Chapter Nine

People tell me that you never need to worry about being able to find your way home. I couldn’t understand them in the least; did they mean I’d never get lost? Did they mean those I could love and trust would always surround me? Or did they mean that my heart would always eventually guide me to happiness? Or perhaps they meant all of those things at once?

Right then, it was swirling about in my mind, over and over, like the clanging of pots and pans in a soapy sink when my mother does the dishes.

I was walking, just walking, pushing through the smoke and fog, forcing myself not to panic by focusing on the irrelevant. Around me, there were calls for help, for warning, for God. I had fled from where the men with guns began to pour in from brash, hulking brown jeeps. Fleetingly, I had longed to question whose side they were on. Then I realized it did not matter. They were holding guns. Something animalistic inside me had risen to the surface and propelled me through the smallest of hidden cracks and keyholes to set me on the track home. Or what I believed was the track home. I did not know.

People rushed away from the site of the blast as I had, hoping for nothing more than preserving a fraction of what had been their life. A wooden sign, shattered and splintering, crunched beneath my shaking feet, bearing a discoloured C. Chana.

Only the old men seemed unchanged. They watched as the road and the air grew red, as the wounded were brought away and uselessly bandaged, as chaotic gunshots calling for order echoed in the evening, and they sat and read their newspapers on the front porch with the same indifferent look in their eyes.

Such was the flow of familiar unfamiliarity that I did not even notice when I reached my road. Men and women swarmed around me, some going one way, some the other, some not moving at all. Then I felt a firm hand grip my arm, and I was yanked up and out of it all.

‘Thank all the gods you’re okay!’ Ma panted as she held me against her on the front steps. ‘Oh, no!’ she murmured when she saw my face, worry and care misting around her. She tilted my chin this way and that, trying to quickly ascertain the damage.

‘Is everyone else . . .?’ I whispered, thinking of the houses I had passed, and which of them Rani Auntie might have been in, or worse, the Alis, so hoarse that I went unheard.

Past her arm, something black and deformed was lingering like a disease in the pores of the soil. Ancient cracks splintered through maggot-infested wood; bare, dead branches, contorted like amputated limbs, hung limply in the chilly air; a small, parasitic flame loitered wickedly within the crevices of decay. And my stomach contracted, filling my thin, white-veined lungs with nausea at the thought of how much of the tree was yet living.

‘Ma,’ I croaked, ‘our chinar.’

She clicked her tongue impatiently as she caught me by the elbow and spun me around to face the door, muttering something about priorities.

Mr Qureishi was seated in the living room, looking as though the bomb had just exploded two inches from his enormous nose. His eyes were wide and he was clutching his briefcase with the air of a drowning man gripping a torn lifebelt. On the desk beside him, a crackly old radio that I’d never seen before was belching out a long blurred sentence.

Ma marched me upstairs immediately and began to wash my face with a wet cloth. Once all the blood had been wiped away, she sighed.

‘There. It’s not so bad, is it? It isn’t a deep wound at least.’

Right, Ma. Sure it isn’t.

‘Listen to me,’ she barked, suddenly anxious. ‘Don’t you see now, Zoon? Don’t you understand why we can’t live here any more? The armies are fighting at the border, in the city, as we speak! That bomb in Nowhatta will be the first of many more now. Much worse could have happened to you. I don’t know what your poor Tathi would have done if—’

She stopped and stared at a moth on the mirror.

‘Your poor Tathi!’ she cried suddenly, shoving me aside.

Halfway to the door, she paused and turned.

‘I’m going to get Tathi. Don’t touch your cut. Don’t go downstairs. Stay in your room, lock the door, don’t be too loud, and don’t answer to anyone unless you hear me come in. Mr Bhukhari is waiting in the living room to sign the papers and I am dealing with far too much right now to have to endure any nonsense from you as well. Got it?’

My head seemed to nod of its own accord.

As she stumbled down the stairs, I heard Mr Qureishi give a frightened yelp.

‘Those men are getting closer! Look, they’re halfway here already! You know, I . . . I really think I ought to leave! Listen, Mrs Razdan, it isn’t that I don’t want to help with the sale. I do. But I’m afraid to say that I’ve decided to place higher value on my life as of now than on my business. It may sound ridiculous, but there it is. I hope you don’t mind?’

‘Of course not!’ Ma replied, trying her hardest to pay attention while, by the sound of it, searching for her second shoe. ‘You have somewhere to go, I suppose?’

‘Yes, I’m headed to my aunt’s. She lives a couple of minutes from here, over on Boulevard Road. She probably hasn’t even realized what’s going on, poor thing. Perhaps I can grab her and make a dash for it.’

The front door was thrown open dramatically, letting in small wisps of mist, and a clatter of footsteps preceded an eerie silence.

It was broken by the voices of the portraits erupting in hurried mutters. Even the emperor had lost his jovial grin in the wake of the imminent—I shuddered—battle. I felt as though I had missed a step going down the stairs, and my stomach had lodged uncomfortably in between my rapidly constricting ribcage.

‘Dear,’ came the voice of the empress. ‘I think now is the time for me to recite this piece I’ve been—’

‘Not now, lamb!’ whispered the emperor, mortified. ‘She wants you all to know,’ he continued, louder, ‘that she has lived here for over 200 years, and that in all her time she has never, and hence will never, see her home succumb to evil.’

This summary seemed, rather than saving time, to have led to an increase in the muttering. ‘Very true, very true,’ murmured the kisan, his eyes hooded and his head lolling on his shoulder. I doubted he had any idea what we were talking about.

‘Listen, we’re all with you!’ called the Mughal warrior, pulling out his elegant blade, then staring about importantly, as though challenging someone to declare any form of cowardice.

‘We . . . we are,’ said the scribe, his eyes having dulled in their usual soothing glow. ‘Fear can be a powerful manipulator. But you mustn’t let it change the way you view yourself.’

