THE HAUNTING LEGACY

Unusual Short Story – THE HAUNTING LEGACY

THE HAUNTING LEGACY – Unusual Short Story

Sakhi stood still, tongue-tied, when her teacher questioned her. Otherwise, she would have been the first to answer any question her teacher put forward to the class during lessons…but this time the questions were not usual. She had mentally prepared about ten excuses to this much anticipated question…however, she could not bring herself to say anything, now that she had been asked. She had rather foolishly told her teacher and friends that she would ask her grandparents to attend the celebrations, knowing fully well how impossible that was.

Her teacher asked again-“Sakhi dear, why couldn’t your grandparents attend the celebrations today? Are they all right? We were all looking forward to meeting them this Grandparents Day at school.”

The truth was that Sakhi herself didn’t know the answer for these questions her teacher had asked. This childhood memory still etched in her mind…

She had always known that her grandparents existed…lived and breathed in a place in Rajasthan. This was the maximum information she had been able to prize out of her parents. She often popped question on their whereabouts to her parents in the most unlikely hours, to catch them off guard. However, they never told her a word more than she knew…and had known since the age of six.

She often asked her parents-“why don’t you tell me more about dada and dadi( grandfather and grandmother)?”

or “why don’t we go and meet them?”.

But these question were either stalled, overrode or most conveniently ignored. She would have long lost faith in their existence had she not received a phone call, once a year, on her birthday, from them. That was the only time she heard them, knew they existed, though for just a second. She always only heard them say ‘Happy Birthday Saku (what her grandparents fondly called her)’ each, in quick succession before her mother snatched away the phone and bid them a solemn goodbye, as if afraid a bomb may explode if she held on any longer! And like this, when on one such birthday, she did not receive their call, she knew they were no more. Sakhi was fifteen then. Soon,dada and dadi were a part of her forgotten history. Having hardly ever seen, heard or even be allowed to speak of them, it was easy to forget them.

Now, Sakhi was a successful working woman, engaged and on the brink of marriage, when a rude shock came her way. Her parents passed away in a freak car accident. Being their only child, her father, had left Sakhi everything he owned in his will. It was not till her parents’ lawyer presented her the papers to be signed that it occurred to her. Her parents had died in a freak accident, yet the lawyer had come with the papers as if everything had been pre planned.

The will was so well chalked out that it seemed her parents knew long before about this impending doom. But, her parents had always been extremely thorough and cautious about everything, be it holiday planning or property papers. However, it was not the existence of the will that surprised her, but the mention of the existence of an ancestral property in Rajasthan which had been handed over to her. And most surprisingly and intriguingly, a solitary typewriter housed in the palace too had been left in Sakhi’s name and quoted as ‘grandparents’ wish’.

Sakhi, on her way to the ancestral palace, could hardly contain her excitement. It had taken her ages to assure her fiancé that she would be able to handle it alone. The truth was, she wanted to go alone, to explore herself before sharing it with anyone. After all, she had now been suddenly given the full right to seek answers for her childhood questions. She was now, to see where she belonged, where her family had always belonged to. Her majestic ancestral palace , after two hundred years since construction, still had not lost even an iota of its previous charm and grandeur. It seemed she stood transfixed for ages, before she woke from her trance to realise the presence of the toothless caretaker by her side. The caretaker (Ramu kaka) , his wife and children were more than pleased to see chhoti memsahib’s daughter. This took her by surprise as she had taken for granted that her mother hardly stayed at the palace! However, it was clearly and justifiably her father, chhota sahib, who was more popular. Being her father’s ancestral palace, it seemed he had spent all his childhood and youth there, till he had been married a year with ‘chhoti memsahib’. However, neither could Ramu kaka nor is wife account for what had gone wrong whereby Sakhi’s parents had to leave, never to return.

Sakhi went into the palace, to find it even prettier than what the exterior walls suggested. With interiors heavily decorated in traditional Rajasthani art and marble work, the palace surely would have been spell-binding in its years of glory. She could hardly contain her excitement on sighting a picture of her grandparents in a room, as shown by Ramu kaka. She heard all the anecdotes and character descriptions Ramu kaka had to offer over lunch at his quarters, answering all her long standing queries. Her childhood agony and frustration of not knowing about her grandparents , seemed to be easing with every word of Ramu kaka’s.

