep in the mother’s room despite having their own room beside it. The mother had gone out of her way to buy the bed sheets and pillow cases and rugs of their liking. She tucked their clothes in the drawers and shelfs of the closet opposite the bathroom. The children cheerfully placed their toys on the vanity table. She was quite dismal when the boys decided to stay with her.

At this juncture, I need to stop here just to share with you that the children for the most part were insulated from the verbal exchanges of the incidences between the mother and father. Fearfulness could escalate into another level of meaning and we did not want to deepen their fear into adulthood. Still, the boys were capable of discerning. There were things that they saw which they did not share until later, when they would come and tell me what they had remembered. They were actually terrified that I would scream and shout over such matters.

In that part of time, I was busy with work to take much notice of the children’s complaints, leaving the wife to attend to such matters. Staying with the mother was an acceptable normalcy. The children did sleep in their room for one night. However, the boys complained that they could not sleep because there was someone in their bathroom splashing water around. It was as if the bathtub had been filled with water and there was someone in it splashing about. I did check the bathroom but found it to be dry and both mother and father quelled their complaints with some cynical remarks that they were somehow fantasizing and imagining things.

Hakim complained that someone played with his hair while he was asleep. Arif, the youngest, brought a long black hair that he found on the bed. It was longer than the mother’s and if on a woman, it would have reached her waist. It was that long. He also showed a long black hair from the vanity table. Hakim also brought hair of the same length from the living room, saying that it was on the sofa. Being a very rationale person, I loudly decided that it was probably from the cleaner as he may have brought it from other houses. However, the rationale was not exactly correct and proper. We had actually purchased another vacuum cleaner for the cleaner to use. As such, there should not be any hair around. For anyone who has children, my advice is this, do listen and pay attention to children when they say and show things. It can make a whole lot of difference.

Of course, being the ignorant father that I was, I was quick to murder any inception of new ideas with my rationality. Despite this, they insisted and finally it could not be resisted. The boys stayed with the mother. And it was the right thing to do.

Hakim had developed the strange habit. His sleep walking occurred almost nightly. Somehow, the mother or Arif were always on alert whenever Hakim was about to open the door and managed to pull him back to sleep. There was at one time that Hakim was already at the staircase, about to go down and the mother had rushed to pull him back up. Upon enquiry, Hakim explained that in a dream, he was called and gestured by someone to follow him, and this was sometimes a man and sometimes a woman. At one time, he also dreamt that his mother was calling him. It would have been a dangerous thing to allow the children to sleep in their room unattended.

The toilet downstairs

At this juncture, this also needed to be told in the earlier chapters, being remembered from recollections with the wife. There was a toilet, adjacent to the dining room. To walk to the dining room from the kitchen, one would have to pass this washroom. I would use it to wash my hands prior to having lunch or dinner. However, the washroom emitted a strong stench of human faeces. It would smell that way whenever I entered it. I checked around the small washroom, looking for a possible leakage. The walls were clean. The pipes did not leak and nobody had used the washroom. As again, using my silly rationality, I surmised that the smell could have emanated from the pinewood door. I did put my nose to it, and there was no smell familiar with it. All of us left the toilet totally alone because we could not endure the stench.

My mother-in-law arrived

My mother-in-law arrived before the Ramadhan, to stay with us for a month or so. I gave her the children’s room to stay in. The children never used the room for anything else other than to change, to store their clothes, and to bathe in its bathroom. For one or two nights she was all right and she enquired about the pasted photostated prints on the walls of each room, to which I replied that it was a precaution of sorts. I did not elaborate.

She would pray in the children’s room and join us later in the community room in the late evenings. Another one or two nights, I noticed that she had set up her prayers in the hall. After one or two nights, she had set up her prayers just beside the television in the community room while we watched television. She told her daughter that apparently there was some presence in the children’s room. While she prayed, something was playing about just behind her, sounding like the crunching of papers, and this alarmed her and subsequently disturbed her prayers.

In one instance while she was washing the dishes, she saw a reflection of a small boy running down the staircase on the window opposite the kitchen sink and down to the back through the secondary kitchen. She thought that it was Arif but both boys were at school at that time. This was the reason for her to shift from praying in the centre hall and into the community room. It was awkward to watch television with the children while the mother-in-law was praying by the side. The house that had once appeared immense now had made itself very small, based on fear.

Ramadhan came

With the passing of days, I paid scant attention to the situation because the frequencies of strange incidences dwindled to nothing. I relegated my mother-in-law’s experiences as one of delusion attributed to being apprehensive to new surroundings. It was so easy to forget the recent past, as if it had not happened! So quick was I to relegate the previous events to the annals of history.

The Ramadhan came. By now, it was already three months that we stayed in the house. It was the first time for us to see the new moon as the sky in Karachi was almost always scanty of clouds of any kind. Here in Karachi, it was obvious enough for the naked eye to see.

The fasting month was blissful for all of us, as it involved going to the restaurants, and to visiting friends’ houses for the break of the fast. The house appeared cheerful, almost brighter and homely. I no longer walked around at nights in the house or outside of it by looking over my shoulders. I no longer stole furtive looks at the unlighted empty rooms. I walked with a smile often, unlike in those days of worry and fear. Yes, the wife and her mother and the children and the new chowkidar and the driver were always busy with the preparations of the festivities. Even the cleaner, stayed a while longer than usual to help around. The only disharmony was the office situation. The CEO was elusive and unable to be contacted and he was always having meetings without calling for my presence. With the preparations for the festivity, the days wore on quickly until the Aidil Fitri arrived. (To be continued)

The Balcony of House No.32

2009-02-20T07:07:00.000-08:00

View from the balcony. Notice the chowkidar at the left.

