Enid

As I sip yet another hot brew of lemongrass tea with honey, I sit contemplating my next move. My trembling, sweaty hands, which even the tea doesn’t seem to steady, make it difficult for me to type. For being a storyteller comes with its own boundaries of wariness — especially, a story like this one that leaves you shaking to your very core, as I am right now.

I still remember that cold, crisp December morning when mom and I were looking for a new apartment to rent. Tired of our leaky roof, damp walls and noisy neighbours, we craved a wholesome change. That morning, I was the happiest I had ever been after an aleatory phone call from our hardworking broker left me beaming. Our house had been on the market for six months before we closed on a decent offer that left us with some savings, despite the damage the roof repairs had done to our pockets. 

“The house sold!” — her voice had the same excitement, I imagine, of someone who had just won the lottery. I remember thinking, ‘This old dump is someone else’s problem now,’ as we hurried home and began packing the last of our suitcases and taped the last cardboard box shut.

Mom and I had been ready to move for years but much to our chagrin, looking for houses to rent in one of India’s most expensive cities was fatiguing, to say the least. We had been contemplating our big move for at least a year before finally zeroing in on a deal. 

Almost out of the blue, we found a quaint one-bedroom apartment right within our budget in Juhu out of all the places in Mumbai. This place had everything — the local market, which wasn’t too far away, frequent buses and the beach that was just a stone’s throw from the apartment.

When we first walked into the old, three-floor-walk-up, we didn’t expect to find a spacious living room with a mini kitchen that even had a dining table for two at its entrance. The semi-furnished house was airy, fresh, renovated, and the mini balcony at the end even gave you a glimpse of the vast Arabian sea. (For the fortunate few who have had the harrowing experience of looking for an apartment in Mumbai, you know that any house with a balcony is a no-brainer.)

Suffice to say, I loved it, though mom had her suspicions. ‘Why do you think it is going for so cheap?’ she wondered out loud, but I brushed her fears aside because I was ecstatic to think that, come Mumbai’s monsoons, I would be revelling in my cup of hot chai with fresh pakoras that I’d buy from the local vendor around the corner.

What’s more was that the landlord's family lived right below us — a sweet couple in their fifties with a rather young daughter. The Lewises were a warm, welcoming couple; the father, Anthony, was a jolly ol’ pot-bellied man, who liked the occasional evening drink and sported a beard like Santa Claus, and his wife, Elizabeth, was your typical homemaker who greeted neighbours with delicious homemade sweets for Christmas. 

Their daughter, Enid, was around 5 or 6 years old and always wore two long pigtails with her Mary Jane shoes, which she had in almost every colour.

The few times that I visited the house to ensure we had hot running water and no impending repairs before moving in, Enid insisted on sitting me down at the table with her dainty tea set where she enjoyed playing the perfect hostess.

My amateur inspections of the house revealed no major skeletons in the closet except for one thing — which, at the time, seemed so strange but intriguing. When I stood on the balcony, I’d see these oddly shaped stains on the wall across from the building. They were odd because they resembled graffiti of little children. 

What’s weird is that they appeared to be staring back at me.

Each of the five children, who seemed to be painted in a row, had differently shaped heads and hairstyles, but their hands lay listless to the sides of their body, almost as though they were helpless.

I chalked that one up to — ‘Stop watching scary movies before bedtime’, and got myself home.

***

It was February before we moved in and there was still a nip in the air but we didn’t notice with all the moving and packing and unboxing that was going on around us. I had my favourite purple sweater tied around my waist because loading the dusty mini Tempo was a task I had to handle alone. On reaching our new place, mom and I were exhausted and just dumped the boxes and suitcases anywhere before reaching for the phone to order a nice hot pizza.

Suddenly, there was a faint knock at the door, which almost went unanswered. Mom opened the door to find little Enid dressed to the nines in her pretty white frock and blue ribbons holding up her signature pigtails that matched her Mary Jane shoes.

She had a large piece of pineapple cake with a thick white frosting on a silver foil paper plate.

“Wow! Don’t you look pretty, Enid!” — mom exclaimed as she took the cake from her tiny hands and made her twirl to show off her dress. “Thank you,” she said coyly. “It’s my birthday.”

“How old are you today?” I asked, as I crouched down next to her. “I am six years old,” she replied, with a broad smile that showed off a couple missing milk teeth.

“Very good,” my mom said as she stooped down to bless her, after which Enid ran down the stairs absent-mindedly. 

The Lewises had sent cake for all the neighbours, and since it was late and we had one heck of a moving day, we split the piece of cake between us and decided to call it a night.

But the next morning we were abruptly awakened at around 8 am with screams and cries. You could hear the anguish in Mrs Lewis’ voice.

We hurried downstairs to find their door slightly ajar. Mom rushed in to hold Elizabeth who was sobbing inconsolably but I was stopped in my tracks by a sight so traumatising that I felt like I was freezing up.

The cold of the winter had nothing on the eerie feeling that crept up the back of my neck as I made my way down the last few steps to the Lewises’ house.

Those footsteps between the staircase and the Lewises’ door were ones I’ll never forget because that’s when realisation dawned.

Tears streamed down my face as, from the corner of my eye, I saw Mr Lewis in the corner who did not dare to look up. He stared at the floor without blinking — in utter disbelief.

My shoes felt like they were slowly filling up with concrete as I took the last few steps to push the door open to find the most dreadful sight. 

It was Enid, hanging from the ceiling fan with a bedsheet around her bent neck. Her face had turned blue just like the ribbons that tied her pigtails that matched her shoes...

Her body was stock-still, which neither the breeze nor the height from which she was suspended could shake.

That’s when I heard the faint conversation between mom and Elizabeth, who was holding back soft sobs to narrate her story. “Five. Five of our children died on their sixth birthday... Two of them were twins,” her voice quavered. As I turned my head to look at her, for the utter disbelief of that sentiment, I caught a glimpse of the wall behind her through their balcony.

To my horror, I realised something even more disturbing than sweet Enid’s lifeless corpse. Those weren’t graffiti or stains but shadows that were, in fact, staring at me. 

As Elizabeth continued her horror story about her eldest son she delivered in her teens, whose head was bashed in in a car crash, to the blood-curdling story of the murder of her twins, my gaze caught something even more terrifying than the stories I was hearing.

My frozen hands began to sweat as I heard my mother say, ‘666’, but that’s not why I was scared.

That day, there weren’t five but six shadows on the wall, the last of which was of a little girl with a frock, a broken neck and pigtails tied with ribbons. The same ones that matched her shoes and now her lacklustre face — blue.