He had lifted himself off his pile of dusty pillows and seemed to want to elaborate on this, but at that moment, one of the Pandits coughed pointedly. They all fell silent, staring at the back wall, some looking astonished, others eager and excited at this event; the Pandits had had rare cause to speak in the past.

‘Zoon,’ began the Pandit furthest to the left, my great-great-great-(I didn’t even know how many greats)-grandfather. ‘You know what’s waiting down there. You know what you must do. You must do what I had done, so many, many years ago, and was foolish enough to believe no one would have to do again.’

‘There will always be a sign,’ croaked a Pandit towards the right, whose image was a faded black-and-white photograph. ‘You will know when the time comes, and when it does, you mustn’t hesitate.’

A flash of recognition stirred in my mind: Rahul Razdan, the first Guardian.

I didn’t move from my spot on the bed. It seemed my bones were sinking into the mattress like it was quicksand.

‘Listen,’ cut in the only portrait printed in colour, speaking briskly and importantly, ‘you’re really all we have left at this point.’

I blinked at him, thrown by his matter-of-fact cynicism. It didn’t do anything to calm my nerves, but before I could contemplate the matter thoroughly, voices had broken out again, some helpful, some chaotic, some frightening.

‘But you must be careful!’ came a voice from the middle of the wall. Soon I located the source: a sketch of an aged Pandit and his daughter. She had a rather wry look about her and did not move at all; it was almost as though she was part of the background. I wondered at how I had not noticed her before. My eyes shifted to the Pandit once again. His beard looked as though clumps had been torn out of it. His turban was unravelling at the end.

‘I have seen what Kruhen Chay can do,’ he continued. ‘I have watched him lure an innocent British soldier into his clutches and murder him the moment he had fulfilled his purpose. I have watched him shatter every window of this house and set alight every pile of snow. He infects and inflames the homes of the valley; I know the devastation he can wreak on Kashmir, and with time there shall be nothing left for him to consume; you must be very careful.’

‘You saw him murder someone?’ I whispered, sickened. To hear of it was one thing, and that ghastly enough; to witness a man have the life ripped from his feeble, frozen fingers was another thing entirely.

The Pandit nodded grimly.

‘And I was killed the very next day,’ he muttered. ‘Luckily I’d hidden my daughter in the broom cupboard . . . and taught her well enough to see that she kept him out . . . she took over . . . and she’d learnt well . . . perhaps I was too harsh on her then . . .’

‘It doesn’t matter how young you are,’ regaled one of the watercolours, interrupting as always. His colours were deep and vibrant, his pheran a bright white amidst fluffy orange pillows. His beard had been painted a deep brown, unlike the others; I suspected that it was his youth that always compelled him to speak. ‘What matters, in the end, is your strength of heart,’ he finished masterfully, ‘for it is that heart, and not your body, that is protecting us all.’

‘So no pressure,’ I muttered. ‘Thanks.’

Dimly she registered that she was screaming, and that someone was pulling frantically at her elbow. But it didn’t seem as though it was happening to her; she felt as though she was watching through a cracking, melting hourglass, a glimpse into someone else’s pain, into someone else’s grief. She could barely see a foot into her hazy, distorted surroundings, and her head spun.

The hand pulling at her disappeared. Immediately her fear intensified. All she knew was that she had to have it back, she had to have someone there, she couldn’t remain there, crouching in the blood-sodden dirt, on her own; and that without something to hold her down, she would be caught in the furious, fast-paced undercurrent of warped despair that she had always feared. She hadn’t even known who that person was; but somehow, in some small way, they had cared for her.

She yelled for help, for God, for anybody. But no one came. With her next gulp of air, she realized why. Smoke was billowing across the murky valley, squirming into alleyways and sanctuaries, strangling those foolish enough to clutch desperately at a fuming corpse, and who soon joined it in the hideous blackened pile of the dead. But she swore she would not be one of them. Not for herself, but for her daughter.

So Shanti planted a final kiss on the wrinkled forehead of her last loved elder, creating small rivulets of tears that ran down her still face, the only part of her saved from the charred rot caking her body. She lay unmoving, completely oblivious to this show of love. Her eyes were closed, but as though she had embraced death with open arms, as though she had known it was coming before it knew that itself. In a sudden gush of twisted desolation, Shanti almost laughed; she had died wearing her glasses. And after all these years, they had finally cracked.

My eyes skittered up to the bedroom mirror once more. I’d been sneaking quick glances at it for a while, each time hoping to see something encouraging and each time having these hopes dashed.

My hair was a tangled mess. No one looking at me then would have been able to tell that I had a fringe. Bits of black were sticking out of my stumpy braid. The slash across my cheek looked as though it had been made with a chainsaw. I looked closer and noticed my shivering knees. I shut my eyes firmly, forcing out the grave overlapping mumbles of the portraits.

This isn’t you.

But what if it is?

It isn’t.

Says who?

Says me.

Who even are you?

. . . I’m you, but smarter.

That makes no sense. So I’m like a two-faced rakshasa or something?

I never said I had a face.

So you’re an atma. I’m possessed. Perfect.

Zoon! Focus!

Sorry.

Tentatively, I let my eyelids slide open, petals on a blooming flower bud. The girl I saw in the mirror was tall and straight-backed. Her hair was thrown back over her shoulder in a jumble; people like her had no time for such things. She had the tiniest of scrapes across her cheek, no thinner than a mouse’s whisker.

I put my hands on my hips.

So did she.

I took in a deep, long breath.

‘Let’s do this thing.’

The living room has never felt smaller than when I walked in to find Mr Bhukhari at its centre. The black in his eyes seemed to have swelled, so that he no longer resembled a human as much as a bloodsucking insect. With a twisted grin like that of a poorly made puppet, he leered at me, waving a smudged piece of crumpled paper in the air—the deeds to the house.

Just then, I heard a gentle dripping of thick, clear liquid against the front window. I turned to stare at it, all of me tensing, as though it might spontaneously combust.