CHAPTER 5 OF HOUSE NO.32

2009-02-20T06:41:00.001-08:00

Stop there. Rewind. Rewind past the room. Rewind past the drive back to office. Rewind to the part where I had lunch at the house after lunch. First I must tell you this and it is relevant. In Karachi, it is not easy to miss the Friday prayers. As soon as the azan from one mosque stops, another will begin from another mosque. There are many mosques in Karachi and each is about a kilometre away from each other. So, in Karachi, if one misses the Friday prayer congregation at one mosque, one can always drive to another mosque and still be able to catch the Friday prayers. Now back to the current state of affairs. The past incidents had aroused such a level of curiosity and speculation with many suspicions. I chose the chowkidar, because he was the closest to the incidents.

The chowkidar stayed in a room at the back of the house, just to the left of the back door. Further away from this room to the left of it, were the small bathroom and the toilet. The chowkidar’s room had a raised cement platform on one side of the wall, so that it could easily be made into a bed but he had used it as a shelf to place his personal things. Instead, the chowkidar had used the mattress that my wife had replaced with a new one for her room and it sat on the floor. The room was about seven by ten feet. On one window, a clothes hanger hung a shirt. There was a black nylon bag which contained some articles of the chowkidar. Since there was no cupboard, this black bag was the storage of sorts. The chowkidar had gone to the mosque and not returned and I knew it would take some time before he would. Since we had some time before the prayers, the driver locked the gate and I entered and inspected the chowkidar’s room. On the shelf, there were some personal effects but I noticed that there were also two or three toys that belonged to the children. The children had earlier complained of some things missing. I saw another toy on the floor. There was a vanity mirror that belonged to my wife and which was supposed to be in the store room in a box. Zadar expressed dismay and shock in broken English, about what he saw. Stealing to him, was taboo even though the things the chowkidar took were of low value. I took back these things on the driver's insistence and planned to talk to the chowkidar on those things he had taken. Now back to the present state of affairs.

The commotion in the wife’s room appeared retaliatory. The chowkidar’s room we entered was empty but something in the chowkidar’s room had seen our trespassing, and was now exacting a possible revenge.

The Imam

The late Mr. Abdul Rahim arrived shortly and I led him into the room. He entered the room alone, carrying his usual calmness about him. A short while later, he emerged to confirm that there was some eerie presence in it. He called someone on the phone, a Malaysian student, he explained who could possibly have the solution. Rahim offered us his house to stay in while we could find another but my wife turned it down politely as we did not want to impose on anybody. The student came shortly, in the evening. I have forgotten his name too but he came to Pakistan, to deepen his knowledge on the Hadiths and also assist in missionary work. He informed us that he did not have the capability to handle a situation of this kind but offered a name of a Pakistani, a fellow student who was also an Imam at his village but to whom many people would turn to in similar cases.

The next day, my driver and me drove to one sunni mosque which was also the madrasah. To get to this mosque, we had to pass the mausoleum of the first Pakistan President, Mohd Ali Jinnar which rose as a white minaret from a park. The mosque sat in between a row of shops. I made the ablution and prayed the two rakaahs to pay respects to the mosque. Later I sat on its stairs and observed the constant diligence of the helpers with brooms who would sweep the surroundings clean. I regretted not bringing the camera.

The class had not finished and we waited a while until it became uncomfortable so that I went about to look for this man. The driver pointed to the class. There was a room, with doors opened on all sides and in it, students sat and listened attentively. There were no chairs and they sat close to each other, almost in huddles as they listened to this lecturer, who sat reverently on an old rickety chair in front. He was burly, old and bearded, with a thick skullcap, body wrapped in a brown, almost overflowing garment or cloak. He looked stern and bigger than the students so that he looked kingly and ancient. He spoke in Urdu which I could not understand, his tones rose and fell as he emphasised certain things while the students sat still, as if mesmerised. If I had known Urdu, I too, would have been mesmerised. Later, this was the same revered teacher of the Hadith who was shot and killed at the same mosque. He had two security guards but at the time of his killing with an M16, the security guards were conveniently not there. If you use an M16 or something, the ricochet will push the gun upwards and so on. As such, the array of bullets almost cut him in two. As again, Pakistan was at war internally; it was a one-sided war with religious and unarmed and uninformed people (that they were actually at war) being terminated. With the recurring assassinations of the learned in religion, the depletion of people of knowledge would no longer make the country a place of congregation.

My driver, talked to one of the students near the door and later came to inform me that the Imam was amongst the students and that the class would finish soon. The "soon" was only an assurance then because it went on for another hour or so. I spent the time observing people, observing the library, observing that it had low wooden tables for the students to place borrowed books on, to read and study and contemplate. A few people came to enquire politely if they could render some assistance and with gestures of the hand and facial expressions, I gave the same explanation that I was waiting for the particular Imam. The class dispersed soon after, students moving out and about from the classroom, so that I could not see my driver. Zada managed to catch hold of the Imam as he was leaving and we managed to talk and request his assistance. The Imam was fair of skin, sharp of nose, thin and tall and certainly possessing the best of manners. Unfortunately, he was totally unable to understand English. I was totally dependable on Zadar for the explanation and hoped that he would have emphasised certain events to ensure the gravity of the matter.

The Malaysian student further explained to the Imam in detail in Urdu and soon after, he was in the car, with us on the way home. We sat in the living room, and we casually talked for a while. He refused any coffee but asked for a glass of water. Later, he asked for a stick but I did not have any but the driver rushed to get one from outside. With the stick in hand, and the Al-Quran, in the other, he walked from room to room, talking in Urdu. He talked in Urdu and there was a commanding tone to his language. I asked the driver and he told me that the Imam was asking these things in the house to move out. He moved from one room to the next until there was none left that he had not visited. From his diary, he fished out a much-used piece of paper that was already fraying at the sides. On this paper, were the Ayatul Kursi and some Arabic words. He told me to make copies and paste them in front of each room door, not on the doors but on walls facing the doors. As these Jinns go in through the door, they would be able to read the reminder on the wall that they are not supposed to interact and disturb humans. Hurriedly, the driver went out to make photostat copies of the paper.

