“The noises that birds make—it’s not real communication.”
“What is? Being told what you can and can’t do? That how you act puts the shits up people? Is driving people crazy, locking them away—is that real communication?”
“Please, Wil.”
“Putting our terrors into the minds of kids—is this what it’s about?”
“No!”
“He understands how to live, how the system works. And he knows we’re messing it all up.”
“Stop!” she shouted. I could hear the nervousness in her voice. “I have to be honest with you: I’ve always tried to be straight with you. I don’t think your behaviour is entirely rational.”
“You think I’m acting irrationally. Come here.”
I grabbed her and pulled her towards the workshop. She came willingly enough at first, but as I opened the door and the smell hit her, she blanched and struggled. I opened both doors wide to let in the light.
“Jesus, what’s that smell?” She stood there, her free hand over her mouth, gazing into the interior. I flipped on the light. I watched as she took in the sight of skeletal corvids hanging from the roof beam. “What are they?” she whispered.
“Birds.”
“Real?”
“They were.”
“How? I mean, why?”
I pulled her inside and grabbed a cloth from the worktop. I told her to hold it over her mouth and nose. I lifted a plastic tub up onto the worktop. She watched while I prised off the lid. Inside, the ends of three nylon stockings—each containing a section of the dismembered kite—were suspended in the solution. She vomited. I reached out to help her but she panicked and stumbled, and as she fell she grabbed the vessel, dragging it down on top of her. She sat there, clothes covered in the stinking, fat-rich solution. She was silent for a moment, then started to scream. I tried to help her. She pushed me away, scrambled to her feet and ran from the workshop. “Wait,” I called as she ran to her car. “Jo,” I said. “It’s not what you think. It’s just birds.”
The engine turned and failed, turned again and fired up. I walked to the car, my shirt splattered with kite tissue. Jo spun the car and gave me one last hollowed-out look before accelerating out of the yard.
I enter the house, knowing this won’t be the end of it. Joanne will see to that. She’ll return soon, very soon. And she won’t be alone. Exhaustion eats into my bones. I haven’t slept in three days, not since Trecastle. I shut my eyes. Soon, my thoughts become inchoate, I dream I’m searching for Blyth in the forest. I’m running and then I’m flying, gliding through the dark canopy. I search for what seems an eternity, always about to close in on something that is never quite in reach. A truth, the truth of what Blyth knows. I can smell it in the damp, viscid air. When the sky is at its blackest, my feathered body slows and hovers, and a sudden, powerful dread pushes me down. Sinking through the branches, the feeling of horror grows and my screams are smothered in the deep, unforgiving darkness.
I wake, heart racing. A tapping noise scatters the last remnants of the dream. I don’t know what time it is, not until I paw at my eyes and glance at the window where Blyth stands framed in the late-afternoon light. We stare at each other for a moment and I try to fathom what it is he wants from me. He waits but doesn’t speak. I climb the stairs and change into a black shirt and jeans. I go back downstairs and venture out into the evening. Blyth has disappeared again. Dusk is not far away. The rooks have gathered to greet me. They begin to cry out, screeching until a great clamour of approval fills the air.
Suddenly, they fall silent. Blyth has come. He looks at me from the roof of the Austin, lifts his head, and calls: chyak, chyak. He skips forward, dips his head, and lifts something in his black bill. Moving closer I recognise the chain of coins. He flaps his iridescent wings and rises. The rooks remain silent while he tumbles in the air then spirals off towards Glasfynydd. I follow him. In the forest, the ground begins to rise steeply. I struggle through the long, dew-covered grass, scanning the sky. At the single lane road that cuts north through the forest, I stand a moment to catch my breath. Up ahead, a steep bank rises above the road. I hear a scratching noise and see Blyth a few feet away. Then he is gone, leaving a coin on the tarmac. I pick it up and crawl up the bank, dragging my body through the gorse and ferns. After a while, the ground clears and I press on deeper into the forest. Soon, I cross a dirt track. There’s no sign of Blyth. I drop to my knees and search the ground until I find another coin on the far side of the track.
