The House of Tears

By Anushka Choudhary

The house changed after she died.

In an instant, everything was different.

He remembers it. The screaming, the dim tungsten light over the body as it’s being cleaned, the vacant eye sockets of the family, the white of their eyes softly carved out by the grief.

The entire architecture became an open grave. The stench reeked over to the roads, in the slow-growing thistles, through the neighborhoods. Whispers, condolences, and flowers. Bowed heads and words of light. Hope was pushed into envelopes. Envelopes pushed into hands.

Slowly, he begins to notice what happens to a home when a soul is pulled out of it.

Hesitant about what form to take, the house morphs, molding itself into the unfamiliar, transfixed in the thin plane between light and shadow.

Swelled up with smoke and brine, it began slowly dissolving him, puncturing his skin. It peered into the edges of his eyes, forcing him to look.

Look where.

There were signs.

And upturned faucet, the water running upwards, the streamlined blue darkening.

A blood-tinged coat hanger was found wedged between rows of carrots. Kitchen drawers filled with white knuckles—the fingertips flayed.

The earth beneath the floors started muttering, a churn of voices deep and disembodied, grieving the loss of a familiar set of footsteps.

The walls stood still only when he was looking at them. He would shift his gaze, and the entire architecture seemed to crumble down in a black urgency.

He found tunnels. Long, winding mazes that lead straight to the past. Once, he followed along, only to end up at the hospital on the day of her birth. Red blood. White angels. He shuddered at the memory. Because of this, he had learned to tread carefully. To watch his step.

She had always been there. Across the trees. Across the hall. Across the road, bent over new buds of hyacinths. Across the store, rummaging for the perfectly shaped tomatoes. And now she’s across the veil—that thin, dark fabric that fractures in and out of existence. She’s on the other side of life.

At night, the world came closer to him.

He kept hearing her. The sound of her kitten heels wandering about. Of her laughing and singing. Of the shrill chime of her silver earrings.

His bed was infested with four-legged memories that seemed to clamor about. He began to pull his blanket and his heart closer together.

That night, when he went to sleep, he was dreaming again.

He turned restlessly on his mattress.

He saw her hunched in the garden, pulling her roots out of the earth. Gathering herself, taking in the soil and the weeds, and preparing to leave.

‘Won’t you take me?’

‘You wouldn't fit in the clouds ’

‘But if I curl up-‘

‘No’

In the dream, he had tried bending his elbows and pulling his knees all the way up to his chin, all the joints tucked in. She had still refused.

They say that grief has five stages. In the morning, he walked back and forth between the first two. And by the time he reaches the third, it is night, and his mom calls him for dinner. The next day, he starts all over again.

In his mind, he resurrects her. He pulls her out into this world. Her angular face, the sharpness of her gaze, her high cheekbones, and then she leaves again. Coiling out of existence.

Today, he needed to see her. The pain inside him had come to the surface, his skin bristling with the red.

He walks over to her room.

He couldn’t bear to go in, and yet he could sense that something was amiss.

The room stood tilted on its axis, the frames lopsided. The bed seemed to float adrift. There were no dents on the pillowcase. No clothes or half-read books lying about. He sees a single string of her colored beads, now broken, rolling off into the far end of the room.

He walks over to the window.

A vase stands buried in its dead stems. Wicker baskets hang by the curtains. She used to take them out every twilight to catch the leftover moonlight.

Something in him aches. As he turns to leave his eyes fixed on her miniatures,.

Memories brush past his thoughts. Of her playing and skittering about.

He remembered how she would dress up her dolls and set them atop the windowsills. And then, one by one, violently brush their hair.

‘Be gentle’ his mom would say.

‘ You would rip their heads off’ his father would add in

Before the dolls could rise up and corner him in the room, he decided to leave.

There he sits, at the dinner table. at the intersection of grief and the leftover love.

They always had meals together, the four of them.

