Looking

By Sheryl M. Yaseen

“Let’s find out why this husband drags his pregnant wife out to drink,” Korean chatter spilled out of the illuminated laptop and into Remy’s earphones, the white subtitles blaring against her eyes in the darkness of her room. Hello Counselor. A Korean talk show where common people wrote in their complaints, and the panel of celebrities, the permanent cast of comedians as well as guests, would discuss these issues with them, offering advice. A strange spectacle, removing the gravity of the real-world problems faced by the people who appeared. But what stood out most to Remy wasn’t this spectacle, but something entirely different.

She mindlessly drew an ellipse with her finger against the laptop’s keyboard, with two diverging lines extending below it.

The show reminded Remy of her mother. It reminded her of her mother, every Saturday, at 10pm. The TV screen would liven up the front hall, with actress Khushboo Sundar mediating conflict between families. Nijangal. That was the show her mother watched; a Tamil show, even though her knowledge of the language was rather elementary. A language she knew simply from watching Tamil movies with her parents when she was a child.

For Remy, this was Korean. Though, there was no relation between Korean and Remy’s parents. Remy found Korean media on her own, by chance, through the hours she spent chronically online, occupying her empty days one way or another. Years went by and she had watched enough Korean media that she decided to try learning the language. With the app DuoLingo, she half-heartedly taught herself, so she could now build basic sentences and recognize some words. Like when the host of Hello Counselor said the words “eotteon namja”, she didn’t need to read the subtitles to know it meant “what kind of man”. Korean became a tad bit easier when she realized that the sentence structure was the same as Malayalam, her mother tongue. Subject-object-verb.

She remembered distinctly how this began. It was on a YouTube channel, where western YouTubers reacted to different things across the world. One day they, along with Remy, discovered K-Pop, and from then on Remy had endless hours of content to fill out the empty container that sat at the pit of her chest for as long as she could remember.

Mindlessness was routine for Remy.

She looked at the door to her room, which was open just a crack. The darkness that leaked in from outside was new; the lights had just gone off a few minutes ago, and her parents had likely gone to bed. This was routine. Remy would go to her room first with a quiet announcement, and the couple would spend hours in each other’s arms, whispering and consoling each other about their days. Remy had just returned after her 3rd semester of college in Delhi, but some things didn’t change.

Without bothering to shut down her laptop, Remy closed the top. She clenched and unclenched her teeth, tapped her finger against the top, eyes focused outside the window. She knew she wouldn’t see what she wanted to. Her room didn’t face that side. Her room didn’t face Nandi Hills.

Detaching her eyes from the window, in the darkness of the room, Remy guided her gaze to the little journal sitting next to her laptop. A book she had bought near her college in Delhi. It was an odd habit of hers. She liked buying little notebooks and journals, always telling herself it was the perfect little thing to start writing her thoughts in. But she never did. She never found a thought important enough to write. When she opened the book she saw the only thing she’d ever written. Her own name.

Remy Anil. She’d always found her name peculiar. A French name. One she’d only ever heard in the Disney movie, Ratatouille. It was the only other place she heard her name, a name she shared with a rat. A rat who was an excellent cook. And here she was, a B.Com student because, well, it made sense. Daughter of a middle management employee at a bank and an accounting teacher at a nearby school. She hadn’t given it a single thought before applying for colleges after getting average marks in Commerce during her 11th and 12th grade.

Remy. A French name, of Latin origin, that meant “oarsman”. She found this out the exact same way her parents did, through the internet. A name that reflected neither her father’s Hindu background, nor her mother’s Muslim one. Though, she supposed, that was fair since neither of the two followed either of the religions.

Still, when Remy stepped into her parents’ new home in Yelahanka, for the first time, the first thing she saw was the puja room diagonally opposite the front door.

“Amumma and Apuppa are coming in a week. If not this, then what am I supposed to set up?” her mother asked in Malayalam, a hint of annoyance in her voice when Remy asked her the senseless question. Remy knew the answer, but she’d asked more in humour than anything else, why the puja room was decked out, with photos of Shiva and Parvati, onyx backlighting, small statues made of ceramic, all before they even had a sofa. Her mother, Safa, had always gotten neurotic when it came to her in-laws, Remy’s paternal grandparents. She’d never been told per se, but she had always had a feeling it was because of Safa’s soured relationship with her own parents, who had allegedly become more detached after their daughter married out of religion. At least Safa had her husband, who, Remy thought, was beyond devoted to her. Remy often wondered, if this type of love, completely focused, was even possible outside of this home. And she wondered if she had come into their world too early, before they had the opportunity to learn to like each other a little less. Or maybe she had pushed them closer together. Whatever it was, at least Safa was loved.