I plunge into the trees ahead, the low branches and brambles tearing my arms and face. The ground continues to climb. My legs ache and my lungs seem about to burst. I grab branches to pull myself up the slope, feeling like I’ve been here before. This sense of déjà vu grows stronger as I emerge from the trees at the top of a ridge. The sun has disappeared behind the hill to the west, leaving only a darkening, bruise-coloured sky. The air is still and quiet.
I stare down into the dark, pine-crowded gulley. I’m oppressed by a sudden, immense dread. I look for Blyth in the preternatural quiet. “I’m here, Blyth. Now show me.”
Kyow-kyow, comes from down in the gulley. My body trembles as I move over the edge, sliding through the scrub until I hit the base of a tree at the bottom. The ground is wet, and an acrid stench hangs in the thick, warm air. Through the undergrowth I see something red. I crawl forward, unable to make it out. A shadow moves across my line of sight and Blyth is there, skipping through the scrub to a mound of earth. I rub my eyes, open them, and see the small body curled in the dirt, a red cap over the head. Crawling over black feathers, I reach out and lift the cap. See the holes where eyes once were and the open wounds where the corvids have been feeding.
Chyak-chyak, says Blyth, hopping backwards up the slope.
“Is this why you brought me here? To show me this?” If Blyth is aware of my anger he doesn’t let on. He stands there, inscrutable.
“I don’t get it,” I cry out. “What is it I should know?”
He gives a piercing shriek and disappears. As I look up a larger figure looms over me and a powerful pain explodes in my skull.
When I come to, my vision is blurred and pain pulsates in my head. Something presses on my chest and I can barely breathe. I try to lift one arm but it feels weak and lifeless. I lay still, aware of a weird falling sensation that I can’t explain. After a while the pain eases a little and my eyes have adjusted to the darkness. I sense a more solid darkness a yard away. The dark mass moves, and in the moonlight I see a blue baseball hat, and then beneath it, the serene face of Edward Owens.
I try to speak but my lips won’t move. I try to sit up but a terrible weakness is upon me. I turn to one side and see an arm outstretched, blood draining from a wound that runs from wrist to elbow. I panic and try to grab the arm to stanch the flow of blood. Then I realise my other arm has been similarly cut.
Edward Owens leans over me. He rolls his head as though to work out a knot of tension. I want to ask him something but the thought slips from my mind before I can turn it into words. He shows me a knife, puts it in my hand, and closes the fingers about the shaft. I want to resist, but all I can do is stare at the empty space where he stood just a moment ago. A space filled now only with night and the stars.
I am not entirely alone. Blyth is perched in a branch close by. After a while, a rook settles beside him. Soon, other corvids arrive in the gully. I watch Blyth, staring at his moon-silver eyes. I understand the nature of his secret. As I lie there dying, I recognise the cold truth of his disinterest, his corvid indifference to my fate, or to any human endeavour. First Blyth, then the rooks, move closer.
The Fortune of Sparrows
USMAN T. MALIK
The courtyard of the orphanage was haunted by birds.
Songbirds, sparrows, gray hornbills, yellow-footed green pigeons, starlings, crows—every species ever glimpsed in Lahore. Twice or thrice a week they came in doles and murders and murmurations, swooping down and carpeting the roof and the walls. To this day I’ve not figured out where they came from in such large numbers or why they gravitated to the orphanage at peculiar intervals. Unsatisfactory theories involving magnetism and satisfactory gossip about corpses buried beneath the old housing were flung about, but no one could explain why on arrival these birds were so quiet—why they would neither cheep nor caw; nor a warbler warble. Hushed, they clung to the courtyard trees, congregated on high wires running parallel to the enclosure walls from one electric pylon to another. It was a sight that gave many a twilight visitor pause when they first glimpsed these silent sentinels. At least until the muezzin called the maghrib prayer and, suddenly, the courtyard came alive with the sound of bird music, the notes of the melodies in harmony with bird colors. The warbler, the cuckoo, the bulbul, the mynah—how they would sing!