I heard a gulp, and whipped around to see Mr Bhukhari staring rigidly at the bare ceiling pressing against the strain of the snow at its corners. He clutched his papers so tightly that I saw whatever blood he had left leave his skin; he dug his shoes into the carpet, as though afraid he would be blown away by the wind.

A gush of water brought us to our senses; outside, a waterfall was streaming down the window in thick sheets. Beyond it, the world was thick smog and jumbled shouts. I stared at it, transfixed, as the ridges and bumps in the window grew more pronounced beneath the crystal cascade, almost as though all the snow on the roof had melted in that sudden instant.

A sinister hissing erupted from the fireplace; I turned my head so fast I felt the muscles in my neck twinge with the pain.

Drops of water had splattered on to the embers in the grate, thick and round, leaping back at once in wisps of steam.

I made to push my hair out of my face, and my hand brushed against moist, clammy skin, slick with sweat. I let out a small, controlled pant, and sucked in a lungful of hot air.

And that’s when I heard it—the gentle, elegant scrape of rusty claws against the inside of the chimney, accompanied by a foul smell that was growing dangerously familiar.

I leapt backwards as though I’d been burnt, my breathing becoming rapid and panicky, watching, listening as the sounds grew louder, punctuated by soft, dangerous hisses . . .

But nothing emerged.

And still nothing.

Mr Bhukhari let out a wild, fluctuating laugh, still smiling that horrible smile of his, with his mouth too full of teeth and his face a doughy mass of pale, lifeless flesh.

And then I felt an excruciating pain in my abdomen, so that I gasped and clutched at it, blind to everything else. My enemy’s first strike. A harpoon had struck me straight through my stomach; I was the helpless, dying fish, flopping at the bottom of the boat.

‘No!’ roared a sharp, fiery cry.

And all at once, the fireplace burst into flame.

The pain in my stomach lessened slightly; I could think clearly again.

I’d never seen the fireplace come alight of his own accord before. I’d thought he couldn’t manage it any more. Somehow, his fire was brighter and greater than any we could ever have lit. Smoke began billowing steadily from the crackling logs, and yet not one wisp was allowed to squirm up into the chimney. The fireplace continued to dispense dollops of smoke, until it curved sinuously against the wood and moved to fill the living room. Inexplicably, despite the flames, the air had cooled slightly.

Gradually, like a buried fossil, a shape began to emerge before me, growing clearer every second. It was something akin to the silhouette of a man, but this monster was nothing like a man. He was large, so large that the splotch of misery meant to serve as his head was pushing up against the ceiling. Warped limbs and chunks of body parts emerged from every side of him, spasming and flailing as though they were still attached to their owners. Perhaps he had swallowed them whole . . . And one of them was my father’s. I forced myself not to tremble.

All of him was a sickening, rotting black. But even in this black I could see the grotesque carvings of his past: a thousand decades, a thousand faces, a thousand screams. When he moved, the air around him rippled and distorted, so that it seemed like all the world was a crude, crumpled drawing, and he was a rip in the paper.

I should have destroyed that fireplace when I had the chance, he remarked coolly.

I flinched, but tried to alter it into a look of disgust. I couldn’t let him see that his horrific, rasping voice, like the scrape of metal against rock, had nearly made my ears bleed.

All at once he winced terribly and let out something akin to a growl. Turning to the fireplace, I saw that melted snow was continuing to drip serenely from the chimney, and the rush of steam sizzling within the smoke had collided with his burnt surface.

I stared too long.

Without warning, he lunged.

Acting on pure instinct, I flung myself towards the wall, as though I were a corpse already, without any thought as to where or how I would land. Had it not been for the carpet, who rose up to catch me in the soft, interlaced weaves of her cloth, I would surely have cracked something against the floor.

The sudden ferocity of his attack alarmed me. Every nerve cell in my body was screaming instructions at my frozen brain.

When I turned to face him again, I found him leering at me from beside a smouldering crater he’d made in the wall. Again he struck, but I was ready and waiting, and I dodged him once more. A small flicker of triumph swept across my pumping heart, and it felt lighter than it had in a while. I was winning!

Then I heard him burst into a cackling roar of pleasure, and my heart sank immediately. Once more, I saw him push himself out of a crater he’d hewn from the wall. The wood had splintered horribly, and it began to go a darker brown than I’d ever seen it, a dying tree unable to reach the soil.

He was destroying the house.

My house.

And for every blow I dodged, it would suffer.

I did not move, yet he sensed that I had understood. A deep chasm carved into his face began to twist itself so that the ends curved upwards. He surveyed me as a cruel army general would survey his deadened enemy, weak and wounded before the might of his guns, waiting patiently to be blasted into nightmarish nothingness.

Out of nowhere, a spark of light catapulted towards Kruhen Chay like a firework. The log sizzled against the surface of his distorted form, and he let out a fierce cry that tore through the air like a million shards of broken glass, cutting through my skin. Slowly, his yells melted into a slippery hiss of anger.

But before either of us had time to fully recover, the fireplace launched another flaming log into the room. Kruhen Chay smacked it away from him, spitting furious insults, and it collided heavily with the fireplace’s aged marble.

Rage curled his fingers into menacing claws. You think your pathetic attempts will hinder me? I who have earned my power every step of the way!

‘What do you mean “earned your power”?’ I replied bitterly. I felt my resolve beginning to grow again. ‘You’ve brought nothing but misery to people, and I’m putting an end to it.’

With irritation, he turned a deeper black than ever, so that the only way I could keep track of him was by looking for that which I could not see.

Silly, impertinent girl. I have been here longer than your filthy race can fathom. I’ll put an end to your chatter soon enough.

And he rose above the ground, readying himself for the attack.

I felt like a taut balloon, filled with too much air too quickly, on the verge of bursting from the pressure.

