THE GHOST HOUSE

A long-held and compelling secret is discovered in the midst of a dysfunctional family home

Old Uncle and Young Uncle are convinced that Manny gave it to Nana. They call a meeting and everyone talks at the same time, except Middle Uncle, Mejho, who doesn’t speak because he isn’t married.

‘Manny is contagious,’ Old Uncle announces. ‘He can’t be here.’

‘But I can’t look after Chottu and Potlu,’ Old Uncle’s wife Old Aunt says. ‘And what about Santa?’ She is already in a bad mood because Sokina, her maid, the one who knows how to shave the rough skin off her feet because she used to work in a parlour, has already been sent away, and now there is only the cook, the sweeper, the guard, and two out of four drivers left.

‘I need him too,’ Young Uncle’s wife Young Aunt says. ‘He’s the only one who can make the mushroom lasagne.’

Ever since Young Aunt became a vegetarian, Manny has to make the lasagne at least once a week. She takes it to her bedroom and eats the whole thing out of the pan while watching Indian Matchmaker. I know this because Plato walked in on her twice, and both times she was wearing oven mitts and scarfing that shit down like it was the last thing she was going to be allowed to eat before a 21-day cabbage cleanse.

Plato is my robot. We know everything that goes on around here because my mother died when I was a baby and they all feel 100 per cent sorry for me. My dad lives in Minnesota and comes home twice a year with a new set of headphones for me and a lot of stories about snow, and for the rest of the year I live with everyone else: my grandfather Nana, the three Uncles, two Aunts and Old Uncle’s children, Chottu and Potlu. And Manny.

Manny’s name isn’t even Manny, it’s Iqbal, like the poet, but ever since they found out he could get me to sleep by singing ‘Twinkle Twinkle’ in his hardcore village accent, they said he had to be my nanny instead of the cook, and they changed his name and never looked back.

The Uncles and Aunts are playing poker.

‘Poor girl will be devastated if we cancel the party,’ Young Aunt says, pretending she cares about me. ‘Who knows if her father will even bother to come?’

‘If Manny goes, then Shantha has to come back,’ Old Aunt says. ‘I’m going to go mad otherwise.’ Old Aunt is always threatening to Go Mad, as if there’s a crazy gene she can activate by pressing on an especially doughy part of her body.

‘If she gets Shantha, I get the other cook,’ Young Aunt says. No one knows how Young Aunt stays so thin, because she can put down breakfast, nashta, lunch, afternoon nashta, dinner and dessert, and still snack like it’s an Olympic sport. No one except me. Plato and I know what happens when she goes into her attached bathroom to redo her lipstick. Why do you think she always smells like Jo Malone?

‘But what about the party?’ Old Aunt keeps saying. ‘No one else can fit into the suit.’

Ever since we got rich, the Aunts decided we have to do all the Rich People things, like go on holiday to the beach and celebrate Christmas.

‘How do you even know it’s Manny?’ Mejho asks, so quiet you can hardly hear him over the air-conditioning.

‘Because,’ Old Uncle says, ‘he’s the only one who does the shopping at Unimart.’

‘Can’t we just make him stay in his room until the party?’

Old Aunt says. ‘He’s probably not even contagious any more.’

‘He can’t stay in his room, he has to make the Christmas cake,’ Young Aunt says. ‘He could wear PPE. Gloves, face shield, all that.’ ‘We could spray him with disinfectant every morning.’

‘Fine,’ Old Uncle groans. ‘We’ll get someone to come over and test him every day.’

‘Thank you jaanu,’ Old Aunt says. ‘You know the poor girl can’t live without him.’

I go and break the news to Manny and find him playing Super

Smash Bros on the Nintendo Switch I gave him, unopened, a present from my dad who had forgotten I already had one. It’s pink, because people think if they give me pink things I’ll start acting like a girl.

I hand him a face shield. ‘You can stay. But you have to wear the suit again.’

‘Okay,’ Manny says.

‘Don’t you want to go home?’ The only time Manny ever gets a few days off is when the Aunts go to Bangkok to get their Botox redone, but this year the borders are closed so Manny hasn’t been anywhere since January.

‘I’ll start on the cake,’ he says. I follow him to the kitchen and get the electric scale out of the drawer so he can measure the flour. Manny is a perfectionist.

‘Did you do your calculus homework?’ he asks me.

‘I ace the tests so the teacher ignores me,’ I say, showing off. ‘Anyways I’m too busy coding Plato.’ Plato is my magnum opus. I’ve already attached a camera and a mic to him, and now I’m going to teach him how to climb the stairs with the wheels I pulled off Potlu’s monster truck.

‘Taking test is easy,’ Manny says. ‘Doesn’t mean anything.’ He measures sugar, flour, butter. Then he says, ‘Mejho is good at maths.’