After a sumptuous lunch (cooked in her honour-as quoted by Ramu kaka’s wife), she again wanted a round around the palace…though this time, alone. She had ascertained in her long talks with Ramu kaka that he knew nothing about the typewriter. Thus, she understood that whatever it was, its presence had been fiercely guarded by her family, not even told to their most faithful servant of sixty years! She also had a feeling that this solitary typewriter held the answer to her parents’ sudden departure from their peaceful existence here.

Search for this notable typewriter took rest of her day and even half of the next day. She had to comb through forty- two rooms, twelve grand bathrooms and an assortment of other ceremonial halls, before finally tumbling on to The Typewriter, on an ornate table in the corner of the biggest bed room in the palace. She was relieved, yet partly irritated to see the typewriter. Its special mention in the will had led her to imagine a gold plated, bejewelled, grand typewriter, a one of a kind…but here stood before her eyes a rather ordinary, mundane typewriter…it was probably the most inappropriate and contrary definition she could have assigned to the it! It was to change the way she perceived her life, the way she lived it…it was to change her forever!

The typewriter was pretty small and compact with an oddly projecting lens on the top. It was a rather usual black and grey in colour with surprisingly untouched keys. Rest was hardly out-of-the –usual to describe. To the left of it lay sheaf of papers, browning at the edges, with sentences or paragraphs neatly type written on them. A paper was already there in the typewriter, plain and empty. The whole ensemble had been covered by a satin curtain, making its presence even more conspicuous in the room.

As she stood gazing at the typewriter, trying to decipher what was exceptional in it, such that it found a special mention in the will, something clunked! As she woke up with a start from her broodings, she realised that the clunking noise had become more regular. She searched the room for the source, but found herself alone. As she turned back her concentrations to the typewriter, she realised that the noise had ceased. However, a sentence had appeared in the previously blank page in the typewriter.

She would not have given this a second thought had she not spotted her name in the sentence. It said-‘Namaskar, Sakhi! Nice to meet you’. The pragmatic mind that she was born with, she quickly waved off the shock as a coincidence. Possibly the sentence had always been there and Sakhi too wasn’t that uncommon a name. Yet again, the matter would have rested there, had not the clunking started again. And this time she found the source; right before her eyes, the typewriter keys clunked, as if operated by an invisible hand, typing yet another sentence before her eyes. And this time she was sure that it was she, the Sakhi, to whom the sentences referred to. This was ascertained as the second sentence clearly wrote-‘You will soon be the wife of Parthiv Kapoor, your marriage taking place on the 25^th of November this year’. The first part of the sentence was a sure fact as Parthiv Kapoor was none other than her fiancé. Yet it was the date of the marriage that bothered her. It had been just a month since her parents had passed away and she was practically in no mood to discuss celebratory days! Clearly the date was a figment of the typewriter’s imagination…the typewriter’s imagination!!!! Assuming that she was hallucinating owing to the whole loads of dust she had been breathing in since morning and an empty stomach, she picked up the typewriter and the sheafs of paper, shrouded them in the satin curtain and moved back to the caretaker’s home.

The caretaker showed extreme curiosity as to what was hidden beneath the curtain, but refrained himself asking further when he came to know the room she had found it in. “Sahib(Sakhi’s grandfather) had forbidden the palace staff to enter his master bed room. Memsahib always cleaned the room on her own. Once a member of the staff had been expelled as he had tried to enter and see what was in there, unable to contain his curiosity. But we knew very well, bitiya (daughter), not to defy the orders of sahib. Even my father, who had served sahib’s father knew that the room was never to be entered. It had almost become an unquestioned custom you see”, explained Ramu kaka. Understanding that whatever the typewriter held was to stay strictly within the family, Sakhi bid the caretaker a hasty goodbye and promised to get back to him on the status of the palace now and then. It was not before she had mounted the train and shut herself in her cabin, that she could again brood over the mysteries of the unusual ‘gift’ her grandparents had bequeathed her. On her way back, almost afraid, she did not open the shroud covering the typewriter.

