The City of Shadows

Something sinister infused the air. It oozed out of cracks on the pavement, dispersed from the generic, flickering-tube-light lit shops – Raju Xerox, Prabheem Dry Fruits – and gathered momentum with the rapidly fading light, which cast a gloom over the whole city of Chhayapur, India (noteworthy attractions: non-existent), marking the end of another disillusioning day, indistinguishable from yesterday. 

The stranger walked on, wearier with each footstep. The road looked just like the one before. A `'Stick No Bills' sign on an empty wall, waiting with gradually diminishing hope for a few posters, the way a retired policeman may look out for a neighbourhood thief, houses so unnaturally vacant they surely had to be heaving with malicious activities, and the occasional, withered weed. 

The shop names were in English, as were the signboards, but when the stranger approached the fellow who must have been Raju (the Xerox man) and Prabheem (of the dry fruits fame) and an anonymous loiterer (profession unknown) to ask them for directions, they had looked up with expressions of blankness and wariness.

Standing outside Raju’s realm of cheap pens in lidless secondhand tupperware boxes, the stranger sighed and pulled open Lang-Switch. The translation app had automatically downloaded on her phone six months ago, stubbornly refusing to be deleted and jealously preventing another translator from being downloaded too. 

She’d often wondered about how reliable Lang-Switch was. Occasionally people, like that pot-bellied security guard or lisping woman aboard a rickshaw, would look puzzled and sometimes just walk away when she tried desperately to translate urgent questions (often “Where is the nearest loo?”) on Lang-Switch. Maybe it was a virus. 

Her boss (famous for an ill-temper and sociopathic tendencies) had instructed her to find a particular Indian weaver- apparently the last of his kind- in Chhayapur, a city in the middle of nowhere with a notoriously indecipherable dialect. Lang-Switch had been absolutely unhelpful, remaining completely quiet in the McDonald’s on the highway when she had found, rarely enough, a Chhayapurian who actually knew where Chhayapur was. If not for that McChicken chomping Chhayapurian businessman’s bubbly attitude, copious hand gestures and the occasional Hindi, Marathi or English word, she would have never reached the city at all. 

That she had got here was no thanks to Lang-Switch.  

This time, however, Lang-Switch behaved in a characteristically capricious manner and delivered the answer that sent the stranger to Building 28, a few streets away. The house was cracked along the side and stained a vivid red with paan. She knocked, rang the ancient doorbell which hiccuped gently, hollered, but there was no response. Thinking murderous thoughts about unreliable weavers, lonely towns and the sinking sun, she pushed against the door, and, surprisingly enough, it opened easily. 

Twilit murkiness gave shadows in the house a tangible presence. Even the dust that clung to the broken table and the cracked floor tiles had a sense of foreignness and power. This was not mundane, pesky, regular dust, but a dust of secrets and whispers. Both a little shocked and more than a little irritated at Lang-Switch (for mis-translating), Raju (for misdirecting) and her boss (for emulating ‘The Devil Wears Prada’), the stranger was turning to leave when a scrap of paper on the floor caught her eye.

It was a newspaper clipping with the headline in English: Young Chhayapurian Vanishes Mysteriously. 

Squinting to read the text of the article, she saw the words, “...his mother and brothers claimed to have seen a man with red eyes outside their house on that day. However, authorities suspect because of money problems…” but the rest was no longer legible. It was accompanied by a photo of a man smiling brightly up at the camera, eyes brimming with hope. He didn’t look like the type to abscond because of “money problems”. Maybe it was a lack of food or the long wearying journey she had just endured, but the stranger felt disproportionate sadness for the man in the article. 

She left the house quickly, not sorry to leave the atmosphere of misery behind. But night was on its way, and she had nowhere to go. She approached an elderly woman, sitting on the steps of the neighbouring house and staring vacantly out onto the road, and urgently asked for a hotel. The woman hissed quickly and suddenly in an unfamiliar language.  Lang-Switch brightened on cue: 

“Darkness is falling early tonight in Chhayapur. Darkness fell early that night too.” 

The stranger shivered with incomprehension and unease. The old woman turned away and went back to looking at the world around with unseeing, unwilling eyes. In her hands, eerily, was the same newspaper clipping that had been in the house. 

Something nagged the stranger, adding to her unease the way a clothing label scratches against you, or wet jeans cling to your skin. As she backed away quickly from the woman, she realised what it was. The old woman had the same eyes as the young man in the article. But they were haunted instead of hopeful.   

What had happened to that man? How was the old woman holding a clipping that had last been behind closed doors? What was going on in Chhayapur? Feverish thoughts swirling through her head, the stranger was almost running now. Air resistance seemed stronger than usual, slowing her down, whispering insidious, indecipherable things in her ears. Every flash of light from an ignorant, passing car was an electric shock; every footstep behind her was a man with red eyes. On one level she knew her hysteria was both unwarranted and irrational. But there was danger in the air. 

Wait! Hadn’t she seen that shop display before? Grimy stacks of crumbling nuts, an outdated calendar, decorated with a computer-generated waterfall, and a creaking table fan had never felt safer. Prabheem’s dry fruit shop! Finally, familiar terrain. 

Lang-Switch activated. 

“Do not enter the shop. Only Building 28 is safe.”

How was this possible? The stranger wavered at the doorstep, racking her head for a logical explanation for how Lang-Switch could be translating out of empty air. 

With a flood of relief, she saw the cheerful man from McDonalds who had directed her to Chhayapur standing in the shop, a packet of cashew nuts in his hands. A sane, normal individual. He’d help her. The stranger stepped purposefully towards the shop and they made eye contact. But was his posture a little straighter, more confident than it had been? And was the upward curve of his smile slightly predatory? And surely it couldn’t be the overhead lights alone that gave his eyes a reddish tint? 

Lang-Switch turned on again. 

“Run. ”

The stranger needed no other cue and charged down the road, blinded with terror. Footsteps pounded behind her, louder and louder as they came closer. How much time before he reached her? She tripped on her shoe laces and screamed. Suddenly, out of what seemed like thin air, two people came speeding down the street. Was she hallucinating, or were they Raju and Prabheem, of the grotty shops and sullen, unresponsive attitudes coming to her aid? And did they look startlingly familiar? As she kept running, hearing the sound of collision and an eerily inhuman growl behind her she realised it was their eyes. 

They must be the brothers, she thought as she shut the door of Building 28 behind her, collapsing onto the ground.

Hardly five roads away, a weaver sat waiting for the woman who would not come. He shivered. Chhayapur was a colder, harsher place than usual tonight. Chhaya was Hindi for shadow, and the name had never fit better. Strange things were awake. The abandoned Xerox and Dry Fruit shops that had closed years ago when their owners had died merely months after their brother’s disappearance- superstitiously avoided by Chhayapurians-were open again. Maybe their restless, residual spirits still saturated the air, flickered and sighed. The weaver wondered what stories they had to tell. If they could tell them. But of course, the dead can’t translate into the language of the living, not even in a place like Chhayapur. 

The weaver’s doorbell rang, and he opened it to the man with the red eyes and the slightly hungry smile.