Just before I popped, my eyes latched desperately on to the twinkling glint of gold. My heart, pumping so adamantly and furiously a second before, seemed to have choked and stuttered to a stop. Because something was shimmering behind him, a myriad of delicate, glittering colours, precious uncut jewels glowing in the growing darkness. I couldn’t look away. And, at that moment, I realized I had to reach them.

Without knowing what they meant, or what they were, or why they had appeared so suddenly in the dark, my mind trained on them, blocking out all else, and refused to relent to any reason.

I began, one thread of the carpet at a time, to move closer.

‘So you weren’t always this awe-inspiring?’ I pressed, doing my best to distract him, stuttering from the effort to produce coherent speech. If I could just keep him talking . . .

Of course not. I was shadow.

‘You were a shadow?’

Not a shadow, you fool. I was shadow. All shadows. And I despised it.

‘Really? Why? That sounds like an interesting job!’

He seemed to swell with displeasure, his mouth twisted in seething anger.

It wasn’t a job! It was punishment. I could not exist without another, without a living being. I was dependent on . . . light.

The darkness rippled, as though he had shuddered.

Getting nearer . . . but mustn’t move too quickly . . . I was pressing forward, keeping my distance from master and servant alike . . .

But it mattered not, you see. Perhaps once, I needed light to exist. But now, I engulf this very light, I destroy it. You’re just like the rest of your kind. So sure they were, when they brought in that flame, of their lovely bright future.

‘Fire,’ I whispered to myself. ‘And that means you owed them, didn’t it?’

He gave a feral snarl.

I went on, louder, ‘For helping you to exist even at night? For letting you exist at all?’

I owe nothing!

The floor reverberated with the sudden force of his wrath, and I jerked back a step, feeling a sharp point like a shark’s tooth under my bare feet. I looked down and saw small nails jutting out of each crevice in the wood. Parts of the floor had cracked and risen higher than the rest, the planks beneath me a suddenly stormy sea.

Without the blaze, I was nothing, and they controlled this . . . fire.

I was inching closer . . . but my frustration increased with every step; I needed him to move so that I could see past him . . .

His voice grew malicious and sinister, dangerously silky.

And yet, with the flames, they brought in a new realm of shadow, and I grew . . . I am a human’s worst fear! I am built up of their misery and suffering, that which they will never overcome. I lord over them. I have taken everything from them as I will take now from you!

I saw it then. The split second in which he rose over me had been enough. I had seen it, and then I was sure. The crest was glowing. Mr Bhukhari, who was leaning heavily against the side of the fireplace, his eyes closed from the effort of staying alive himself, hadn’t noticed anything.

And yet it was clear to me. The crest was made of precious stones that glittered and danced in the flame of the roaring fire. The swans were indeed a delicate pink, and spread their wings lovingly around the third, misty-grey swan against a royal purple. The light shimmered across them, and when it caught a particular tilt on the crest, I noticed that the three swans joined together in the shape of a palm.

I felt as though I, too, was glowing from the inside, as though a searing, red-hot iron had lit up the core of my soul. ‘You won’t!’ I burst out at Kruhen Chay. ‘You never have and never will be able to defeat those in whom our magic is strong!’

I thought fleetingly of Altaf, goofy, carefree and spontaneous. How foolish I’d thought him when we first met.

A malicious, warped, sickeningly mocking voice slid its coils around me and pulled me back to the present.

Like your father?

I opened my mouth to retaliate, but my brain was lagging behind, and I could think of nothing to say.

He was so strong he didn’t even need to wait till he was of age, did he? Ah, it is always so simple. He thought he was destined to be a king, and let me lurk in the corners of his feeble mind till I drove him mad, taking such pleasure in revealing him to be not even a mere peasant.

I swallowed hard, struggling against the knot of grief in my windpipe.

‘He was the first, and the last. He was wrong.’

Kruhen Chay gaped at me in amusement, so stunned was he by my words. His reaction to what I had hoped was a war cry gave me a nauseous feeling in the pit of my stomach, as though he’d just shrunk me down to the carpet.

It must be entertaining to have such a lively imagination. I have slain every other useless Guardian who dared to face me, you pathetic child. What makes you think you, not even yet Guardian, will be any different?

‘Because he was wrong,’ I repeated.

It dawned on me then, slowly, magnificently.

He was wrong.

You cannot rid the world—or yourself—of darkness. You cannot fight it as you would any other enemy. It will always exist, and it will always confront you; that is the price we pay for being human. And that, I realized, was why not a single Guardian had ever survived. They threw themselves against the darkness like a drowning man upon the rocks; eventually, they broke.

But you cannot oppose the darkness by making yourself an obstacle to it. There was only one way, I saw, to combat the darkness—to go through it.

Kruhen Chay lunged at me, finally sick of my babbling, with a furious snarl. But I didn’t turn away. Before he could change course, I took a deliberately large step forward. When I felt my front toes brush merrily against the carpet, I sucked in one last deep breath before jumping straight at the oncoming darkness, forcing myself to think of the fireplace beyond.

And then I was flying.

And then I was misery . . . I was the cries of lost children, sobbing for their home. I was the sound of bullets striking the sky, ripping it to pieces. I was the whistling of a hundred faded bits of blood-red string, sinking against the wall of an empty mosque. I was the bitter, stale air of Kashmir, longing for the wind. I was the desperate clanging of an empty well, a dull and hollow block of stone. I was the paradise lost.

And then I was nothing at all.

And then I was light.

The slam of my bones against frost-cold marble brought me back to the present. I felt my jaw shudder from the impact, waited as many seconds as I dared, and forced myself to stand. Kruhen Chay was writhing like a startled lizard, his back to me, hissing and scraping his nails against the centre of his deformed body. Without sparing either him or his then screeching accomplice another glance, I pressed my filthy hand to the crest. I was so weak and wobbly I could barely move. I hadn’t expected it to be enough. But something from deep within the crest had caught my wrist like a magnet, and was pulling me closer every moment.