Tired and exhausted, she went off to sleep as soon as she reached home late that night. She would have forgotten all about the typewriter as an eerie dream, had she not received a call from Parthiv that morning. Parthiv, apart from enquiring about her well-being and trip, had also called to inform that his parents had fixed the wedding date as 25th of the next month, 25th of November!! In the coming moments of utter surprise at the aptness of the typewriter’s information, she hardly assimilated what Parthiv was speaking about. All she remember was muttering a mechanical “bye” before keeping down the phone and rushing to her study to see the typewriter. As she removed the cover over the typewriter, she yet again, almost immediately saw the words

‘namaskar, Sakhi’ reappear.

One sentence below, the words ‘25th November’ was clearly typed in the paper. Now, the typewriter came back to life, typing a fresh new sentence-

‘Your lawyer will come today to enquire about the typewriter. You will not tell him the complete truth and stall your meeting with Parthiv Kapoor till late evening.’

Almost as if knew what to do next, she called Parthiv up, delayed their lunch meeting to dinner and started searching her mind for a solid excuse to avoid further questions by the lawyer on the typewriter. Once convinced her reasoning was firm and that the lawyer won’t bother to ask further questions, she settled down with her breakfast at the table glancing through the papers she had got along with the typewriter.

That day what came, were a series of revelations; how the typewriter had predicted the daily happenings in its user’s life, marriages, names of the children to be born, legal battles, family ceremonies, palace dealings and even the time and type of death they’d suffer. The pages seemed to provide a daily account of all that was to then occur in the lives of her great grandparents and grandparents. She got to visualise them, know them, their fears, emotions, behaviour and character even better than how she knew her own parents! She realised that none of the pages referred to her parents as they had hardly ever been to the palace. However, disturbingly, their death prediction was etched in a sheet. That is probably how their will and the presence of the lawyer seemed so pre-planned. They must have always known, but how?

And then it dawned on her that her parents had gone to visit the palace at her grandparents funeral…probably it was then that they had chanced upon the prediction, for now she remembered that they had returned visibly disturbed and shaken. But it was 20 years ago, she could have easily been mistaken. The rest of Sakhi’s sanctioned holidays passed by her reading and re-reading the papers and daily glancing through the typewriter every morning. It had almost become a habit with her, even when she started back in office. It was to her like a daily glance through the astrology column in the newspaper, only that the typewriter was true, till the last word!

Soon she was married, on the 25th of November, in a small ceremony (but she knew that already). She had still withheld the mention of the typewriter from Parthiv, and she planned to continue that way…after all, he would ask her to throw it away, and now, she could hardly do without it. The typewriter had become her trusted guide, her personal diary-only that it recorded experiences before they took place. Now, Sakhi seemed to always know everything, be it her honeymoon location, the name of her child to be born, upcoming rows, pay hike…everything! She did as the typewriter told her to, as now , the typewriter’s predictions were more dictatorial and directive than mere predictions. Also there was no more ‘namaskar Sakhi’ that greeted her every morning, but a set of situations and directions to tackle them.

She started living life like a person reading a mystery novel, knowing very well its ending. Life for her held no more surprises, no fun. She was living it(hardly) because the typewriter told her to do so. She knew when a surprise party was coming, when her promotion was due, what her son would graduate in, where would he be placed in life and even when her husband would die. It seemed as the typewriter was living her life. On the last day of her life (very well knowing it was her last day), she finished the legal matters, bequeathing the typewriter to her son. She had long stopped asking why her grandparents had bequeathed it to her and why her parents had never visited the palace. It was because all had been aforesaid by the typewriter. Now that she looked back, she remembered how her visit to the palace had changed her life forever. That day, Sakhi did not look at her ‘predictions’ and for that she suffered extreme uneasiness, but decided to bear it. Just for the last day. She did die that day, living life as a bonded servant to the wishes of the typewriter. Till the last day, repenting the predictability of life and fearing the unknown.

When her son(who had been summoned urgently) reached his mother’s study, soon after her death, he saw spare pieces of a broken typewriter. It was beyond repair. And underneath the wreck lay a typewritten paper stating-

‘ you will destroy me today Sakhi…I’m warning you, dare not.’

But yet, lay there the pieces of the typewriter and her mother’s body sprawling on the ground with a large stone in her hand. Afterall, Sakhi had chosen to be different. She had chosen to defy the typewriter, to let her son live life as it unravels, to die free and release her ancestors from the clutches of this fateful disease too.

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