As we sent him back to the madrassah, I asked the Imam what the payment was. He said that there was no payment to be made but then perhaps that I could buy him some books of the Hadith for him as gifts. Being poor, he could not afford his own books and relied on the library at the madrassah for the books. This Imam had been studying the Hadith for 8 years. As told by the Malaysian student, this Imam, whose name I could not remember, was diligent in deepening his knowledge. His house was very far away from the madrassah. He had to take two buses, to reach it early in the morning and was always the earliest. When he left, he gave the assurance that in the event of a recurrence, he would return with another remedy.

The old man arrived

My office got wind of the event at the house and soon after Vincent came and appointed himself to find a pious person who was capable of exorcising the house. He later arrived in the evening with a bearded old fellow in a shawal kameez. He wore a grey turban and the deep wrinkles on his face told of many years of the past. He looked clean and had an air of the leader about him. Vincent’s assistant was a tall and burly mustachioed person (whose name I could not remember too) but always charitable with his smiles.

The old man did not come in at first but stood at the gate in the waning evening light. He was quiet for a while and then informed the driver to instruct the chowkidar to stay put in his own room. Only when this was done that the old man came in and made straight for the room upstairs. He had some air of urgency about him, in a state of confrontation, as depicted in his eyes. He gave me a scant look, and then instructed the burly fellow, who was Vincent’s assistant to join him in coming to the room.

It was some minutes and we heard this old man talking harshly. When they came out, the burly man was shivering as if he had come out from the freezer while the old man still maintained that stern look about him. I asked the burly man what happened. He said that upon entering the room, the old man walked to the big wall mirror between the bathroom door and the closet. He spoke at one corner and spoke loudly as if admonishing something. The burly man had thought that this was strangely funny but soon after, the winds came in and bellowed about them, as if they were engulfed in a sand storm, so that the burly man became so afraid that his skin whitened and his flesh shivered.

The old man gave one instruction. The chowkidar had to be removed from the house with immediate effect. He gave a translated account of what happened. The chowkidar, belonged to a tribe called something like "bereli" whose custom it was to interact with demons to do their work for them. They would read the Al-Quran backwards. This chowkidar kept about him a family of demons, consisting of a couple and two children. He also told me that he fed them regularly and that somewhere in the house, there was a place where he would feed these things. It brought to mind, the remains of a dead chicken on the balcony when we first moved in. Yes, he said, he fed them the roti, the chicken and he fed them with our food. The old man insisted that the chowkidar be removed instantly and as such, the men picked the chowkidar up and sent him to the office. Later, as we sat in the living room, the old man softened, appearing relaxed. The boys took a liking to him and played about him and he kissed their hands. The kissing of children’s hands was a very ancient tradition of the Muslims as children are revered for their innocence and for their sinless lives.

I found out later, that his services were used by Ministers in the Pakistani government. The old man further elaborated that the demons of the chowkidar were able to transform themselves like him. He would use them to guard the house. At this time, I remembered that my wife was shocked at one time, when she looked out through the dining room window and saw the chowkidar. It was unusual of him to peer through the window then. At one time, I did see the chowkidar coming out of a room downstairs but he did not say a word to me. The toys the chowkidar took were for the children of these demons. His rationale of removing the chowkidar was that these demons would move along with him. (To be continued)

The wife's room

2009-02-13T11:01:00.000-08:00

This picture was taken before we decided to move in. The window on the left opened to the balcony. The single bed was later removed, leaving only the king-sized bed.

The upper hall

2009-02-13T10:58:00.000-08:00

The staircase led into the upper hall. The opened door led to the balcony. To the right of it was the door to the wife's bedroom.

CHAPTER 4 OF HOUSE NO.32

2009-02-13T10:33:00.000-08:00

When I started recollecting the events that have happened in Karachi, I really did not expect that there will be a lot of words put in. Perhaps, the family and I have been psychologically affected by it all although we do not want to admit it. Sometimes, events in our lives can be traumatic that it takes some distance in time to look back and see. Yes, perhaps that is the most probable reason why I felt compelled to write this chronicle only at this time and not before.

The Gas incident was unnerving and I made many equations, firstly relying on those people around me, other than the family as the suspects with motives. As I have mentioned earlier, this house was acquired from the Army and taken forcefully from the rightful owner. There is therefore the possibility that the General or his family had stolen into the house and let open the gas. The chowkidar was acquired along with the house and could possibly be working with the actual house owner. In that sense, the chowkidar could have done it or was an accomplice to the dastardly deed. Further away from this possibility was that the Army Captain did not get what was promised him by Vincent, and so, returned to exact some form of revenge. Further away from that possibility was Vincent or some other person working in the company which was instructed to do this so that I would decide not to work anymore in Karachi and fearfully return to Malaysia. Another possibility was that the chowkidar had stolen into the house and cooked something but forgot to switch off the gas (although the house was locked when we were away). Another possibility was the neighbour on the left of the house, whom we have not seen and who could have resented our presence, had climbed the eight-foot wall and stolen in and let open the gas. Still, it could be the Japanese neighbour, a recluse on the other side of the house who also resented our presence who could have climbed the other side of the eight-foot wall and stolen into the house and let open the gas.

Finally, unable to come arrive at some conclusion, I increased and enhanced my rituals of exorcism, insisting that that the chowkidar read the Surah Yaseen loudly in the living room downstairs while I did the same upstairs. Zadar, the driver suggested that we go to a madrasah so that we can gather some children who could recite the Surah Yaseen in the house. This we did in one late afternoon. The children came and the wife prepared some meals which we bought from the nearby restaurant. Inexperienced, each person read at different speeds and tones, until it became an almost senseless cacophony of chatter leaving me much bewildered and at the same time, amused at the futility of a solution.

