Kal Ke Kahaani

Zahina Maghrabi

Kal we visited home, on today’s sunrise it has become a khayal rewritten into a memory that turns into a story - 

A kahaani that I have tried to visit, but end up at a different window to the same emotion.  

The door was left open as we pressed our hand against the wood, creaking from a dozen loose screws. Dust continues to make arcs on every corner, layered against the waxy portrait, hung on the top wall. My sister and I stay close together, walking carefully against old carpet and yellowed walls, following the nazar of it’s aakh. Two black stones that never change colour even when the house was young. We always used to tread carefully, watching the pale sun above the house crack the roof. Its heat would always scorch the magnolias before blooming. 

Everything is still in place; the wooden table with the cracked glaze and the pot fading with raang. The drawer creaked as she pulled it, rummaging through the jewellery left behind.  

A thick golden chain laid inside, braids intertwined and an empty box of Marlboro, lingering an ashy scent encased inside the wood. Gold was important for every family; passed down between rings and skin that slipped between heritages. It slides between my sister’s wrist like shimmering liquid, the same way our mother wore it around her neck. She would sit around the coffee table, flipping through a book and pointed to all the flowers she wanted to plant outside. Our palms were lined with soil and sand as she poured water in the summer, then do the magnolias last, dreaming about how one day they would hang above the roof like white lanterns. Maria and I started to dream too, watching her every morning tend to the seedlings until they sprouted into saplings. Green vines wrapped around the limestone, covering the surface with thick leaves.  

 Most evenings were dark inside the house, both of us peered behind the curtain where our parents sat and listened to a pattern of syllables; at shaam a fragmented voice, at subh a fragile language of folded letters and unfinished sentences. Every kal, of yesterday and tomorrow was streaked with violent shades of aagh, cutting deep into the sunrise until the border between our childhoods faded.  

The clocks melted, hot metal burning the plants until they wept and charred. Our mother had been silent, gathering all the photographs laid across the house.  

Kismat me ye lektaya, we helped empty the albums, removing grainy textured Polaroids and folded the rest of our clothes into boxes.  

When the phone rang from calls from across the ocean, their questions were soft whispers, zabaan of salt. 

Maria let the gold chain drop to the floor and rummaged through the rest of the drawer, picking out the frayed leather wallet. A dozen cards and letters had been stacked between each other, but she tossed it away, reaching for a lighter deeper inside the drawer. 

 The fire was an unwavering flame, illuminating her skin as she pressed her thumb down. 

‘Still works,’ she said.  

‘Is there anything else inside?’ I don’t like how alive it looks, flickering like a pale spirit. Maria places it back inside, reaching her hand but her fingers only touch dust. We place the gold back and the lighter, glancing around the bookshelf towering in the corner of the room. Most of the titles have faded, and the cabinets are sealed. I stand with my hands tied behind my back, recognising the antiques lined between each other on the shelves. We’d never been allowed to touch them, staring through the glass at crystal jars and trinkets from all over the world.  

The matryoshka doll with a painted face.  

Maria passes by the portrait again, a broken mirror of vices and stands at the door.  

“You seem scared to be here, let’s keep going,” she says, twisting the handle and tilted her head towards its direction. 

I follow, standing beside her and watch the corners encroach, looking ahead as she peers through a keyhole. The air around us turns cold, beginning to congeal between the distance from the door and us.  

“Why would I be afraid?” We’d walked through the home more times than I could count, but it was only as we grew older we recognised the eyes that began to creep across our shoulder, from the doll and the painting. We’d found comfort with each other, in the reeling images of a dove white page of a book that we shared before bed. At least we had that given to us. 

“Then you go first, I’ll walk behind you.” Maria steps away, gesturing me forward.  

A slit falls beneath the floorboards from the creak, I nod and continue walking. 

 My feet are light as I slip through, standing at the edge of an indented wave rumbling against the staircase. The water makes an arc of tessellating mandalas, swirling down.  

If I stare too long there’s no end to the cycle, no way to make out the windows that are steadily awash with salt and water rising to the glass.  

The smell was dense in the air, mist spraying against my skin as I try to find my footing on the first step until my sister pulls me back, shaking her head.  

“All that talk for what? We’ll drown if you keep staring.” She grips my hand, walking down the spiral until the door at the ledge becomes smaller, and our shoes soak with water.  

Her eyes look forward, intentional as she drags me down wandering between each set until the temperature drops. Slowly some of the doors look familiar, but our knees are soaked with water.  

Maria trudged through towards it, but I can’t stay focused looking over to the sea ribboned with white eels and iris blue skeletal fish, glassy eyes like marble stifling my movement. Again, she pulls on me, pointing towards a door where a drawing had been framed across. 

 It was the one Maria made before I was born of everyone inside the home, deliberate and small thin lines of chalk resembling the features of the ones who were quiet. I walk alongside her into a room diverged towards the sky, close to the cosmos. 

 So much had changed, outside it was still shaam, close to midnight but here the sun was a permanent disc through the window, seven floors above the house.    

The creaks and soft clicks of the house whirred, awakened by movement. The sewing machine suddenly paused; the needle strung with a bundle of white thread across a plain fabric stopped on an unfinished pattern. In the corner there was an old mattress we’d once slept in, a thin sheet splayed over.  

The chair beside the desk faced towards the window and a yellow-white dress hung across.  

I neared towards the machine, tucking my finger around the white thread, cutting through it like a web. It was the same material that had crafted the dress, still as lovely as it had been on the day, that I wished to wear it. The other girls wore it on a summer fluttering like wings. 

I reached for the hem, slipping it off the chair a slow decay had spread itself inside the room, and a stain split down the middle, wilting the cotton flowers embroidered along the hem.  

Kal I had wanted it more than anything, tomorrow it would be a fragile cloth, shrunk into a distant memory we don’t need to return to. Scraps of fabric bound by the cotton flower threads that no longer follow us. Maria steps over the dress, arms crossed.  

“We could feed it to the ocean,” she says but there is nothing for them to feed on.  

Only memory that lived inside the hollow room. From today we don’t have to think about our past or futures, how the word kal means a border that left us to figure out the remnants we piece together. On tomorrow’s moon we have the gold, yesterday we were looking for what belonged to us.  

Kal, finally we’ll look back at the house swallowed up by the arc of binding stairwells.  

Kal our hands are free of dust.