Gray House

Technorati Tag(s): Mystery

Ever since my father thought I was old enough to wander without adult guidance, the beach was one of my favorite haunts. I grew up with kids who were more or less the same age as me, and we discovered more or less the same things at more or less the same time.

How it went is, one of us would knock on everyone else's door--didn't matter who. He'd say, "Chal beach jayenge."¹

Didn't matter what time of the day it was.

Except that it decided more or less what we'd do at the beach.

5 in the morning meant either cricket in the sand or long walks from Holiday Inn to The Centaur Hotel. Along the coast. Walking in the water. Collecting seashells. Tiny button-shaped round discs which we used as beads in board games I don't remember now. Making up weird theories about how those button shells are mini spaceships. This was after we heard a friend's dad tell us a story about aliens on mars. Before that we didn't know about aliens.

7 in the morning meant frisbee or what we called Jackie Channing. It consists of weird karate moves where you more or less land on your head. Your hair, it fills up with sand. Oh boy, and you don't want to go home with your head full of sand or your mother will hose the sand off you. Or so my mother always said, though she never did it.

9 in the morning meant skipping beach altogether and stopping at the video game parlor along the way and playing Street Fighter on the coin operated machine. We'd use one coin and get almost an hour's worth of play. That's forty five minutes above what's allowed. We knew a lot of tricks.

1 in the afternoon meant simply sitting under the shade of the Holiday Inn's rock wall and shooting pies in the sky and watching, as Floyd sang, some distant ship's smoke on the horizon admist sparkling water.

And by the way, all this, it's just me making those days seem clearer and sunnier than they were.

4 in the afternoon also meant video gaming, then racing to the beach to grab kulfis.² Sometimes we also flew kites. Both with simple threads and new nylon threads, which didn't cut and so weren't half as fun in Kite Wars.

6 in the evening meant digging your feet in the sand and wiggling your toes, building castles (which more or less looked like sand mountains riddled with wormholes), watching the sun set, and playing cricket or, in the rainy season, football.

8 in the night meant staying close to the food shops and gobbling snack after snack after juice after drink after golgappa³ after joke after joke.

All this, every single day, every single time we went to the beach, we passed one of the biggest temples in our area. I never went inside it, but it always looked pleasant from the outside, through the gates. If you've seen one big Indian temple, you've seen them all.

Opposite this temple, on the other side of the road, there was a gray house.

A barb-wire fence dense with wilderness surrounded it on all four sides.

It was gray all over. From the roof which slanted on both sides to the broken glass windows to the barred door to the wheelbarrow which used to be there for almost a year and then disappeared.

In all our trips, I never saw a light inside that house. Not once.

None of those who visited the temple payed the house much attention, or so it seemed. We once asked one of the temple guards about the house, and he kept squishing tobacco and betel nut juice in his hands and said, "Koi khabar nai, bhai."⁴

A friend said nobody went in there because the ground--which, surprisingly, was grassless and rocky--had one lakh snakes. Cobras and pythons and boas and those red black white striped ones he didn't know the name of.

Another told us a witch lived there.

One of the big guys--probably nineteen at that time--told us, ghosts.

Not that any of it is true, but what he told us is (and this was right after watching Chota Chetan--a 3D movie) this: two kids lived in the house. Two ghosts. Their parents died in the house of some disease. Those kids, they died of starvation because they couldn't step outside their house. Outside their house the field was full of poisonous snakes who could turn you into a snake if they bit you.⁵

The guy who told us this story, he went bald at age twenty three. Not kidding.

And just to make it more interesting, he added, "Sometimes they come out at night because snakes can't harm them anymore. They're ghosts now."⁶

He added, "And sometimes they visit other people's homes and--"

This kid I knew, he went, "They won't come to my home. I've got Ganpati's⁷ photo on my door. They won't dare enter."

And this guy, he went, "Sometimes they play in the temple."

The kid, he pissed in his pants. Not kidding. He was probably ten.

When one of us first introduced the idea of vampires to us--and this was probably a couple of years after the two ghosts living in the house, even before we snapped twigs into two and tied them up in a cross with rubber bands, one of us said the gray house had vampires living in it. That's why there were no lights in it during the day, because they sleep in the day. Someone suggested visiting the house at night, but none of us had the balls to take up that offer. Not even for a Pepsi each day for the rest of the year.

What you probably won't believe is the house never aged. Except for the wheelbarrow which disappeared. If you took a photo the year after it disappeared and then took a photo nine years later, both photos would look exactly the same.

My friend's dad, the same one who told us about aliens, once suggested that the house housed a power line control unit, or perhaps a water pump like the one in the huge playground behind my house.

Someone, perhaps our building watchman, suggested it was government property.

We never found out. Although we never found a board or a signpost suggesting anything like that.

I don't remember the last time I saw that house, just like I don't remember the last time I went to the beach (although I can say almost three years have passed since I've been there), but after someone asked me about the house today, I made a trip to my old house and then from there walked the old route to the beach.

The temple, it's still the same. More or less.

The house, make what you will of this, is still there. The left window still has that same cross framework. The lower right pane of that window is still cracked.

The gate is still the same.

The temple's guard--not the same one we talked to so many years ago--still doesn't know anything.

What's puzzling is, why is such a place uninhabited. By people, at least?

The house is next to a temple. Prime, prime, excruciatingly prime land. Holy land. Why is it empty? Why is it locked?

_______________
¹Let's go to the beach.
²Kulfi: call it ice-cream on a stick.
³Ice on a stick with a glass of multi-flavored non-alcoholic beverage.
⁴No idea, brother.
⁵None of them cared that someone had just said that very same thing a few days back.
⁶He said it in Marathi, but making footnotes for every translation gets mighty painful after a while.
⁷A Hindu god with an elephant's head and a man's fat body. A rat drives his wagon.