The Water

Concerned over the spate of events, I moved upstairs, into the very room that the scream came from. This was not something of an egoistic gesture to challenge anything. This was a place of convenience for me to monitor the whole situation. I have to admit too, that I was also apprehensive of the situation, perhaps a little more apprehensive, maybe fearful. As said earlier, I am indeed far from superstitious. I moved in quickly, so that I could react to any untoward incident that could possibly befall my family. In Karachi, I hardly slept a full nine hours, preferring to sleep after three in the morning, just to be sure that everything was safe as the family slept. We were in some form of danger and that was the necessary thing to do, to stay awake, like Don Quixote, apparently brave but almost unarmed and as so, almost defenceless to anything that was not material, that was not flesh and bones. I slept that night and everything seemed normal, except for some sounds of somebody walking on the roof. Maybe it was the chowkidar, I surmised. The room was smaller and so everything else was reachable. The thing to do was to sleep with my back to the wall and face the remaining part of the room. That would be the best position to sleep with, I surmised.

The next night went on as usual. The following morning, I woke up and stepped onto a floor which was flooded with water. This water seeped through the door and flowed down the staircase and on to the floor below. The whole floor was flooded. I checked the bathroom and discovered that the water did not originate from the bathroom. However, one wall of the room, had water cascading slowly in a small flow from somewhere above. Apparently, the water came from somewhere up the roof and it went into the room through the windows.

With assistance from the driver, we asked for the repairman to come and inspect. He went upstairs to the roof and reported that there was a leakage in the water tank. Such nearness to strangeness rather than coincidence was indeed baffling. It was almost impossible to live in that room for fear of slipping and for fear of electrocution. In a way, I was ejected by the circumstances. As such, my stay in that room was a very short sojourn indeed, and the main room downstairs was once again the appointed abode.

The turbulence

I remembered this day to be a Friday as I returned home after prayers to have my lunch and shortly after, left for the office, only to return in a huff. The wife was babbling incoherently on the phone imploring me to return home immediately. We had not reached the office yet and I insisted that the driver made a turn for home. I told the driver about it and he too was a little agitated and curious.

When I came in at the front door, the wife usual composure was already in tatters, her body shaking as if she had just exited from a deep freezer, her arms about her, tears welling in her eyes and apparently in some fearful state. The children were apparently in fear too, bewildered and confused and also afraid. She told me to enter her room. I went up and everyone followed. I entered while everyone else stayed outside. My first thought was that there was an attempt of a robbery, an attempt to break in since nobody ventured any clue despite my queries.

Safe for the bed and the bed tables, almost everything was strewn about. The air in the room had taken a different mood, apparently dark and seething with the recent past of a very antagonistic presence. Hairs on my neck stood upright sensing something that I could not see or remnants of a presence that I could not see. The bed whose bed sheet was neatly tucked earlier was rudely set aside, as if someone had slipped in and rose from the bed in a rush. Magazines were strewn about, table lamps lay on their sides, clothes from the cupboard facing the bathroom, lay ariled on the floor and the carpets creased and bent at the corners. Cosmetics and other peripherals lay on their sides on the make-up table opposite the bed.

I moved to the windows, seeing the balcony from it. They were closed. I walked about and fidgeted for some time, before taking the courage to look under the bed. Anything could be down there, my fear told me. Nothing was under it though and I sighed with some relief. I reviewed the scenario again and noticed some coherent pattern. Its like looking at some points on a chart and then drawing an imaginary line to connect the points and seeing a particular trend. Like that.

The turbulence seemed to commence from the bathroom, and like a gust of wind, it travelled by the wall to mess up the things on the make-up table, and on to the next wall, catching the bed and the table lamp and then the magazines and finally to return into the bathroom. The possibility was that a gust of wind had entered through the bathroom window and moved around the room before dissipating.

I went into the bathroom, set aside the curtains and breathed another sigh of relief. There was nothing there too. The windows were locked shut and so, my earlier deduction was invalidated and thrown out as garbage.

I walked out of the room and saw that the same faces that were astonished before, still carried the same astonishment. It never left them.

I could not offer an explanation and the wife was clearly agitated. The children reported that they played outside earlier in the upper hall and the bedroom door was closed. They were aware that the mother was downstairs in the kitchen, cleaning up after the lunch and I had just left for the office. However, they suddenly heard some commotion in the bedroom. They peeked under the door and saw some shadowy movements. The mother was alerted and here was now the story to be told.

Just as bewildered as the rest, I took out the mobile phone and called the First Secretary of the Malaysian High Commission, the late Abdul Rahim. He had become a good friend and at this time, I needed his opinion on the matter. (To be continued)

The spiral staircase

2009-02-08T22:13:00.000-08:00

Zadar, the driver and the boys looking down from the roof. This is the spiral staircase which rises from the back of the house. Just above, in the foreground is the driver's room. This was left empty as the driver preferred to sleep in the same room with the chowkidar.

CHAPTER 3 OF HOUSE NO. 32

2009-02-08T22:05:00.000-08:00

Now comes the third part to the story. As again, I implore you to read the first and second part and only then, you will be able to appreciate this part. Enough said.

In writing the first part, I forgot to mention what the power outage did to light bulbs and electronic equipment. Let me say it then. Power outages burned bulbs. And so, the trips to town also involved buying light bulbs. I bought plenty. So shopping in Karachi was adventurously mundane as buying light bulbs and shower heads. In the house, light bulbs had an average life span of a week. I have meant it to be a short recount but obviously, forgotten portions, which clearly have been relegated to the dungeon, have risen to the surface and as such, many more words have poured onto the canvas.