It was on the second day of her stay that Remy had first ventured out into the balcony. Around 7pm, when her parents were out visiting a friend from their college days, she’d decided to give the house a look. It was a Monday, and she’d enjoyed the emptiness of the house in her own room all day long. First, she fixed herself a cup of warm, plain, milk tea, then she explored. The hall was almost empty, where the TV sat in its box, a teapoy in front of it, and nothing else. The leather couch had been falling apart, and was sold off before they shifted. Then she went to the guest room, stuffed to the brim with all the boxes of personal belongings. The kitchen, which was the only part of the house that had been arranged, she was familiar with already, of course. She ignored her parents’ bedroom and stepped out into the balcony attached to the front hall. It was a small one, maybe 10 feet wide, but gave a nice view of Yelahanka. The area surrounding the apartments was covered in trees that had little homes and roads nestled between them. The trees and homes spread far wide, till other apartment buildings came into view. In the far distance she saw hills, specifically Nandi Hills, that she had visited maybe three times in the 8 years she had lived in Bangalore prior to college.

The cup of tea warmed Remy’s palm as she held it with both hands, the long sleeves of her shirt protecting her from the heat, the same way it protected the rest of her from the cold air of the 8th floor balcony.

Neither the cold nor the heat bothered Remy anymore though. Because something had completely, and utterly captured her. Her eyebrows had furrowed, eyes squinted as she looked onto the distance, by the hills. A bright light that rose from the ground spread out and into the sky. It was clear, crisp, and it cut through the almost brown, polluted, city night.

“Nillsu da!” the words echoed, making Remy jump. She looked down to the ground floor where she saw a group of kids playing. Stop, da. She didn’t know much Kannada despite having lived in Bangalore for so long, but she knew that “nillsu” meant stop.

Remy pursed her lips as she saw the group of kids running around. Happy. Loud. Excitable. Annoying? Thinking back on that moment, Remy felt uncomfortable. She drew the ellipse with the diverging lines over and over again as she thought back on that moment. The moment one of the boys had looked up and into the sky. She wondered right now, in the dark, if he had been looking at her.

The night she saw that light, after eating dinner in her room, Remy had gone to speak to her parents who were just stepping into the house.

“Have you seen that weird light near Nandi Hills?” she asked, in English, as her father took his shoes off, and her mother put hers in the shoe stand that had been placed near the front door.

“What light?” her mother asked back in Malayalam, walking past Remy and into the house with a plastic cover in her hand.

“There’s this light going into the sky. Near Nandi hills.”

“Must be the airport. It’s right there,” her father replied. Both her parents disappeared into the bedroom soon after.

The next evening, after her household had settled into sleep around midnight, Remy had gone out into the balcony again, this time without any tea. The light was still there, reaching out into the sky, grabbing it. And then once more, the next night. Like this, Remy spent four nights going into the balcony at midnight, looking at the strange light in the distance. Except, on the fourth night, she saw something new. Three red lights, blinking.

Remy didn’t ask her parents.

Must be aeroplanes, she told herself.

For about an hour, Remy sat in the balcony on a plastic chair, listening to music, observing the strange light in the distance. Every night she would sleep around 1am, only to wake up around noon the next day. Even upon waking up Remy would stay in her room, holed up on the mattress on the ground, watching mindless shows on her laptop. This was why she’d been so desperate to come back home, after all. To not use her brain in any capacity whatsoever. The only thing she hadn’t anticipated was her nightly visit to the balcony. For a whole week, she had gotten away with this too. It was Saturday morning, at 6:30am, that she could no longer escape this.

Woosh. Her thin sheet flew right off Remy’s body, exposing her to the full brunt of the fan that spun at maximum speed.

“What are you doing?” her mother demanded, speaking Malayalam as always.

