This happened twenty-two years ago.

It was summer. Armed with slingshots and stones, us friends were roaming outside the Chinese Mansion. Our fight always raged with squirrels, chameleons, moles, dogs, even snakes and mongooses.

“Do you have an idea what the Chinese do with their dead?” Utkal stopped in his tracks with the football ensconced in the crook of his arm. Those were the days when one had to put the rubber bladder separately inside the ball. After the bladder was filled with air, lacing up the muzzle was a herculean task.

Utkal would always come up with such questions in those days. At times, it seemed like the only purpose of his existence was to pose such questions, like Socrates. “Do they cremate them, bury them or simply feed them to vultures and crows?”

“The Chinese never die,” I replied. “We live next to the Chinese Mansion, but I have never seen a Chinese funeral. They just get older and older but never die.” Then I remembered the coffin that had been brought out of the Chinese Mansion. “Perhaps, after getting fed up, their relatives put them in a coffin and leave them in the jungle.”

There was a large drain, whose source was somewhere in the Chinese Mansion. There were clumps of trees that ran parallel to it and opened onto a stretch of barren fields. Here, the forest floor was dank, and being on the outskirts of the city, sanitation workers, taking advantage of the loneliness of the place, would come with their trolleys to dump the carcasses of animals. We would form a picture in our minds of the Chinese dead that roamed about in the forest. Their skins would be so transparent and white that in the sunlight, you could see through them.

Since we had been brainwashed from our childhood that the Chinese ate all things that walked or crawled the earth, including snakes and cockroaches, we took it for granted that the spirits of the dead and rotten carcasses of animals would not matter to them. “Really,” Amjad said, “I don’t think you are wrong. We have seen burning pyres in the cremation grounds. We ourselves bury our dead in graveyards, Parsis feed their corpses to vultures and crows, some people drop their dead into the river. We have read all these things in books. But we have never heard of the Chinese having any cremation ground or graveyard of their own. I am sure some big mystery is involved in this. One day, we should go into the forest behind the Chinese Mansion and explore.”

“People say that the forest is infested with the spirits of the dead Chinese. They come there rowing their boats in the river and get down near the drain.”

“All the more reason that we should go there.”

And although I never really believed that there was a place where the Chinese would leave their dead, I don’t know why, but I was deeply convinced of it. Of late, what with these Chinese dead, I have started seeing this part of the city as a very mysterious place. More than 70 per cent of this city’s population lives in the older part, where the roads are extremely congested and filthy; at some points, they are merely dingy lanes. Most of its markets are old and dirty, reminding one of the days when this city had been merely a village, but with the arrival of the British, people from far-off places started to converge and settle down here, and thus, by rapidly increasing their number, they had turned it into a town. The other residential parts of the town hark back to a later period when some two-storey buildings had come up. Some havelis had also been constructed, which are now in ruins. A few government buildings are also there, partly in use and partly forsaken. The birds in the trees are the ones that we had seen in our childhood days. But sometimes, we fancy that this city is a weird place, built over a mysterious swampland that always remains buried in a dense fog, which makes it special. And people living here are a mysterious lot, very difficult to understand from the outside. It would not be strange to think someone else lives inside us, peering out through our eyes. The sunlight pours a pale yellow on our tall windows, and the moon descends to our level to shine over our heads.

The summer is here. The criminal case against the rapist is about to start. The public prosecutor has been asked to forward the list of witnesses. The villagers take too long to open up. Most of them don’t want to come to court or the police stations, except for a few village idiots or good-fornothings, who are always ready to go anywhere for a little bit of money. But they get a mere pittance from the allowances they are entitled to as witnesses; a major part of it is usurped by the police constables and court staff. Unlike other times, this time, the public prosecutor appears emotionally involved in the case. After all, the modesty of an eight-year-old child has been outraged, and that too by a forty-year-old man. The hon’ble judge has finalised the charges, and all indications are there that if the accused is convicted, he will receive a life sentence. The public prosecutor has submitted a petition for amendment of the charges so that the charge of death sentence may be annexed. I haven’t objected to this. As a defence lawyer, I am going through very tough times. It is not easy to prepare people to depose in favour of the accused. This case pertains to a village where people are fairly conservative. Often, their reactions are collective, and once they adopt a position, you cannot make them budge from it. I told the family members that I intended to go to their village to see the location where the incident took place. But I am hard-pressed for time, and only a few weeks are left before the case will start. In fact, the case can start any day after the summer holidays are over (this summer break is part of a tradition when Britishers were at the helm of the affairs and hon’ble judges used to go off with their entire offices to the hill stations to escape the blistering heat of the plains). The public prosecutor has handed in the list of witnesses who are to be summoned by the court. But it isn’t enough to send them summons; the police will have to depute its machinery to bring the witnesses to the courtroom on the hearing day. To make it possible, they are compelled to send uniformed policemen to the village. Once a witness is brought to the witness box and his deposition is recorded, no one bothers whether the witness makes it to his home or not

Excerpted with permission from The Chinese Mansion, Siddique Alam, translated from the Urdu by Jaideep Pandey, Hachette India.

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