Now to get to the serious part. The daily breakage of the shower heads triggered a switch in the head. There was the chowkidar, the security, whose main job was to open the gate (truthfully, that was all he did. We had to employ a gardener to water the plants). I have forgotten his name but later, I will be able to remember it. His name starts with an "H", I think. I can remember faces but not names. The chowkidar rarely came into the house except to collect cool water in a plastic bottle from the fridge. In Pakistan, the chowkidar is a necessary symbol to any upper income household. He is also the traditional security although lacking in any weapons, save for a short stick. To me, the chowkidar is just a gatekeeper, who opens the gates and also who queries anybody who would want to come in. The chowkidar also oversees any workers who are in the house, such as the repairman, the gardener and the cleaner.

I had described him earlier. He was round, tubby even, bearded, with a jovial face and he wore a skullcap always and a blue traditional Pakistani attire (the shawal kameez, I think). Looks are always deceiving but I am still gullible to it. He was supposedly the pious man who would make his way to the mosque for the evening prayer. But then, as the days wore on, his real self showed through, little by little, so that he was no better than the Vincent character. There was always money to be made from gullible people. Anyway, before I deviate any further from this true path of telling the story, let me describe him a little later in the story.

Something was definitely strange about the house but I could not draw any definite conclusions about it. If I could sense it, I was unable to determine the location. After about a week, I commenced the ritual of exorcism, using the Ayatul Kursi, which lasted for about two hours and it was indeed taxing on the tongue and throat. With the enchanted water in a brown porcelain curry pot (yes, a heavy curry pot), I walked from room to room, sprinkling everything with it. The children followed behind, observing and trying to understand my strange behaviour. Nothing strange happened but everything else was a little wet. The wife was aloof in her demeanour, not asking and not talking about it, apparently relegating my erratic behaviour as baseless superstition. I am not superstitious. Being superstitious means to avoid any encounters with something deemed as apparitions or bad luck through an irrational belief in the supernatural. Avoidance is the keyword to superstition, being the expected behavioural trait of a superstitious person. On the other hand, I do not avoid, instead I frequent it. As an example, I had recurrently swum in a particular swimming pool at nights, in the dark (that was another story which would warrant to be told, before I die of course) and that swimming pool was notorious for its haunting (I can assure you though, recurrence of my visits did yield results from the irritation and subsequent wrath of demons to my presence. Maybe, one of these days I will tell that too). I am not superstitious because I put myself in challenging situations, certainly not for glory and not for satisfying the ego.

I have some level of acute awareness of presences which are not easily detectable with the seeing eye. I cannot describe it but I can tell you how it would feel like. To truly appreciate this, bear with me for a moment and try this experiment. Put yourself in a very dark room until there is total darkness. Close your eyes and ask a friend to come in and move around furtively anywhere he likes. If there is someone else there with you in that small room in total blackness, your eyes and your other faculties will formulate some outline of form. This could possibly be the brain which attempts and hastily puts together all sensory perceptions to graphically illustrate a presence. Perhaps, that is how a blind person sees, maybe. But that is as close as you can get to my perception of these things. Just to deviate a little from this story, I went to my friend’s house once. Keat Swee and his wife Jeannie thought that I might sense something in the house because Jeannie was having mysterious scratches on her skin and they were very deep, leaving scars on her legs. When I came into the bedroom, I could almost "see" a swirling cylindrical vortex about three feet in diameter, that stayed solitary but swirled in a clockwise fashion. It sat near the bed. I went downstairs and "saw" that this cylindrical thing had extended beyond the floor down below. It was like a pillar that stood there, in a belligerent mood. I did not say much to my friend, afraid that I may insult his belief on things but it was not a friendly thing. I had wanted to suggest to him to move elsewhere but then, I always procrastinate when there is a risk of offending someone. Most of the time I keep to myself on these things.

Now back to the story thus far. Shower heads remained intact. There were no other incidents. About two weeks later, the container arrived and we were able to furnish the house with some furniture we brought from Malaysia. I focussed on the job and that was that.

I have since moved into my own room downstairs. The room was the biggest in the house, about sixty feet in length and twenty feet wide or so. The walls were empty of any pictures. At one corner, was this monstrosity of an air-conditioning unit, which upon being switched on, would drown out anything that happens to want to enter as an audible sound. It would catch any sound, even the smallest of sound, like the scratching sound of a cockroach scampering on the floor and devour it and chew on it, until there was none left. It was a tractor fixed to the wall and the wall would shake from its noisy droning. If the family was in any danger, I will be unable to hear them. And so, there I was, with a tractor on the wall but yet, it could not drown the foreboding, the sense of emptiness in the room but also the sense of not being alone. I placed the bed to the far end of the room, by the last window. The windows opened to the front yard.

The Wife

As usual, we had dinner at the dining room, and after that, I retired to the living room. With my back to the window, I sat on the sofa chair facing the dining room. My wife wore a green blouse that night. I sat there smoking, with a cup of coffee on the coffee table on the left. Then I saw my wife, head a little bent down, coming into the dining room, from the other door and she quickly turned to the right and away from my line of sight. She did not come out of the dining room. Just about that time, my wife also entered the living room from my left, talking to me about something. Twenty feet away, there was supposed to be my wife in the dining room. And here she was, talking to me. I did not share with her what I saw. Something was beginning to show itself, taking the form of my wife and this was eerie. I think I did tell my wife about this but she was adamant in relegating my vision to hallucination and pure superstition. There it goes, again that word, superstition.

The Gas

Next to the kitchen, there another secondary kitchen, with its own oven and cabinet but smaller and narrow. To get to the backyard, one would have to pass this kitchen on one’s left first before opening the wire-mesh door. We never utilised this part of the kitchen and so, it was left alone. To the right of this door, ran a narrow spiral staircase right up to the roof and the roof was almost flat so that one can walk about it.