The crest locked around my palm, cracks in the brick surrounding cool marble closing up as it shimmered, and suddenly I could feel something moving beneath my fingers. It was smooth, delicate and utterly beautiful. Despite the knowledge in my heart that this fight was not nearly over, my muscles unwound and relaxed beneath my skin.

The warmth of the magic began to move past my fingers, over my wrist, a velvet glove.

With a sudden surge, I felt it gush through all of me at once, as though each of my cells was swelling and bursting and forming anew. I would have screamed, but it coated my vocal cords like syrup, shining out from within me so that I could feel rays of light gleaming out from my body.

I collapsed beside the fireplace. Yet I was no longer shivering. I simply lay there like a forgotten rag doll in the wreckage of a fire, with nowhere to go and nothing to go to and no way to get there if I did.

I rose to my feet.

Something light and powerful was surging through my heart.

My body seemed no longer to need encouragement or even instructions.

I was ready.

No, snarled Kruhen Chay, his voice no longer an omnipresent siren’s call but the shattered, feeble whining of a bratty child.

You . . . you . . .

He turned savagely on Mr Bhukhari, as though noticing him for the first time. With a brutal slice, he cut through the darkened flesh on his victim’s ear. It did not bleed red but oozed a thick, black sludge that dripped down the side of his face and joined Kruhen Chay once more, shattering their connection at last.

Mr Bhukhari took a single step back, as though trying to escape from his own body. He dropped to his knees, form contorted. A guttural wail tore from him as he shrunk before me, suffocating darkness flooding out of him. His hair began to recede and turned a foggy, miserable grey.

‘Traitor!’ he roared, sinking into himself as he clutched at his mutilated face. ‘I did what you asked! I brought you the house!’

And you are no longer of use to me, finished Kruhen Chay, not even looking at his former ally. I’m amazed you didn’t foresee this. As if I’d waste my time helping your people form a nation once I had all I needed from you. Like a fool you let me use your body, helped me acquire a powerful form! Further proof of how impossibly incompetent and overconfident humans are. So much so, in fact, that while I took your body, you refused to allow me access to your mind. If you had, it might perhaps have saved your worthless life.

He paused, as though unsure whether it was worth his time to continue. When he spoke again, his voice hummed with malicious pleasure.

Of course, your unwillingness didn’t stop me.

‘What?’ gasped Mr Bhukhari, barely able to form words, eyes wide and watery from the smoke, his limbs going limp against him.

You think I’d allow a human to make my decisions for me? I have had control over your mind since the moment I entered you, fool. I played along with your little game; I kept you conscious, let you believe you were in charge. You were far less trouble that way. But they were my triumphs, every one of them, all of them weakening my ancient foe. Bombing the police station, armies pouring funds into shrapnel, using this force to keep control and firing to kill, regardless of whom the bullet struck, this violent bitterness against your nation that spreads like contagion . . . Did you ever, even for a second, truly believe that you had the power to keep me out?

In my mind’s eye, I saw an inflamed, red eyeball, staring without seeing, contorted in pain, bits of metal sinking slowly into its flickering iris. I saw a hailstone of rocks showering from the sun. And I realized that we were far more tainted by the darkness than any of us anywhere knew, above all, the man writhing on the carpet before me.

Mr Bhukhari let out a bellow of pain, of fear, of emptiness, betrayed by the devil inside himself. For all but a second, his gaze caught mine, brimming with tortured sadness. And not even the most skilled cryptographer could have deciphered all that swirled within the sunken depths of his eyes. Then he collapsed against the ground, so near death that his body seemed to have begun its decay already, his sagging skin turning to festered flesh against his charred skull, and Kruhen Chay kicked him uncaringly aside.

The darkness willed me to drown in his burnt, rotting face, willed me to choke from the smoke surrounding his figure, nearly lured me within the reach of his subtly glinting claws.

But I would never do that again.

I had seen him for what he really was—a shadow.

And I was no longer afraid of the dark.

I stood firmly before the fireplace, blocking his escape route, and felt the magic thrumming in my bones, waiting eagerly for the charge. The flames glowed brighter behind me.

Suddenly, with a fleeting glance at me, he burst out of the living room, trailing putrid smoke, hell-bent on destroying all he could of the house—his hated enemy that yet battled against his rise to power and dominance. I knew what he was after, what he had always been after: the removal of his final obstacle. For then he would sink deep within the once fertile earth, poison every tree, let every flower rot, hack at every hilltop, mar every sunrise and fester within every decaying heart. He would fuse with Kashmir itself, the land and my people surrendering to him and his suffocating, cruel darkness, fire and blood ruling as his fellows. And he would be indestructible. Without hesitation, I chased after him, so quickly it seemed I was plummeting from all that I had been to all that I was then.

The banister bore the long scratches of his claws, and the bedroom door hung by a single, fractured hinge, bent over like a forgotten lover, a vine of hope preventing her from leaving a silent grave.

I came expecting cries of pain, yells of fury and the wreckage of loss. What I heard instead were whoops of encouragement and bangs of celebration.

Kruhen Chay had become tangled in squirming bed sheets, and the portraits were, of course, the ones making all the noise. As I watched, the Mughal warrior launched his gleaming, unused spear out of his frame and straight at Kruhen Chay. It soared through the air, a miracle of creation, and landed squarely on target, covering Kruhen Chay with a splatter of white and grey paint. His look of incredulity nearly made me smile; he had clearly not expected the house to put up such a fight.

‘Excellent work!’ came the tinkling voice of the empress. ‘I could have shot it better myself, of course, but . . .’

‘Dear,’ the emperor was muttering, ‘I’m the ruler, I think I’m supposed to give the orders . . .’

‘Please just stop arguing, whatever else you do!’ came the noise of the normally quiet mantri, who was in the process of scribbling so furiously on the scroll in front of him that he had ink on his glasses. ‘I’m trying to copy down the court proceedings, and I’ll muddle it up with you yelling like that.’