For a long time now I have been afraid of birds.
But, then, living in the orphanage with my sisters, playing Ice Water when it drizzled, listening to the gurgle of water sluicing off rain gutters into the courtyard’s red earth, I was not. I liked them. All us girls did. We picked their feathers off the ground and made garlands out of them. We looked for bird nests in the courtyard trees and giggled when Mano stalked them, his mangled tail bristling, and, from hidden corners, sprang at the crows, parrots, and pigeons, making the creatures explode skyward in a flurry of black, blue, and green. The color specks circled the enclosure until night crept up from the horizon and took the birds with it.
Mano the wedding cat belonged to Bibi Soraiya, who managed the orphanage’s affairs. Mano was old and two-colored. Neha used to say that was why prescience boiled in his blood, that he was a creature fleshed from opposites and could glimpse things we could not. Angels, jinns, and the ghosts of martyrs walk among us, and everyone knows spirits are fond of cats. Who knew what they whispered in his ear when they floated past him or brushed his fur?
And when Mano settled down by the orphanage gate, licking his fur and purring, we knew the Rishtay Wali Aunty was to come for us that day or night.
The wedding cat was never wrong about the matchmaker’s arrival. That was why he was the wedding cat.
My sisters and I were fond of Mano—we fed him from our plate—but sometimes, when the wedding cat’s eyes gleamed in the darkness and he slid across the courtyard, back arched, the sounds from his throat indistinguishable from the rumble of a motor engine outside the orphanage door or the passage of something large and ponderous high above the clouds, we weren’t so fond of him.
Sometimes we wished Mano would run away and not come back.
The orphanage was a house of many doors.
A long time ago, during the British Raj, we were told, it was a hospital with two wings that flanked the courtyard. The east wing was the smaller building with limited rooms for dying or contagious patients, as if they were the same. It had a long corridor that ran parallel to the courtyard and formed a semicircle connecting it with the west wing, where the rest of the patients were housed.
These rooms were ours now and we loved playing in them. Most of us had mirrors above the washbasin and we pretended that people from the past still stayed within our rooms, that the change of morning and afternoon light in the mirrors meant they were stirring and moving about and such cohabitation made us all a big family. The lives of our family spanned centuries.
I remember one afternoon when we were playing Ice Water. Barefoot, we rushed at the fleeing team, trying to touch their arms or torsos, to pretend-petrify them into captivity. The escapees would circle back and try to tap the captives “awake.” Half of my sisters were already statues frozen by the chasing team, but Neha cheated by hiding, which wasn’t allowed.
It had rained the night before. The ground was marked with footprints. The trees whispered in the courtyard and the mirrors in our rooms rippled when we ran past the open doors, and I thought I heard Neha giggle and dive into one of the rooms at the end of the east corridor. I sprinted across the courtyard, shouting her name. She giggled again and waved a spindly arm from the doorway. I reached the corridor and went in after her.
No one was in the room. A large wet crow with a broken wing perched on the edge of the skylight. It watched me with red beady eyes and shook raindrops off its feathers.
I whirled, taking in each corner. I remember feeling a sense of loss. Daylight was waning, and when I turned again it wasn’t the room I’d entered. Instead of the sparse wooden charpoy there was a finely made bed with pillows and brocaded quilts, a sandalwood footstool placed at its end. A body-length mirror gleamed beside the bed. The walls were hung with canted paintings whose beauty, strangely, could not be admired: the moment I leaned in for a closer look, the pictures blurred.