We had dinner with some friends and returned late. Somehow, by sheer coincidence, I wandered to the back, past the secondary kitchen. My olfactory nerve reported a strange smell and triggered the alarm bell in the brain. As I have said earlier, I am a smoker. I smoke cigarettes. I am not supposed to smell anything because it would seem that a smoker would have a blunt olfactory nerve. In my school science, I was taught that gas was odourless but in this situation, I have to differ significantly from theory. Since I could not see anything, I put my ear on the below the oven in the secondary kitchen. There was a faint hissing sound. With my good ear, I followed the sound until I came to the cabinet housing the oven. At my eye level as I crouched, I could see that all the gas switches had been turned on to the maximum. When we left, we had ensured that all windows were locked shut to prevent burglary. As such, with the gas being released, the whole house was a big gas tank waiting for the smoker to light his cigarette. In Karachi, gas is distributed via pipes. There were no gas drums and so, gas can go indefinitely if the gas stove was let open. The only person around was the chowkidar. He could have done it but I surmised that he would not have any reason to do it. He would not want to lose his salary so soon and to a Pakistani, money is almost always everything. He too, was astonished at this, a bewildered look on his face with eyes a little brighter and larger and mouth a little opened, to define this bewilderment. We do that sometimes, to empathise with the current situation.

We let open all the windows and doors to rid the gas. It was a dangerous situation. This was no warning signal of any kind. This was not a flag that was raised to the enemy to signal the commencement of war. This was a brutal effort to kill. (To be continued)

The dining room

2009-02-05T10:10:00.000-08:00

The dining room of House No. 32. In the background is the living room.

CHAPTER 2 OF HOUSE NO. 32

2009-02-04T09:12:00.000-08:00

Now, this is the second part of the story on the Pakistani house. For those who have not read the first part, by all means, please scroll down and read it. A story is not a story until all the parts have been read and imagined. Believe you me, there are no surprises in here. So, please go to Part 1 if you have not read it.

House No. 32 was chosen but then, its leasing mechanism was questionable. I was informed that the bungalow was confiscated from an Army General who had offended President Musharaff. The house was then put under the guardianship of the Army until such time that the President may return the house to the General. By the way, House No. 32 sat about one house away behind the ex-President’s house in the same housing community. He would come furtively by to Karachi every now and then. During my tenure as the Chief Financial Officer, I have not sighted and read the Lease Agreement for the house, despite my repeated demands on the Administration Manager. However, on that day, that we chose the house, I saw that the Administration Manager, whose name I can recall was Vincent, rode out in a car with an Army Officer beside him. The Officer left two of his soldiers behind at the house, while we were inside. The ride was supposedly a negotiation of sorts on the rental fee but I thought otherwise. Vincent originated from India, bald and lanky of sorts, having a nose like a hawk. He always talked seriously and furiously, this was his methodology to allay any intentions of intrusion for verifications of the facts. There are people like that in this world, of course, who always talk furiously and there will always be the people who will be sufficiently gullible enough to believe that the furious talk comes from an intelligent and hard-working mind. I hold fast to one principle in mind; those who talk in many words are those who are the most lazy and blunt of mind. Those who talk impressively are almost always the conniving people. Consultants always talk like that too. That is why the most gullible always happens to be the senior of officers in the company who will promote the people who can talk the most. Gullibility always loses to connivance.

I allowed Vincent to do things his way so that I could settle down in Karachi and get to him later when I have settled the more important things, such as reining in the CEO to adhere to Head Office’s rules and regulations. Vincent was not the only one who was corrupt. There were others who were more voracious. The CEO of that time, was a donkey without the reins. He bayed impressively, which of course attracted the inept senior management in my company into investing in a technically bankrupt company and he needed to be reined in to the proper procedures. Perhaps I shall write about these people another time.

And so, back to House No.32. On the first day that we moved in, the house was almost bare, save for the battered sofas, faded curtains, chairs and beds. The marble floor was already chipping off, so that we had to walk with slippers in order to protect our soles. Initially we had viewed the house in the day time. Come night time, the house took on a slightly different aura, so dense, that we always wished that we somewhere outside of it, driving around in Karachi. Truthfully, that was what we did. We would drive around at nights. We switched on so many lights, in order to feel comfortable. None of the lights seemed comfortably bright enough and the children moved in pairs or either followed me or the mother and they were never far enough to not be seen.

Our furniture had not arrived from Malaysia. Without furniture, our voices echoed and sounded hollow and noises were amplified. Most windows had to be closed because, as explained earlier, the dust would come in and settle on everything. As such, no outside noise was audible. The house was enclosed within walls ten feet tall. The house also came with the chowkidar, a bearded and round and fair man, and with the perpetual smile he had on him, like a grin, we were confident that we were in good hands.

The First Night

The first night was spent on the second floor, with its own sofa and a coffee table standing on a dark marble floor. The living room upstairs was spacious. Since the door to the balcony was shut tight in order to prevent the dust, it was quite warm. As a first day ritual in the house, I recited the Surah Yaseen before all of us retired into the master bedroom. The children’s room was beside it although separated by some twenty feet of wall. During our stay, the children did not stay long enough in their own rooms, preferring to sleep with the mother. On our first night, we slept light, my wife with her magazines and me with my book. As usual the bed was not sufficiently big enough to fit four people and I had to sleep on a mat on the floor at the foot of the bed. The room itself was not quiet as the China-made air-conditioning vibrated and coughed like an old engine.

