Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(63)

I remember the day well because Mano was sick, he had been puking all morning. Red and black feathers glistened in the wedding cat’s vomit. Bibi Soraiya fretted over him and fetched him digestive sherbet from the animal doctor in the alley three streets down, but Mano wouldn’t touch it. Nor would he eat anything else. He just crawled across the courtyard and lay next to the entrance, waiting.

The Rishtay Wali Aunty arrived in a green-backed rickshaw. We were in class in the north corridor and from the window I saw her dismount. A squat woman with one droopy eye and features hardened by time and sun, she waddled to the entrance and rang the bell. Bibi Soraiya appeared and opened the door. Together, they stepped over Mano, crossed the courtyard, and disappeared behind the thick line of trees in the direction of Bibi’s quarters.

A good match had been found for Sangeeta Apa, we would discover.

“The boy is fifty-one and very pious,” Bibi Soraiya told us the next day when we assembled in the courtyard to sing the national anthem. “He lives in Gujranwala and owns a dairy shop. Your Apa is really lucky. His dowry demands are so reasonable.”

We whooped and cheered and congratulated Apa. She stood there, still as a lake, her gaze on the wedding cat, who was feeling better and kept walking between her legs, mewling. The hem of Apa’s dopatta crept into her mouth and the din we made startled a host of sparrows that escaped, cheeping, into the sky.

That night I saw my second and third ghosts.

I was returning from the cigarette stall—Bibi Soraiya had a fondness for hookah and gave me a bar of Jubilee chocolate each time I fetched her tobacco. A clear night with a blue moon full as a houri’s lips shining above the orphanage, and Mano was by the entrance, his tail twitching. I bent to scratch his chin. He slipped away, turned, and watched me, eyes glinting like coins in the dark beneath the trees.

“You hungry? Want some milk, Mano-billi?” I said, patting my pocket to make sure the roll of tobacco hadn’t fallen out.

The wedding cat purred. He arched its back, twisted, and started for the east corridor. He circled a (maple?) trunk, stopped, looked back at me.

“What is it? Not feeling better?”

Mano gazed at me. Night dilated around us. The cat shivered and hissed, his tail puffing up, and lunged toward the trees. I would have left him to whatever mischief he was up to and gone my way, but Mano had been acting odd all day. I called, then dashed after him.

He was a blur in the blackness and sometimes he was a sound. I followed him to the edge of the east corridor where he waited, ears pinned back, pawing the ground before one of the rooms. He saw me and blinked.

The wedding cat went inside the room.

I glanced down the unlit corridor. Nothing moved through its length. No sounds. Not one rectangle of light stretching from open doorways, which seemed more numerous and narrower than I had ever seen.

I looked at the room Mano had entered. A peculiar effect of light and dark turned the framework of its door pale blue, as if a thin coating of paint had been applied to the wood. The doorway was wedged between Sangeeta Apa’s room and another girl’s whose name escapes me. Inside, silver light flickered. Shadows moved beyond a curtain of mist or smoke.

I mothed to the strange light and entered the room.


By this time I had been at the orphanage for a number of years and watched half a dozen of my sisters get married. Their ages ranged from thirteen to thirty. Out of the six, we escorted three to the train station and one to the bus. One disappeared, nobody knew where, and one was married to an elderly clerk in the local municipality office who was, happily, receptive to bribes from the needful. This man had thrived and could afford a lavish wedding in a real wedding hall—Lala’s Shadi House near Data Darbar. My sisters and I, therefore, had occasion to put on our best dresses, and we danced and sang at the baaraat party to our heart’s content. It remains one of my fondest memories.

The wedding hall I was in now made the other seem like a shanty.

It was the grandest room I had ever seen or would. Pentagonal in shape, flanked by pillared archways, it was strewn with rose petals at the entrance and the far end. Motia and bright feather wreaths decked the walls, as did colorful mosaics and tapestries (these blurred when I passed them so I could never make out the images). Persian rugs were arranged in geometric patterns on the floor and spiraling crystal chandeliers sparkled and glimmered overhead. Candelabras lined the walls and threw a chiaroscuro of light and shadow such that the rugs (so fine they felt like extensions of my skin) seemed to shift beneath my passage.

My memory of the room is perfect, so vivid that it still lives behind my eyelids. I can shut my eyes now and see everything in profuse detail.

At the far end of the room was a cage on a raised platform. A bridegroom and his bride sat cross-legged on an embellished takht inside it.

I walked forward. The groom wore a sherwani glittering with sequins, and garlands of red flowers and rupee notes around his neck. His face was covered with a veil of charred feathers. The woman wore a gold-red wedding dress and was laden with jewelry from head to toe. Wherever her skin was exposed it was painted with henna. She was breathtaking.

Now I noticed other cages secreted away in arched recesses on either side of me. Silent men and women in colorful shalwar kurtas and saris sat inside on wooden perches and swings. Their eyes followed me as I moved down the hall. Their lips were parted. From each mouth protruded what I first thought were albino tongues. A second look dismissed the idea. The objects were pale and card-shaped.