In a wave of untamed brutality, Kruhen Chay struck at the bed sheet with a jagged claw. The sound of ripping fabric propelled me forward, and, feeling every element within the house bind itself to me, I focused upon a single spot beneath me, launching a nail from the cracking floor into his eye. With a bellow, he released the ravaged bed sheet, who sunk, defeated, to the floor. As he clutched his face, I saw his edges grow light and blurred.

He went for the portraits next, his aim on the back wall, snarling at the Kashmiri seated furthest left; the one who had first trapped him in his steaming prison. His claws began to cut through the faded bronze frame like butter, sawing at wood shavings and twisted bits of metal, melting them as he went—and instantaneously they shuddered to a halt, just before they reached the painting itself. Spluttering, he turned to see me, my arms trembling with the strain of holding him back, the rush of power flooding through me directed straight at his struggling limbs.

Beginning to sweat (which I hardly ever do), but smiling still, I launched him out of the bedroom in one swift move. He tumbled like a misshapen cricket ball down the hallway and into the library.

The Pandit seemed completely unperturbed by these proceedings and sat nonchalantly in his damaged frame. Smoothing his single bunched up tuft of hair, where the paint had smudged slightly as it melted from the heat of the darkness, he took the opportunity to begin narrating the nature of consciousness to anyone who would listen.

After silently thanking my ancestors for their obsession with unnecessarily large and extravagant frames, I hurried towards the library.

My bare feet felt the scorching heat of the wood, and I looked down to see stains of faded black against the ground, dark footsteps of a clumsy thief.

I was so occupied with examining the wood that I slammed straight into the closing door.

I burst in with an exclamation of shock and pain, and the sight that greeted me only added to it. A tidal wave of yellow paper and hard book covers were soaring through the air, straight at the doorway. For a moment, I believed they were soaring towards me, and I was on the verge of stopping them with a rush of magic, when I realized they were aiming for Kruhen Chay, then a shrunken, faded figure, cowardly compared to his earlier grandeur. He let out a muffled, garbled yell as he was buried under a mountain of books.

It seemed that the armchair was directing the attack, and directing it very systematically at that. He was puffing out a long string of precise words, riding on one large gulp of air.

‘27, 82, straight to his head, 90, 120, now, hit him with the pointed end first, 32, 68, cover up that stray limb . . .’

Abruptly, his chain of orders was snapped in half by the cries of his troops and the screech of tearing paper.

I moved forward and focused on paralysing Kruhen Chay. A ball of enchanted energy then encompassed the shuddering swarms of binding and paper, shining golden with light, yet rippling with darkness beneath, and I tried to think of how I would get him out of the library with half the library on top of him. It turned out I didn’t need to worry.

It seemed that the bookshelves cared more for their books than they had ever let on.

With bangs that would put a chaotic firework display to shame, they knocked each other over, beginning from the very last bookshelf and continuing in one smooth wave to the very first. The thudding grew louder and louder, till they sounded like a pride of lions breaking into a chorus of roars. I threw my arms up over my head, hearing the fleet of bookshelves collide, crash and sink.

When they quieted, I raised my head to see that the final bookshelf had landed squarely upon Kruhen Chay, pinning him down to prevent his escape, and had halted just inches from the door. Long, brown scrapes against the ceiling gave the appearance of a wild beast having tried frantically to dig its way out.

At first, I had a sudden urge to push the bookshelves upright once more, lest their worn wood catch fire from the heat of Kruhen Chay. But it seemed he was no longer the blaze he had once been.

The books, however, had not been spared the bookshelves’ attack.

‘Would it kill you to lose a few pounds?’

‘I think we all ought to take a nice, deep breath . . .’

‘Everyone—all puzzles have an answer. Think your way out of this, come on.’

‘Are you up for a quick debate on that?’

‘If it’s still raining, I’m not coming out!’

I laughed softly to myself, still concentrating all my energy on that single point on my fingertips from which I could feel heat emanating, fighting to keep my enemy immobile.

A memory from an old, unlabelled bottle surfaced before me; fishing on a still, gentle lake, leaning out of the side of the tilting shikara, watching as women wove near the water weeds, holding tight to the merry rod as something struggled fiercely beneath.

‘Get off him!’ I yelled at last. ‘I can’t hold him forever!’

With a single whoosh, the light within me erupted in a tidal wave that gushed through the library, and I had shoved the bookshelf above Kruhen Chay into a standing position once more. It stood, empty and alone, in the middle of the room. Slowly, steadily, eyes closed in concentration yet sensing the magic around me, I began to drag the splatter of darkness that remained out from under the jumble of books. I tried to steer him away from those who I could see were badly torn. I could feel each slice in their yellowed pages, as though it were a jagged knife grating against my own neck.

But his power was formidable yet, and he fought to regain control of his limbs. As he did so, I noticed that some were beginning to shrink; they seemed to be melting into thick crude oil. Perhaps those weren’t footsteps I’d seen earlier.

I had allowed it to distract me a second too long. Kruhen Chay had broken my shaking amateur hold, and he slammed past me at once, snaking down the stairs. Clutching my shoulder, I pelted past him, skidding so badly it seemed that the floor was indeed slicked in oil.

I could hear the fire crackling, cutting off his first route of escape; and yet he had not made for the living room at all.

Panic echoed dimly around me.

Oh, no . . . oh, no . . . don’t let him reach that door, Zoon . . . don’t let him reach that door!

I stumbled on the last step and tumbled down into the front room, narrowly missing hitting my head against the wall. My heart thudded heavily for a moment, trying to prove to me that we were okay, I was still alive, I was working fine.

Kruhen Chay had sped towards the door, but the chair had no intention of letting him leave; with a war cry that sounded suspiciously like ‘Die, devil, die!’ he launched himself at the door handle and barricaded it from the inside.