Sometime in the night and somehow, we heard a scream, like that of a woman. We had not been asleep as yet. It was not a short scream but stretched for a while, like a scream of someone who had just sat on a hot iron and was in tremendous pain. And it sounded like it came from the other room upstairs, the room opposite the children’s room. As I have described, the house sat in a gated community, remote from any busy road. It sat within four concrete walls. Beyond these walls, the house sat between two other bungalows and one behind it. Thus, as I have described, no outside noise was audible. As I have described, we stayed in a room with noisy air-conditioning, which sounded worse that a hair dryer. And so, it took me some time to realise that the noise actually came from within. The children heard it too, startled faces, finding comfort in thick blankets.

The Second Night

As I have said earlier, it could have been the second night or it could have been after some nights. I did not take notes and neither did I carry a notebook and a pencil to jot down the events. Nothing was expected in this sort of way. If we had planned to stay in an infamously haunted house, I would have brought a notebook and pencil with me everywhere I go in the house. So there. What makes a haunting is always the unexpected or the unexpectedly bizarre.

We had dinner at the long dinner table in the dining room. This dining room was adjacent to the main living room, and it had high wooden sliding doors on both sides as entrances from the living room and the other, from the main hall facing the staircase. Soon after, we helped each other to clear the table and wash the dishes and after that I went to inspect the main room downstairs, which had been designated to be my bedroom. I walked with my flip flops, past the staircase, past the centre hall and past the unoccupied room with the door ajar. As I walked, rather slowly (because it was a casual walk), I saw movements, like glimpses of shadows, skirting past at high speeds, beside me on both sides and in front of me. Pleasantly surprised, I relegated the sights as image overlaps from the persistence of vision caused by the rapid movements of both eyes in surveying the scenery in front. I learned about persistence of vision in my science class. That was my conclusion and I did not share it with the family of course.

Talking about persistence, Karachi also had persistent brown-outs. Why anybody would call it a brown-out, I would not know why. Black-out is a better word to describe such a happening in Karachi because when the power is down, I do not see any brown but blackness. My room had a large bathroom, and it would take ten paces to reach the end, at the window. Adjoining the bathroom was the wardrobe room, before coming into the bedroom. As such, there were three doors insulating a person taking a bath, one at the bedroom door, the other at the door into the wardrobe room, and another, into the bathroom. At one time, I was taking a shower when the electricity went out and I was in pitch blackness. The exit to the bedroom seemed a long time and to walk towards the family upstairs in the dark with the assistance of a lighter was like an endless journey, hearing their anguish in an effort to comfort them. The short education was educational enough for us to purchase emergency lamps to accommodate the black-outs. On average, the house experienced two black-outs every day. The torchlight was a common companion to the bathroom.

The Shower Heads

Every morning, it was my habit to wake up before everyone else to go down the spiral staircase to the kitchen to make a drink of Nescafe and then to proceed inspecting all rooms, to ensure that all lights have been switched off. Electricity in Karachi was expensive. Perhaps, it may not have been the reason at all. Why I did that was strange. I went into the room opposite the children’s room. That would be where we heard the scream. The room was slightly smaller, having a single bed, with a window that overlooked the side of the courtyard. It has no wardrobe room, but had wooden built-in cabinets facing the bathroom. When I went into the bathroom, I noticed that the green-coloured plastic shower head was broken and lay at the bottom of the bathtub. It did not break at the end, but in the middle. The very hard plastic broke in the middle. Just the day before, this shower head was not broken and now it had. Looking for a shower head in Karachi became an event, which later, became a customary event like no other.

The next day, as usual, I inspected the rooms, going from the room opposite the children’s room, seeing the hose without the shower head, and went into the children’s room. On closer inspection, the shower head lay broken at the bottom of the bathtub. I was a little surprised to find that it was also broken in the middle. It would need two strong opposite forces to fracture the hard plastic in the middle. I tried it and could not. I surmised that the children may have dropped it and it cracked and broke on the bathtub floor, an event that was mutually exclusive from the first. I also surmised that the children could have let the shower head fall to the bottom and it broke that way. Later I queried the children on the possibility but none came forward to volunteer an affirmation.

Thus far, another second trip was made, for a shower head. In Karachi, there was a road, of which I could not remember the name. Here, toiletry shops stood side by side to casually compete with each other for customers. I remember going from one shop to the other to look for the fitting. It was not exactly a straight-forward affair, as the shower heads came in different sizes. There was no standardisation of things in Karachi, unlike in Malaysia. But after work, this was the event I partook, to look for the shower heads.

On the third day, however, the shower head in the bathroom on the ground floor was found broken. This was the room next to mine. This was the day that I had to rule out coincidence and allow the possibility of vandalism. The children were quizzed again and none of them said he would ever want to enter a room alone. (To be continued).

The Inside of House No32

2009-01-29T06:20:00.000-08:00

Nikon D100
The lower center hall of House No.32 with its curved staircase, rough marble and an enclave in the background.

House No 32

2009-01-25T00:14:00.000-08:00

The cleaner and the chowkidar with a lorry at the entrace of the troubled house.

CHAPTER 1 OF HOUSE NO.32

2009-01-24T23:50:00.000-08:00

I have many ghost stories to share and non are figments of my imagination, being shared and seen and heard not by me alone but by others. Of course, I am writing this, to entice you to read further, so that you do not easily scoff at the idea of ghosts, of spirits or of Jinns. I have began to speak before of these to people but upon reading the furtively sceptical looks in the countenances of the listeners, the words simply retreat into the caves of the mind, shying away from being exposed. To tell you frankly, there is no joy in telling a non-fictional story as it has to be validated and the words verified before being told. There are the difficulties of putting the events in a chronological order and this my friend, is not something that I am quite adept at. At least, not yet. Perhaps later, when I take to writing seriously. Yet, before I die, before I leave this good earth, I will share with you, certain experiences. There will be sceptics out there, just the same but I can also show you that there was a pure sceptic in this story who was converted into a believer. We all believe in something after all. Not believing in anything, is also another belief, another side to the same coin. The difference between telling a story and writing a story is that when telling, one is opened to derisive queries to stop the flow while a story in the written word is a house that a person can either choose to enter or not. So there it is, either you come in or you don’t. But I must tell you that I am not looking for any glamour in writing it, nor do I derive anything from looking at startled faces because there is not any. I cannot see your faces after all.

