Naina

“50!”

“40!, I go everyday”, said Naina. Naina did go to Prizark Gardens everyday. 

The cab driver agrees, not flinching, because he had dropped Naina twice in the last week. He drives 100 passengers daily, but with someone comes in with grey eyes, you don’t forget them. 

Naina didn’t remember him. She hardly remembers anything. Her days are spent at the rugged Garden, her nights are spent in a small apartment, cuddled up with her Prince. 

Prince was not allowed at Prizark. It isn’t permitted to bring your dog to the gardens. Humans are allowed but not all - only the ones with clothes on. The beggars wandered outside. They say the place reeks love during winter nights. The beggars hate love she had concluded. “Anything we love, is taken away from us”.

Prizark Gardens is a strange place for many reasons. It only has grass the size you will find growing on your outer home walls. This makes it feel more immense. It covers about 20 Acres, but it feels like an endless horizon of brown powder, littered with spontaneous greens and marble white structures. 

Naina has to change two buses and tussle with the cab drivers for this one and half hour drive. She enjoys the journey. Earphones plugged in, playing the constant white noise on her basic phone, she keeps her eyes closed through the journey, never once breaking, and wakes up like an alarm clock when the destination has arrived. 

Again she plays the white noise for 15 minutes, till the cab takes her to main gate. She has to tell the driver to take her to the second gate, off to the west, because that’s where she likes to get down. 

Today Naina didn’t sleep during the journey. It was very cold, the buses’ windows leaking the chilly air and hitting her ears again and again. It made a hissing sound, which pierced through her ears harder than the white noise. She was irate with this. 

She enters through the gate and looks back on the road. It’s an empty street even for a cold day. There are vendors selling pink candies, tea serving kids running around and a few slow cars crawling to it’s destination. The usual beggars are sitting outside the gate and eating the scrapings some generous people had left them. Naina feels the cold in her ears again. 

Now, one would assume that Naina had a soft spot for the beggars. For their life was hard - no one should be living like a vermin. But Naina had nothing more than mild basic humanity for them. She couldn’t care less if they were there or not. She only spoke to a beggar when Naina had extra bread and no dogs were there to feed. That day she notice that, Khayyum had no proper feet, just some loosely packed meat and bones. She didn’t feel like asking him what had happened. Avoiding the conversation, she asked him, “Why don’t you sit in the shade of the trees? There are no guards to throw you out” That’s when Khayyum told her the story of why he doesn’t enter the garden.

Khayyum is a middle aged, slim person. He looks like a beggar because of the clothes he wears and that he never washes his face. If someone were to take these things away, Khayyum would look like a regular person, without feet.

Naina wasn’t sure if she wanted to hear the story or not. But Khayyum didn’t wait for her approval and started, “It was 3 years back when I first came to this place”. The lightyears of thirty-six months were enough to grab Naina’s attention. She was happy that Khayyum was taking her back in time. 

“I came as a beggar to this town. How many people do you know shift their locations as beggars?”

“ I don’t know any beggars”

“Hmm..there is nothing special about us. The lesser you know, the better” 

“Okay”

“But I wasn’t a beggar before. I worked as a labourer. But they paid me equivalent to a beggar and made me work like a donkey. So I decided to quit and become a full time beggar.” he laughed, showing his grey teeth.

Naina rolled her eyes. Khayyum had lost her interest. She didn’t even know why she was listening to him. But she stood there, as if giving him a second chance to tell his story.

Khayyum continued, “ I am sorry for my stinking breath. I don’t enter the garden because I can barely walk. My feet are crushed because of the heavy things we had to carry. I have no other skills. I can’t get any other job, so this is my survival.”

Naina looked again where Khayyum’s feet were supposed to be. They weren’t covered. His toes were out of shape. Naina felt disgusted by looking at them. 

And she became interested in the story. There was nowhere to go but home, and listening to a miserable person kept her out of her misery.

“There is another reason why I don’t go inside the garden. Because of a woman”

“She kicked you out?”

“No, she invites me in to the garden.…but….” He paused, “ but she scares me“

“I am surprised that anyone makes you afraid rather than the other way round”

“No, believe me, she would make anyone scared. She is there inside that marble statue, that one over there, and she calls people inside and you never know what happens to them.”

Naina looked at the statue which Khayyum pointed at. It was not more than 100 paces away from them and stood on the edge of nowhere. It was a very ordinary. The woman was posing, her face tilted towards the right and her eyes looking down. She carried a bunch of flowers in her hand. There was no way to make out if it was snow on top of the shoulders or crow shit.

“So she comes out of the statue? Or she just calls you from there?” Naina asked.

Khayyum didn’t expect this question and was startled for a second. He expected Naina to laugh at him for his foolish story. Everyone had laughed at him whenever he told the story. But her question had genuineness in it. 

“What?” No. Okay. She doesn’t come out. All she does is call you.”

“Call you by your name? How does she know your name?”

“I told her my name once!! No, she doesn’t call me by name!! All she makes is a hissing noise.” Khayyum was breathing heavily now. 

“Then how do you know she is calling you?”

Khayyum finally regretted telling Naina his story. He was annoyed by her questions. Beggars don’t have patience afterall, they have a billion people to beg to.

“Look, I am not a story teller!.She doesn’t call you. She makes a peculiar sound and when a statue makes a peculiar sound, you go and listen to it. But once you go there, there is no way to make out where that sound is coming from. It becomes very scary during the night.”

Naina nodded. There were no lamp posts inside. The street lights also didn’t cover this area. It would be pitch dark during the nights. Specially in winter, where there can be so much fog as well. It could become eerie. 

“It could be just some insects.”, Naina interrupted.

“Insects don’t make this kind of noise. Insects don’t…”

Naina couldn’t hear him anymore. It had been a dark dusk that day. She didn’t know when it became even darker. All she could hear was a hissing sound. The same hissing sound she heard on the bus. The same hissing sound Khayyum might be describing to her, coming from the statue. 

Naina was drawn to it like a mother is drawn to a child’s cry. There was a lot of pain in the noise. The flowers which the statute held became pale red, and everything else became black. The statue couldn’t be seen any more. Just the noise. The sound was haunting. It became unbearable. 

Naina walked towards the noise slowly. When she finally stood in front of it, she saw the statues eyes looking down - wide eyes with grey pupil. The woman wasn’t smiling. It was a face of horror, like she had seen something cruel. The eyes became wet and the flowers became paler. 

Naina realised that she wasn’t hallucinating and that the statue reflected her reality. She had stopped counting days since the last 3 years since her husband’s death. She had become a loner. She lived off her savings in a small apartment, with her dog. She didn’t meet anyone who knew her. Most of them thought that she had died long ago. 

It was her nightmare. Or was it her dream? Naina couldn’t decide. All her life, she had loved the idea of a great tragedy happening to her. A tragedy so powerful which would change her into a new person. A second life, in which she would become what she had always wanted to become - a melancholy. But since the passing away of her husband, she had been miserable. She hated her new life. She had become a living memory of her earlier self; a statue of a brief moment in her life, which she could never recover from, a moment she had always thought about. 

The statue of Prizark Garden had given this eerie feeling to many people. They say, the statue was build by labourers 700 years ago. Many labourers had lot their feet because of carrying and dragging the heavy marble slabs. Grass was planted, but it never became green.