Memories of making pancakes, of sharing pancakes, of burning pancakes. All seem to come at him at once. He splits into two and joins. And splits again. The kitchen masquerades as a blunt knife.

He looks over at the stove.

. The fragile ceramic teacups that were once arranged by color—deep blue fading to a violet haze—now scratch the floor one by one as they fall.

He looks around to see if anyone notices. But no, they’re all busy with the soup. The thick broth that his mother had made yesterday was reheated. Their combined hunger seemed to have been reduced by half these weeks.

He declares that he is not hungry, and he gets up to leave.

He’s been having a hard time keeping track of time. His body forgets to breathe, eat, and sleep. It forgets to be.

He feels uneasy with the non-linear progression of events.

The hurrying hours. The almost stagnant minutes. The fluttering seconds.

The hands of the clocks seem to reach out and pull him in. A numbered nausea overtakes his entire self.

He begins to climb up the top of the house, pushing past the dust.

Empty frames hang askew on the walls. The fish and clams in the paintings have fallen out, and the water of the azure sea has overflown in the parlor.

The sea tide had willed its way to the study area, resulting in a half-rinsed rug and two broken chestnut drawers.

Hopeless, he closes the door and walks out.

There’s no place for his eyes to rest. There is nowhere to look. Every piece of furniture and every fixture is marred by her presence. He goes wherever his legs take him, having no will of his own.

And further and further he treads, up to the attic. With every step, he grows more restless.

This is the place she used to hide herself and all her trinkets.

He sees her small wooden frog, and

some stockings stuffed in the shoe box.

Coins that she used to gather for the vending machines lay stacked atop one another.

And on the other side lay her treasures.

Her collection of bird feathers. The deep blue and the berry red. And loads of gray. Of finches, canaries, and house sparrows. And some that he didn’t know.

‘Are you here?’

He called out to the darkness.

‘Come out of hiding’

It was like they were playing a game of hide-and-seek. But the hiding was behind the arm of a God, and the seeking was for perpetuity.

He needed to get away. Away from these rooms, there are these bloated halls. Away from these eyes, which seem to blink at him and water. That followed him everywhere he went.

He wanted to climb out of this enormous wound that the house had become.

Breathless, he goes out to the garden.

But there is no escaping her.

As soon as he steps into the green, the leaves come alive in her memory.

You can smell her in the flowers. In the dense undergrowth, fidgeting.  She’s curled up on the fringes of her washed clothes, swinging on the line.

There, in the leaf-locked trees, they used to run about trying to catch each other.

He remembered how once she had toppled over and how they had come rushing back to the house with blood and leaves on her knees.

In the summers, they used to indulge in birdwatching. See swathes of a colored set flying over.

They’re teenage sparrows?

She would ask as he tried to explain to her the concept of aging in temperate birds.

You could say that, yes.

Overwhelmed, he leaves the garden.

Over time, he started to see holes in his memory. His hope for her return started to leak out, drip by drip, on the wooden tiles. Every day felt more bleak than the last.

He must tell his mother.

Of the morsels of fear, round and raised, that flood his mind. Of the hollowness and all the haunting.

Of the loss of half of himself. Of how he’s been dragging around the other half.

He must tell his father.

Of the grief shifting inside him,  large blocks sliding off one another, waiting to be shipped offshore, fighting their way out of his system.

But his parents altogether seemed strange. Their souls seemed to have stopped abruptly, and then they started with a jolt, running on counterfeit fuel.

He sits with them as they have their morning tea.

‘Are you okay?’

‘Do you need to talk?’

They do their best to console him.

‘We’re here’

He looks at them, their eyes sunken. They haven’t slept in days. Their voice seems to float from somewhere else; the tip of their vowels is blue.

Blue hands. She’s always had ink running in her palms and watercolor on the roughened laces of her dresses. That one Wednesday-

‘-so that would be better for all of us’

He didn’t realize they were still talking. But he agreed with them.