I turned to look at the mirror. It was a fabulous piece of workmanship, its edges carved in mahogany with sparrows in flight. The girl in the mirror looked back at me with wide, black eyes. She couldn’t have been more than my age. Her eyelids were swollen, her lips red, shaped like leaves felled by autumn rain. A bruise flowered from the root of her left ear, all the way up her scalp. She looked neither happy nor unhappy. A passing ghost, I thought, gone forever the moment I departed from this strange new room.
As I watched, the girl in the mirror leaned back, pointed at me, and began to laugh. The sound filled the room, a cacophony of maddened birdsong. She laughed and laughed and the air heated with her laughter and the skylight darkened with night. A whoosh of blistering air, my nostrils filling up with a bitter smell like charred flesh or feathers, and the girl in the mirror was smoking. Coils of gray-black rose from her hair like braids. Smoke ringed her eyes, now orange-blue. She flapped her skinny, crinkling arms, and I cried out and turned, knocking over the footstool, and fled from the room.
Later, after I was calmed by Sangeeta Apa and Bibi Soraiya with hot tea and a thin slice of buttered bread, I told them about the room and its fiery inhabitant. Sangeeta Apa and Bibi glanced at each other.
“Was there a stove in the room?” Bibi Soraiya asked.
“I didn’t see one,” I said.
She nodded. “Go to your room, bachey. Shut the door and get some sleep. I’ll tell your sisters not to bother you.”
Neha came to my bed that night. We were roommates, three of us, but our third was sick and they’d put her up in the east wing. “What happened?” Neha asked, draping an arm across my body.
I told her. When I got to the part about following her into the room, her eyes widened, like the girl-in-the-mirror’s had and she began to breathe irregularly—an exacerbation of her asthma. We had to rush her to Mayo Hospital where the doctors made her spend that night and the night after.
To this day she insists that girl with the spindly arm wasn’t her. Neha was hiding atop one of the courtyard trees and showed me fresh scratches from the branches on her left arm. I believed her. I have always believed her.
That was the first time I saw a ghost in the orphanage. There were two more instances.
Both on the night before Sangeeta Apa’s wedding dinner.
In story hour on a Friday, Sangeeta Apa told us the tale of the mythical bird Huma. Persian legend holds, she said, that the Huma never rests. It circles ceaselessly high above the earth forever, invisible to prisoners of earthly time; impervious.
Furthermore, they say (said Sangeeta Apa):
It eats bones. The female lays her eggs in the air. As the egg drops, the hatchling squirms out and escapes before the shell hits the earth. It is a bridge between the heavens and earth. It’s a bird of fortune. The shadow of the Huma falling on a man bequeaths royalty on his person. The Huma once declined to travel to the far ends of the earth, for wherever its shadow fell the masses would become kings and the Huma is very particular. Like the phoenix, it is old and deathless. In an alternate form, it has seen the destruction of the world three times over
and
it cannot be taken alive. Whosoever captures it will die in forty days.
It is a story I have thought about many times since.
We were all in love with the bird man. Who wouldn’t be?
Every evening he came cycling down Multan Road, trilling the bell on his bicycle, which was laden with birdcages and wicker baskets. The baskets brimmed with candles, lice combs, fans, attar bottles, incense, and other household items. The bird man was a short, thin man, and very clumsy—I can’t tell you how many times we helped him pick up dropped merchandise, cages, even his turban. His turban was large and sequined with a starched turra at the top. Many times we saw him in clothes with holes in them—once he even circled the neighborhood barefoot—but we never saw that turra unstarched, even if his awkwardness meant we frequently glimpsed his long, beautiful, well-oiled hair, which would have suited our own heads so well, we thought.
The bird man would stop under a peepal tree near the entrance of the orphanage. Grinning, he’d get off the bicycle and spread a wool shawl on the ground. He’d set his cages down and begin twittering. He could whistle, warble, chirrup, cheep, and caw as well as any bird he carried, startling new customers and delighting old.
He followed this musical prologue with a show displaying his birds’ impeccable training in divination.