Kruhen Chay let out a snarl of undiluted fury and flashed a deep black once more. He was quickly regaining whatever strength the house had managed to take from him, and he slashed uncontrollably at the quixotic quill, who had taken it upon himself to spear out his eye.

But it would hardly have mattered even if he’d grown another limb—I knew what to do.

‘Now!’ I cried out, and before I had even finished the word, cracks had begun forming against each plank of wood on the walls; they trembled with the strain. Time stood still, frozen in awe, and the pipes burst from the walls, like hidden dragons, with a shattering splintering of wood. Each pipe threw itself forward, eager to enter the battlefield, free from the dark at last.

Blasts of mist jetted across the room so that my eyes blurred and became useless; Kruhen Chay’s cries rang horribly through the room, growing fainter and fainter.

I raised my hands in front of me and made to clear the air . . . and he emerged, thrashing and convulsing against the steam as it leached the misery from his surface, spitting out a long rush of furious, fuming words.

I watched, as though the hourglass had slowed, as Kruhen Chay was thrown against the ground. He was melting, all of him, the black tar of his limbs losing shape. He stuck to the ground like chewed gum, spitting out enraged insults that grew quieter and quieter, until his voice was a hoarse memory of yesterday.

Just then, I heard another unfamiliar noise—the thick, gentle sound of shifting cloth. The carpet, who, to my knowledge, had never so much as looked out of the window, was moving. Steadily, smilingly, she twisted herself over at her right corner, so that I caught a glimpse of a metal handle beneath her thick, elegant fabric.

The handle was bloated and rusty, so disfigured from years of disuse that it no longer resembled a handle at all. Yet when I touched it, it leapt open as though it had been waiting for me all its life.

It led down into some sort of cave. I leaned in closer and was met with a gust of steam. It tasted stale and lifeless. My stomach coiled around my ribs in fear and comprehension.

The hammam.

Over my shoulder, Kruhen Chay slumped weakly against the chair’s steady legs, flopping about uselessly like a headless cockroach.

I closed my eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. Then I felt my magic release the panting quill on to the haggard desk. It was like a pinpoint of life within the vast darkness of my closed lids.

Slowly, steadily, I coaxed it to curl around Kruhen Chay, sealing the steam around him. Then, after pulling the bonds tight to form a rope, I pulled Kruhen Chay closer and closer.

Just before he reached me, I opened my eyes. Still he tried to fight against the invisible cords around him. In a single movement, I flung the bundle of darkness down into the hammam.

As he neared the cave where he’d once been entrapped for hundreds of long, grinding years, its hidden entrance began to slowly bend open with a horrible creak, as though it, too, had been waiting. The screech of metal and stone boomed in the normally silent hammam. Layers of dust began to flow like water from the sudden unprecedented disturbance.

And below that, it was too dark for the sun’s rays, cowardly despite their bright bravado, to pierce. It was the dark of creatures that are slow and old, lingering on the edge of life, yet unclaimed by an uncaring death.

Something rose then, from the very corner of the hammam—a figure, unmoving, white and deathly pale, as though ill. His eyes seemed white and pupil-less, and I could see the worn wood of the ground right through him. He rose, moving towards me, passing straight through rusty heaters . . . and yet, somehow, I felt no urge to dodge a possible attack. I knew him somehow . . . he was my friend.

He flew past me, slowly, gently, as though he had not seen the world for a hundred years and was almost frightened of what he might find. He inclined his head towards me. He very nearly smiled. Then he drifted up to the fireplace and rose up through the chimney. I could no longer see him at all. There wasn’t a shred of evidence that he’d even existed.

The roar of my enemy, still putting up a stubborn fight, brought me harshly back to earth. He fought against my hold; I gritted my teeth with the effort to keep steady.

He gasped in pain; his struggles subsided as the steam held him fast in its iron hold. Scriptures engraved aeons ago in the stone began to glow and twist, melting and freezing anew.

As I forced him to enter his miserable cavern, he let out a final, raspy cry of bitterness and anger and unquestionable loss. He turned once more to stare at me, his newly translucent, emaciated body twisting horribly as he did so, the cracks meant to serve as his mouth twisting in hatred . . .

There was a crash as stone thudded against the ground, sealed once more.

He was gone.

Gone for now, I told myself, calming my heaving lungs. I gave a great sigh and continued to breathe deeply till the air entering my body felt nearly the same as the air leaving it.

Then I stood up.

All at once, the walls detonated into deafening cheers. I allowed a smile to slide across my lips.

As I walked into the living room, they continued to hoot and clap.

‘What a show! I really enjoyed the light effects!’ called the quill eagerly.

‘Ugh, ignore him! You were fantastic! What a feat, what a battle to have fought, especially at your age! I never expected it. I’ll say quite frankly . . .’ the fireplace put in.

‘Completely brilliant!’ roared the king’s portrait. ‘I’m proud to have you serving in my court!’

‘I agree, sahib! That was, hands down, the most memorable court proceeding ever!’

‘Yes, I must say,’ put in the watercolour Pandit, ‘it seems I was quite a fitting source of guidance and inspiration.’

‘Very well done,’ came the steady, calming tone of the armchair from the library. ‘I was leaning towards taking a different route, but your way was better, I must say.’

‘Armchair,’ I murmured in a tentative, hushed voice, suddenly unsure of my post as Guardian, ‘do you think I made the right choice? About not trying to destroy Kruhen Chay, I mean.’

He didn’t say anything for a moment. When he did, I could hear a smile in his voice. It wasn’t joyous; it was a sad, gentle, quiet sort of smile.

‘Yes,’ he replied softly. ‘Such a thing would be impossible, Zoon. Darkness is now as much a part of every human as light is; there will always be darkness somewhere in the world and in us. What is important is that we do not let it control us.’

I nodded. For some reason, I thought of Tathi.