“What?” Remy responded. Remy herself spoke very little Malayalam. Born in Mumbai, never having lived in Kerala Remy mostly only really spoke Hindi and English. It was an active effort made by her parents, who stopped her from speaking Malayalam at home, wanting her to assimilate into the city they lived in at the time. Strangely enough, this assimilation was also why she never had to learn Kannada, making do with the two other languages because of how the natives of Bangalore had learned to adapt to its foreign dwellers. Still, despite speaking very little Malayalam, Remy would often respond to her mother in the same when she spoke shorter sentences. It was hard to say whether her mother even noticed, or cared. She knew her father, who had also grown up in Mumbai, definitely didn’t care.

“Have you been sleeping till the afternoon every day?” Safa demanded next. “Are you going to sleep like this when Amumma and Apuppa come also? Do you really want me to suffer through her nagging?”

“But they aren’t here yet…” Remy mumbled, covering her eyes, shielding them from the light that had been turned on.

“I don’t know all that. You’re waking up right now. Come, help me in the kitchen,” Safa spoke quickly, leaning on her side, to take the weight off of her aging knees.

After a brief argument that consisted of mumbling and yelling, the two decided that Remy was going for a walk to freshen up, and then helping in the kitchen. When Remy had stepped into the lift, she came face to face with an elderly couple. Making polite conversation, in thick Kannadiga accents, they said they walked every morning with their friends from the apartments. Remy had travelled all the way to the ground floor with them. In that short lift ride, she had learned that they were originally from Mangalore, but had recently shifted to Bangalore with their son’s family. The family also included a 17-year-old boy, Karthik, who was just two years younger to Remy. They felt she would get along with him quite well, and that she could knock at their door any time. Karthik, apparently, was a very sweet boy, who often took them up to the terrace for walks in the evening too. You see, since they lived on the 13th floor, they had keys to the terrace. “Oh, but I’m not able to remember if he locked it properly,” the grandmother said. On the ground floor, Remy waited till they got out, then pressed the button to the 13th floor.

Typically, apartments kept the terrace closed, but Remy had been lucky, because the grandmother was right and the terrace was open. When she had stepped out, bracing against the strong, chilly, morning air, she’d felt like she could take a breath at last. She walked around the solar panels and the tall structure where the aviation light sat. It was when she reached the right end, the same side as her balcony, that the breath was take away from her again. It was well into the morning now. 7am. The sun was out and about, illuminating the sky. And still.

Still.

She saw the light, climbing out the earth, dispersing into the sky.

Remy tried taking a photo, but of course, her phone camera wasn’t nearly that good. She stood there, staring at the light by Nandi Hills for forty minutes, waiting for it to waver, fade, disappear. But nothing happened. The light continued to spread into the sky, reaching up into the clouds.

Dazed, she had finally gone back home. There was yelling, but she didn’t care. She pondered, over and over, whether she should tell her parents. What would they say? What could this even mean? While helping in the kitchen, Remy poured too much water into the dosa maavu, her mother yelled at her for not knowing how to do something so simple, and Remy decided to keep the light to herself.

The first time Remy spoke to anyone about the light was the next day. At 7am, once more, she got into the lift to go to the terrace. This time, she saw a young boy her age. The same boy who had looked at her the first time she saw that strange light by Nandi Hills. When Remy got into the lift she learned that this was Karthik. He had fair skin, a square face, big, deep, pulling, light-coloured eyes, and spoke in an accent similar to his grandparents. He was warm, like they said he would be, and was just as talkative as them. Unable to curb her curiosity any further, Remy asked him about the light. She told him everything, about how it grew out of the ground and spread into the sky at night and day, and she told him about the blinking red lights.

“You know, I haven’t looked at that side much, so I don’t really know,” Karthik replied. “But honestly, it sounds like aliens,” he said, then laughed. “I think I still haven’t locked the terrace,” he said. “You can go up whenever you want.”

When she went up to the terrace, the light was still there.

That evening, the landline began to ring, disturbing the silence of her house that was empty again, because Remy’s parents had gone down on a walk together.

“Remy, right? Karthik here!”

“Karthik? Hey, how’d you get my landline?”

“It’s very easy, the number is always block number, floor number, then door number.”

“I know that, but what I meant is, how did you know my door number?”

“That-a? I know everyone on that floor, so I guessed C803 was you.”

Had he paused? Before he had answered? Remy couldn’t remember.

“Oh, okay. What’s up?”