The bird man sold all manner of bird: parrots, pigeons, bank mynahs, Australian lovebirds (his hottest item), but there were two he wouldn’t part with—a pair of green rose-necked parakeets. These parakeets had mastered the art of soothsaying. They fluttered impatiently in a painted blue wooden cage, while the bird man fanned out a stack of white envelopes on the shawl. The envelopes had gilded borders, and soaring birds, dulled by time and use, were embossed in the corners.
Curious customers, many of them prematurely aged women, would come up and look. Shy at first, they would slowly gather courage, put out their hands for examination, and pose their questions:
Will I ever get married? Will my firstborn be a boy? Will that please my husband? My mother-in-law wants more dowry and loathes me. What should I do?
and
Should I stay away from the gas stove in the kitchen?
We girls would gather around the bird man as he frowned and took their hands. His fingernails were long and manicured, and softly they traced the lines on the women’s palms. He had a comforting smell about him, like earth, or bird, or the way my hands smelled after rolling dough peras on the nights it was my turn to bake roti. He spoke gently to the women, whispering, calming their nerves.
Only then would he lift the door of the blue cage, letting one of the parakeets hop out.
The bird would pace back and forth across the envelopes. It nipped and pecked at them, its small head darting, until finally it gripped an envelope’s edge. It would lift it in its beak and prop it against its emerald body. The bird man would take the envelope, extract the piece of paper inside, pop a tablet of sweet choori into the parakeet’s beak, and read the prophecy to the wide-eyed customer.
He was never wrong, the women said. So many before him were charlatans, they said. Their eyes glowed when they said it and the bird man’s admirers grew and grew.
My sisters and I were his admirers as well. Sangeeta Apa would watch him from the entrance, the end of her cotton dopatta caught between her teeth. He would laugh with us and tell us our fortunes for free. Sometimes he teased Apa, “Whoever you marry will become a king among men.” Often he would give us gifts: bird-shaped candles he’d designed, vials of cheap attar, bottles of scented rubbing oil. He was a good man, we thought. Wise and ageless.
Sometimes after the Rishtay Wali Aunty had been by, we would ask him to tell us the would-be bride’s future. Always he refused.
“Palm lines and the paths of heavenly bodies are malleable. Hard work, prayer, love—they can reshape them,” he would say. “Take care of your families and all will be well.”
We wanted to believe him and sometimes we did, but, even at that age, we knew better. The orphanage was our father and mother. Beyond its walls, who knew?
The walls of the orphanage were dun-colored.
I remember this even if I have forgotten other things—the face of the old pastor who came tottering down the courtyard on Sundays; the smell of trees that lined the courtyard (which trees? I remember orange and red mulberry, but which one at the courtyard’s end by Sangeeta Apa’s room that cast a long, shocked shadow); the color of the bird man’s turban, the sequins of which flared red as he pedaled his bicycle down Multan Road at dusk. Strange how we drown in recollection at the least propitious of times but cannot pluck memories from the past’s branches when we need them.
Sangeeta Apa.
No end or beginning to some tales, but middles are always there. She was the middle of all our stories, the center sitting still and somber when everyone around her rode, quickly or sluggishly, the tide of time in the orphanage. Days and weeks and months and years—the Rishtay Wali Aunty’s arrival marked them and whittled them away. Thirty-six girls of all ages. So many marriages and migrations. So many of my sisters came and went, yet Sangeeta Apa remained, braiding our hair, peeling mangoes, husking peas and walnuts, dyeing Bibi Soraiya’s hair with henna (the smell of that henna, rich and secret, like a sunset glimpsed from a crevice under the canal bridges); and as we giggled and ran around the courtyard, singing songs
We are a flock of sparrows, Father
One day we will fly away
Sangeeta Apa would shake her head and laugh, the sound ringing out loud and shrill and mysterious, until its final notes couldn’t be told from the twilight birdsong.
It was a very long time before the Rishtay Wali Aunty came for her. By then Apa was in her forties, half her head silvered with age.
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.