The little boy with the pixie face

And in the end it all came together in a concerto; the breathing, the piano. The little boy who lurked in the abandoned barsaati on the terrace. 

He had a face like a pixie. Sharp nose, pale skin, black hair with a widow’s peak.

I typed, a mug of tea cupped in one hand.

There was a legend about the building. It was said that there was a time when passers-by looked up at it and all they saw was a building under construction. One could climb the stairs, ascend floor by floor towards the top, tread through rooms, and peer out into the street below from windows that had nails, frames of moulding, shutters that opened at the slightest insistence. But you could wave from those windows and those staring up at you would see nothing, only empty space.

I occupied the top floor. My two-room barsaati shared terrace space with a one-room barsaati at one end. If I stood at my door, I could see the entrance to the other barsaati, but only just.

I sipped my tea. The wind softly rattled my kitchen window.

Often I would stay awake beyond 11PM catching up on work, an evening cup of tea pumping caffeine through my bloodstream. Before turning in, usually a good four to five hours later, I would check that all my doors were locked, double-check the terrace doors and pull open the curtains, so the morning sun would wake me. Twice I woke up to find one of my terrace doors slightly ajar.

I took a long sip of flowery golden orange pekoe and resumed editing a nurse’s final year thesis.

They said the legend died somewhere down the years when the barsaati, the one-room tenement at the far end, was occupied by a little family. A single mother, two daughters and a little boy. The building stopped being partially visible. It was a mystery, but talk, like all talk, faded with time.

It was nearing three thirty in the morning. I worked to the periodic rattle of the kitchen window and Chopin’s music on youtube when a new sound was introduced into the mix. An infant’s cry, or a cat’s yowl, filled the silence of the pre-dawn morning. I paused my editing.

The second time that I awoke to a terrace door ajar, I noticed that the other barsaati was no longer closed. Its mesh door was partially open, as if it had a lazy hinge. Making a quick decision, I briskly walked towards the hallway leading out of my barsaati and pushed open the door. There on the stairwell, was the pixie faced boy. I looked at him and he looked at me, with scared eyes. Pausing for the merest second, he started hurrying down the stairs.He moved incredibly fast. I didn’t know who he was, I just knew he wasn’t quite alright.

After that first time, I surprised him several times when I would open my main door unexpectedly. Always, he ran away. Always I gave a half-hearted chase.

The baby stopped crying. I got up yawning, stretched my back and decided to go to sleep. Plumping up two pillows, my new favourite way of resting my head, I plugged my ears into Chopin’s Adagio, or what youtube told me was Chopin’s Adagio and drifted off to sleep, riding the swells of emotion that responded to the lovemaking of a cello and a piano, poetry and sound. The piece, oddly and yet aptly enough, includes the sound of human breath. Inhale. Notes. Exhale.

The next time I lost the boy, I headed towards that barsaati. I opened the mesh door, which indeed hung from a post-functional hinge, and found a dusty, furnished room inside. It was a small room, made smaller by an enormous double bed that took up almost all the floor space. Lifting my eyes from the bedspread, I looked around the room. It was empty. As I stepped out of the door, on my way out, a flurry of images flashed through my mind, making me gasp. It was over almost as soon as it began and I only vaguely remember the quiet, watchful stares of three women. One of them was older, maybe in her forties, the other two were around my age. They looked like my dead cousins. My eyes swelled with tears because they had looked so solid.

I drifted off to sleep. My dreams that night were populated by people of different degrees of solidity. Two little girls, the least solid of us all, danced around tables, dodging our legs, busy with their games of make-belief. The pleasantly countenanced pixie-faced boy rested his chin on his knees, watching them from a distance.

The sun woke me up the next morning, along with the breeze from the terrace door which was open again.