‘But it is clear that you understand that already,’ said the armchair, in a lighter, encouraging tone. ‘The resilience and resistance this house displayed today showed powerful magic; it has proved that your spirit is braver and stronger than any other Guardian we have ever had.’

My smile grew wider, and I felt a rush of pride in my chest.

The books continued slapping their pages together and cheering deafeningly, oblivious to this quiet exchange, rowdy and rough as a full cricket stadium.

And then, so silent that I could almost believe it had been wishful thinking, I heard the softest and gentlest of voices coming from beneath me.

‘That was really something, wasn’t it? For a minute there, I was really scared that you’d hurt yourself.’

I knelt down and patted the carpet gently. ‘You made sure I didn’t,’ I replied. ‘Thank you!’

‘And thank you to all of you,’ I called out, beginning to feel like I’d just won some kind of award. ‘You helped me so much . . . and . . . hold up . . .’ The tiniest of gears inside me stuttered to a stop, clogged by an interesting observation. ‘Wait a minute . . . how can all of us hear each other if we’re in separate rooms?’

There was a moment of dead silence, like when a bride spills rogan josh on her best sari an hour before the wedding. Then the house exploded all over again, only this time in a chorus of laughter.

‘What, did you think you’d become Guardian and everything would stay the same?’ called the fireplace.

‘She thought she’d fight Kruhen Chay and then just go about her business as usual!’ joked the armchair, and the desk practically broke a leg sniggering. I couldn’t help but grin.

I turned round to face the house. ‘Guys,’ I said loudly, in what I hoped was an authoritative enough voice for them not to start laughing again, ‘Ma’s going to be home soon with Tathi and we need this place cleaned up. I know we can’t fix everything, but let’s try to do what we can. Okay?’

To my utter amazement, they all began following my instructions right away. A little ray of pride, like the candle on a birthday cake, sparked inside me.

I decided to do this systematically, room by room. While the fireplace worked on sucking in all the smoke he’d dispensed and shoving it up the chimney, I straightened out the desk, mended the quill’s torn feather slowly (he just wouldn’t stop going on and on about it—his ‘battle scar’ he called it), the magic gentler then, and, with just a touch, I was able to restore the shine to the desk’s tattered surface.

The floorboards took a while to mend, what with their splintered edges and nails jutting out, but I managed it. I left the walls as they were; I couldn’t make sense of the maze of pipes tangled with shattered wood.

Once the carpet had been cleaned out (which took surprisingly little time), I moved upstairs.

Halfway up, I caught a glimpse of the quiet garden outside. A bright blush of chocolate brown was creeping rapidly up the chinar, sealing jagged cracks, filling the air with a sugary scent and growing small spots of green as it meandered. I gave the banister an excited little squeeze.

The bedroom was really quite a mess. It didn’t take me long to mend the brave bed sheet, though, magic dancing from my fingertips; she was then promptly greeted with a round of fierce applause as she slept tiredly, yet happily, on the bed once more. But I’d no idea what to do with the Pandit’s desecrated frame.

Finally, I settled on mending the metal links within it as best I could. Hopefully, it would be enough to avoid awkward questions.

As I healed the house, restoring whatever I could to its former majesty, I felt it resonate within me, a talisman of sunshine.

In the desperate hope that some of it at least might have righted itself by the time I got there, I checked on the library last. I should have known better than to do that. The books seemed to have become far more confused than usual, fighting over torn pages, toppling over one another and jostling for space in the only standing bookshelf, who was then dangerously close to falling over once again.

I buried my face in my hands before even beginning.

Deciding that this would be a lot easier if I could just see past the flurry of pages, I moved all the books to one small corner with a sweep of my arm. This rush of magic only fuelled their zest and chatter further, although those with missing pages paused and stuttered, lost for words.

After a great deal of effort, which involved having to suspend certain bookshelves in the air while reorganizing their neighbours, I’d managed to get the bookshelves back into respectable order.

‘Not bad,’ I muttered to myself. Sure, a few of them were crooked, and yes, they did have plenty of bumps and scratches, and, of course, some of them may have been upside down, but it wasn’t too shabby for a first try.

The books were, if anything, even more frustrating. Eventually I was forced to immobilize them while I read through every single torn page to determine which book it belonged to. Once they found themselves whole again, they began to fly back to their places on the shelves.

With the library then looking as though it had been hit by a natural disaster of slightly lesser intensity, I trooped downstairs once more.

‘Zoon! What do I do with this old thing?’ called the fireplace as he chucked glowing embers at a small pile of ashes on the ground beside him.

‘What is that?’

I leaned closer to get a clear look—it wasn’t all ashes. Some of it looked like dead skin . . .

‘That’s Mr Bhukhari.’

With a lurch that nearly made me sick, I launched myself backwards.

‘Ew! Gross! Why is he—it—on the carpet? Get it out!’

‘Where do you propose I put it?’

‘Just chuck it out of the chimney!’

The fireplace inhaled sharply, partly because I’d told him to and partly because my hysterics irritated him. The small lump of black rot, then all that was left of what had once been an unbroken, strong, healthy man, whooshed up the chimney as he did so. With a single large gust of air, he proclaimed it far away already.

‘Why did that happen to him?’ I whispered, still horrified by what I’d just seen.

‘When you give all inside you to darkness,’ the fireplace replied, ‘it leaves you nothing but an empty shell. He left his life in the hands of a creature known to deceive and betray. ’

We were silent for a moment. I hadn’t thought I cared for that man. But I did. How horrific it had been to watch him descend further into the darkness and his maze of thorns, into manipulation and madness, into his own shrivelled heart. I imagined him as a younger man, seated at dinner with his family, happy and hopeful and whole. Somehow, death is always painful, no different for your greatest enemy than for your closest companion—and he was somewhere inexplicably in between. It leaves a bitter taste in the air; a taste of sickness, sudden fear and lost opportunity.

Just then, I heard the grating twist of a key in our lock.

‘Ma’s home.’