“When I came home I was thinking about what you said. So, I googled this light thing, and I found this weird website. I was thinking you can look at the stories there.”

And so, they exchanged e-mail IDs and Karthik sent her six links. All from a website called a54looker.com

The first link was a story from Taos, New Mexico, USA. A forest ranger in 1997 saw a light coming out from among the trees, by the mountains. He went towards the light with a few other rangers, who got more and more uncomfortable the closer they got. This one man, named Teddy Hoover, scoffed them off and went closer to the light. The men saw another bright light flash with a loud sound, and they were all knocked out. For a week, no one saw Teddy again. But when he came back, there was a noticeable change. He was happier, more sociable, and fastidious at work. He was quickly promoted to chief ranger, got married to the mayor’s niece, and lived happily. But in all that time, he never once spoke about what happened, where he went, nothing.

The second link told a story from India itself. An account by 22-year-old Adil Afsal, from Ladakh. Throughout Adil’s childhood, he heard stories about strange lights in the sky, though these lights had always been reported as military tests and drones. But there was one particular incident in 2018 that had stuck in his mind. In the summer of 2018, all of a sudden, there was a bright light coming from beyond the Pangong Tso lake. The light remained for one week, and that entire week they saw warm, comfortable weather that didn’t go below 20 degrees or go above 26. Adil, too, saw strange blinking red lights in the sky above the diverging light. One night, on the last night, while walking by the market, he saw something beyond a building. Grey orbs that seemed to have an endless mist swirling inside of them. The orbs instilled a strange feeling in him. Of fear, and confusion. The feeling of being lost. But still comforting. It was like the orbs were looking back. He ran away, too afraid to find out what was waiting for him in the darkness. He never saw anything like that again, but Adil often found himself yearning for those eyes.

The other stories were all of a similar nature, and from all over the world. Stories of people following lights, in forests and mountains, disappearing or seeing strange, welcoming things. When Remy tried to do her own search, she found nothing except for articles, all of whom made claims of satellites and drones. Nothing about this light, reaching out into the sky. No oddly happy people, no comfortable weather. Remy quickly called Karthik, wanting to know where he found these links.

“You just need to do a little bit research. You must not have used the right search words,” he told her, laughing through the phone.

“I guess… Do you think that’s what I’m seeing? The light near Nandi?” she asked.

“You won’t know unless you find out, no?”

“And how do I find out?”

“Go to Nandi Hills, what else?”

Once more, Karthik laughed.

It had been two days since then. Amumma and Apuppa were going to be here the next afternoon, but instead of setting up her room, Remy spent her time reading that website over and over again. Every few hours, unknowingly, her fingers would glide over to the web browser. She’d google a54looker.com, and the site immediately popped up. Why hadn’t it shown up before? she wondered each time, as though expecting it to not be there. And with that question in mind, she would read every last word, letting it print itself onto her mind.

And so, here Remy was, in the darkness of her room, in front of her laptop, waiting for time to pass her by. Once the clock struck 1am, she reached for her backpack. Fishing around for no more than a second, she pulled out a set of keys. Car keys. Quietly, as quietly as she could, Remy snuck out of her house. Through the lift ride her heart thudded, beating against her rib cage, as though to pull her back. Her jaw clenched and unclenched. Her finger doodled the ellipse with the diverging lines against the leg of her jeans.

Remy got into the car and drove out of the apartments.

She drove away from Yelahanka. Past her old school. Beyond the Border Security Force colony. Over the flyover. Through the toll booth. Then she stopped. She looked at the sky. She looked for the light.

Her eyes searched.

Overcome by strange, strong, emotions, she started the car again. Scared, confused, lost, she drove straight past the airport and towards Nandi Hills.

Remy didn’t disappear for a week, no. When morning came and the house woke up, Remy was in the balcony, with a warm cup of tea, looking past the houses and roads settled between trees, and past the apartment buildings. She looked at the hills. Only the hills.

But it was impossible to say if anyone saw Remy ever again. Because something had changed. And it wasn’t happy or comfortable. When the balcony door slid open and Remy’s confused parents looked her in the eye, a slow, very slow smile grew on her face. A smile that didn’t affect her eyes, a smile that strained her cheeks. “You’re awake?” she asked in Malayalam. This time, her parents took notice.

By Sheryl M. Yaseen