I snort to show how little I care what Mejho thinks. When Nana’s bookshop shut down, Mejho had the stock brought over and he built a shed on the roof, and he’s up there all day classifying Nana’s old library and smoking cigars while the other Uncles bark into their computers. The cigar smell is everywhere, even in the kitchen. Whenever I go up there he gives a little shudder, like he’s seen a ghost and he has to re-remember that my mother is dead.

‘Take this to Nana,’ Manny says, handing me a small bowl of mustard oil.

Nana used to own the best bookshop in New Market, but the Uncles sold it to buy a printing press. When Big Uncle got the contract to print Star Cigarette boxes, we all got rich, and Nana fled to a tiny room off the kitchen and started spending all his time hunched over his briefcase of homeopathic medicine. As far as I’m concerned, he’s the only scary person in the house, not because he yells at me to comb my hair or get Plato off the dining table, but because he hardly says a word, and I always wonder what’s going on in there. Maybe he knows as much as I do. Maybe even more.

‘Nana,’ I say, knocking on the door. ‘I brought you some warm oil.’ The doctor gave Nana a prescription, said he might need oxygen, that we should take him to the hospital. But Nana refused, pointed to his glass vials and locked the door to his room.

He shuffles to the door in his rubber slippers and slides the bolt open. I watch him slurp down the mustard oil.

‘Your mother was not for this Earth,’ he says, rearranging himself on the bed.

That’s what people always say to me. God wanted her back. She was too good for the world. She’s an angel in heaven.

It’s all crap. If I ever get up there, I’m going to tell her what a shit job she did of being my mother, that I had to grow up with two women who had so much air between their ears it was a miracle they didn’t float, and that the only person who cared about me was Manny. Sometimes, if I’m feeling generous, I wonder if my mother was the one who sent him to me. When Mejho arrived with Manny one day, saying he needed a job, that he could alphabetise the books in the library but that he didn’t mind cooking, was that actually my mother, sending me the one person who packed my lunchbox and put a hot-water bottle under my blanket in the winter? Whatever, it wasn’t enough. It wouldn’t make up for all the times Old Aunt told me to change my T-shirt because it was too tight, which was code for my breasts were getting bigger and she didn’t want any attention being taken away from her own breasts, which were born in a hospital in Singapore.

‘What’s everyone saying about me?’ Nana asks.

‘That you’re going to die.’

‘Motherfuckers.’

Our hatred of everyone else is why I’m allowed in Nana’s room. ‘I want you to look out for Mejho,’ he says. ‘When I’m gone.’

The only time Mejho ever looks me in the eye is when I knock on the library door and ask to re-read the first-edition Philip K Dick he lets me borrow sometimes. ‘Books will ease your loneliness,’ he once told me, probably the longest sentence I ever heard him say. Screw that. You know what eases my loneliness? Plato and me spying on everyone and finding out all their dirty little secrets.

At the Christmas party, everyone dresses up and pouts into their phones. Chottu eats six slices of cake so Potlu eats seven. ‘Merry Christmas, darling!’ The Aunts coo, as if this will distract me from the fact that my father hasn’t come. Manny puts on the suit, Chottu and Potlu sit on his lap and pull on his fake beard, and he smiles and hands out presents like it’s a totally normal thing to do.

That night, Nana coughs about a hundred times, and then he just stops. It’s past midnight and everyone is asleep, so I feed Plato’s camera through a gap under the door and there’s Nana, lying on the bed with his mouth open.

I send Plato to look for Manny. He isn’t in the kitchen and he isn’t in his room. We cross the courtyard once, twice. Well, as of this afternoon Plato can climb stairs because I am a genius. He’s slow, but finally, he’s on the roof. I steer him to the shed. The screen is dark, and then, we hear music, Plato and I. A piano. The light is dim and golden. We see a pair of hands inside another pair of hands. We hear soft, urgent sounds.

The Santa suit lies empty on the ground.

I turn Plato around, slow as I can so no one hears him. I still haven’t programmed him to climb down the stairs, so I tuck him into a corner of the roof and switch off the sound.

Mejho, always in the middle, never marrying, bringing Manny to the house one day and telling us Manny would alphabetise Nana’s library, Nana who loved to read, Nana who started with a stall at New Market and whose sons turned his shop into a printing press and added extensions to the house and got themselves a pair of fancy wives – and Manny, Manny the indispensable, ‘Twinkle Twinkle’-singing, lasagne-making Santa, roaming silently through the house, upstairs where Mejho would wait for him, the two men who never spoke, never said anything about who they were, draped in clouds of cigar smoke, surrounded by all those old books, those other contrarians, scraping a little corner of love out of our house of ghosts.

Goodbye, Plato, I whisper, dismantling the camera. The best secret of the house has been given up to me, and I no longer have any need of him.