Time and again, he would find himself walking up and down the staircase.

She had pasted her art on the wall over the steps. Big and hefty cutouts. He vividly remembers the process.

She would set herself down on the floor with colors and papers.

Wielding the crayon with a set determination, she would draw tall birds and slowly color in the brown of their nests. She would draw skies and assemble the landscape, filling in the hills and bridges, the sea, and serpents.

Once, he told her to draw herself.

She had beautiful and fated eyes. One tooth chipped in. Braids are thick and well spun. Dark hair, just like their mother.

When he saw her portrait, she had sketched a tea-colored sparrow. Incredibly small and round.

Over and over, he heard his mother’s calls. She would ask aloud from the kitchen while she was busy mixing pancake batter or heating the rice.

Where’s your sister?

In her room.

Where’s your sister?

She’s there, drawing circles in the dirt.

Where is she? I don’t know.

Go look for your sister.

So he looked. And he looked and looked.

And in the search, the halls seem to narrow in, widen out, and narrow in again. The concavity is blotting and blurring the edges.

Everything has begun closing in on him. He couldn’t understand it. Wherever he went—in the attic, near the kitchen, on the stairs, between two rooms—he was always at the center of the house. Always at the scene of crime.

His mind kept rearing back. Kept finding a needle, kept threading his memory together, the needle slipping, the stitches coming loose and loose, a flap of skin peeling off, and the blood rushing—always the blood rushing.

His mother comes over. She notices the darkness that has taken over her son. She kneads his shoulders and resolves these substratums of grief that now layer his entire self.

Where’s my sister?

She’s in heaven.

Where’s my sister?

She’s up there, playing with the fauns and fairies.

Where’s my sister?

I don’t know.

He knows.

She’s a part of him.

She’s there, sleeping in the hollow of his cheek, the loose strands of her hair fluttering. Making him sneeze.

Her shadow shifts with his, and the light itself is treacherous.

Scratched on the walls of his throat is her laugh. The way it starts to shrill and shifts into a soft ruffle as it recedes.

Parts of him detach and reattach—a limb here, a tongue there. A necessary fragmentation. Her vowels seem to escape out of his speech; his voice slurred heavy with consonants.

He would walk out of his body. He would tie himself to a balloon and float away. He would sit in the corner of the gray sky and begin to fold himself into a cloud, churning the swollen dew into rain. And one day she’d pass by; he knows this.

Like a pendulum, his mind swings between two extremes.

One minute later, his mom sits with pins and needles, suturing the half-burnt sun to his bedroom wall. The next minute, he is in

waist-high water, the deep blue bending in to engulf him.

He wants to run after her, to catch her behind a thicket of wildbushes, so the entire house could sigh in relief. The doors would return to their hinges, and the honey would sulk back into its jar. He would leave for school, and his parents would hurry for work.

But things kept getting worse.

The next morning, he notices a

large fractal crack in the mirror, the timbers around it creaking. He looks into it, and something else stares back. He turns and leaves the room. The eyes in the mirror watch him go.

He’s observed these inconsistencies, these blasphemous tricks of light. He’s sat down on his desk with a pencil to make sense of this. All in vain. He would stare at the ceiling and snuff out the lamp. He would just have to get used to this coordinated darkness.

It soon dawned on him what was happening to their family.

He saw their eyes and their feet, their tables, and their rooms disengaged with reality.

The past had stretched and stretched over till there was no room for the present. The house stood gasping for air, the windows shutting and swinging open, as if in a deep trance.

And so it is. Fate will have its way.

Against blood and hope, fate has had its way.

The house goes on existing like a living eye. It watches over them, their grief, their love,

their perfunctory attempt at life. It tucks them into the bed and torches them awake. It exists as a singularity, beyond the reach of the sun, wind, and time.

It soon dawned on him, a little too late:

The house was his, turned inside out.

By Anushka Choudhary