One such story was in Pakistan, and these are not stories collected from other people, these are not stories heard from other people, this is a story of my family and myself in Karachi in the year 2005.

On the second day that we arrived in Karachi, at the Sheraton Hotel, to be exact, we were already moving about in the sprawling city of house dwellings, in search of the house that would be our temporary home in Pakistan. There were many roads, as I can recall, that we took, streets of which I could not remember. I can remember the dirt and dust, of constructed roads which took months to finish, the traffic jams and the debris that litter the streets. There was no need of drains, because it almost never rains in this desert city but if it does, garbage and undrained water form formidable pools of dark and murky fluid across roads, making them inaccessible, and sometimes, causing floods. When it rains in Karachi, it takes a long time to finish, like waking up every morning to relief oneself, it almost feels forever. If you are in Karachi, you too would want the rain to fall forever. Karachi is a dry place, where the dust never settles, where the dust is finer, and lighter and wants to be everywhere. Sometimes, one can arrive to the conclusion that there is no more need of a vacuum cleaner, because the dust returns soon after. Karachi is also a city of houses, of fenced bungalows, siting on flat arid land and there few trees in between, almost not at all. I learned later that most Pakistanis build their houses big because they would want their daughters and sons, to marry and stay together under the same roof. So, in a typical house, there is the aging father and mother, the children, the grandchildren. That is why the kitchen is always big, to accommodate the cooking for the big family. In essence, therefore, a Pakistani, is never alone, his or her existence is dependent on the acknowledgement of his or her existence by another. At this point, I am prone to thinking of bees sharing the same beehive. That would be the correct way of describing it. If you can see, I have not begun writing the story just yet, but there it is, as it has to be told this way. One must see the scenario and surroundings in one’s mind before putting the story in the front yard. In that way, the whole picture is seen, not just the story, so that it cannot happen in any other place, but only in Karachi.

We went through nine houses, for the next two days in our fervent effort to locate our next habitation. There was one house, that was modern in architecture and not very big, with a huge front yard. The furniture was there, the house looked that it had just been vacated in a rush. The upstairs quarters had a spacious square with a Jacuzzi in the middle. But the frequency near the children’s room was eerie to the point of being uncomfortable. I will need to use frequency to refer to the term of feeling. The area around it was dank and dark and in shadows but these factors were not the contributors to the feeling. It was something else. The children’s room was still intact, as if the children had just got out for a while and there were many toys strewn about on the floor. I asked about this and was told that there was a recent divorce and the occupants had vacated it in a rush, without ever bordering to bring their belongings, which was strange. Even if there was a separation, there would still be the sense of wanting to bring something home. When I came out from that house, I was already sick and nauseous. The other house visits had to be cancelled because I was too sick to go any further and had to retire to the hotel. There was something there that had affected me tremendously until I fell sick.

This is not the story I am about to tell though. To move forward a little, through a sequence of events of going to other houses (and to cut the story short, so to say), we finally settled on a villa by a public park in the Defence Housing Area. House number 32 with the red Bougainvilla tree. That was how I remembered it. We chose it because it was located in a gated and guarded community. We chose because it looked and felt comfortable enough to stay in. Maybe these were the logical reasons and maybe again, they were not. It could have been that we were tired and the options were not many, there was the house with the most evil feeling in it and there was a house that was in the gated community and which looked friendly enough. But first, let me describe to you what it means to look at a house. In Karachi, one can forget that oneself is in Karachi, when one closes the main door behind and enter the house, any house for that matter. A house can be big and luxurious on the inside but it was the external peripheral that will starkly remind us that we are after all, in Karachi. Outside any house, the scene is typical, that of a dusty road with sparse and dusty vegetation with busy traffic unless of course, the house is in a gated community. One must wonder then, is it the house that came first or the road that came earlier.

House No. 32 was certainly huge. The wide wooden gate, opened to the porch, and the porch was wide enough to fit in two cars. The main door to the house, was at the centre and the shallow marbled steps led into the dark marble floor inside. Immediately to the left of the narrow corridor after the main door, was a huge room which later, became my room. The right of the corridor opened through a doorway, into the living room. A sliding door separated the dining room from the living room. Coming back again to the corridor, it led to the centre of the house, a spacious centre which on the left had a door to another room while in front, was another room with a glass wall. A wide spiral staircase rose on the right, facing the kitchen. Upstairs, there were three other bedrooms, each with their own beds and separate wardrobe room and bathroom. There was another room which faced the balcony and this was to become our community room. The kitchen itself opened to another narrow kitchen complete with the ovens and pine cabinets, before meeting the outside backyard. To the left of the back, another spiral staircase wound itself around right up to the roof, after passing by another room, supposedly for the driver. To the left of the door to the backyard, there was another small room, supposedly for the chowkidar, or security man. Right at the roof, it was almost flat so that one day, my two sons and the driver and chowkidar and including myself, walked about on the roof, because the height provided extensive view of the city. Of course, I will be lying if I could see the city, no, only the tops of houses and two streets below. Inside, the house was dark because the window wore heavy curtains and there were many of them. Glass cubes embedded in the roof, cleverly provided some light but it was not good enough. The balcony was wide and long, running the full width of the house at the front but it was wasted space, its floor littered with chicken bones, debris and thick coating of dust. There were three rooms, one room was bigger than the other two. There was a second balcony, albeit narrow. There was another narrow storeroom.

Why do I need to describe the house in detail? Of course, as before, so now, the scenario needed to be etched in the mind. (To be Continued)