The Broom After Dark

The village of Pithamara sat where the Brahmaputra bent like a tired arm, its banks thick with betel nut trees and the smell of wet earth. Sewali had lived there her whole life, in the same tin-roofed house her grandfather had built, for she had lost her parents in a boat accident long before she spoke her first word.

Youth, too, did not prove to be any better for Sewali, as she was an outcast for having committed the unforgivable sin of bearing a child with a man outside her caste, and then being abandoned by that very man, the man she once dreamt of building a life with.

The only person who seemed to have really cared for Sewali was her grandmother, of course, only till she was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and then died a slow, agonising death. Sewali never set foot in a school, but the only lesson she learnt from her grandmother was that a broom does not touch the floor after the sun goes down. Her grandmother used to say it plainly, without explanation, the way old women say things that don’t need explaining: “Sweep after dark and you sweep the luck out of the house – and you sweep something else in.”

Sewali had never questioned it. Not until the evening her daughter Rimjhim fell asleep early with fever, and the kitchen floor was a mess of rice husks and ash from the evening fire, and the mosquitoes were rising in grey clouds from the courtyard, and she thought – just this once. Just a few strokes near the doorway. Who would know?

The sky outside had gone the colour of a bruise. She lit no lamp near the door, just worked by the weak light spilling from the kitchen, the broom’s dry rasp the only sound besides the peeps of the frogs in the paddy behind the house.

On the third stroke, she heard it!

A thin, high sound, threading up through the frog-song and the wind in the bamboo – the unmistakable cry of an infant. Not a goat, not a bird, not the neighbour’s radio left playing too loud. A baby’s cry, raw and desperate, coming from somewhere near the Tulsi plant at the edge of the courtyard, where the ground dipped toward the old well nobody used anymore.

Sewali’s hands went still on the broom handle.

Not a single infant was there in Pithamara that night. Old Rajen Hazarika’s grandchild had been taken to the town hospital that morning for some ailment Sewali had no clue about. The Rabha family living two houses down had no children at all. She counted, the way you count in a panic, every house, every family, every child she knew by name – and found no infant who could be crying in her courtyard in the dark.

The cry came again, closer now, no longer near the Tulsi but somewhere just past the low bamboo fence, as if it were being carried – carried by someone walking, someone whose footsteps made no sound on the dry leaves.

She should have gone inside. She would tell herself that for years afterwards – I should have gone inside and shut the door and said nothing. Instead, some old animal part of her, the part that still remembered every story her grandmother had ever spoken about the things that walk the paddy fields at dusk, made her lift the broom and hold it in front of her like a blunt, useless shield cum weapon.

The Tulsi plant stood where it always stood. But beside it, where the shadow of the fence should have fallen straight and empty, something appeared crouched.

It had the shape of a woman – long hair, unbound, hanging so far forward it hid where a face should be. Her body swayed gently, side to side, the way a mother sways when she is trying to put her child to sleep – and in her arms, held the way you would hold something you loved, was a bundle of cloth. The cloth seemed still; then it moved. The crying came from inside it, muffled now, softening into the particular hiccupping whimper of an infant being comforted.

Sewali did not remember deciding to speak. The word came out of her before her fear could stop it.

“Kun hoi?” – Who is there?

The swaying stopped.

Slowly, without lifting her head, without unbending her neck, the woman turned the bundle toward Sewali, cradling it up and out of the shadow of her own hair, offering it – the way a neighbour might offer to let you hold a newborn.

The cloth was empty. But the crying did not stop. It came now from everywhere at once – from the well, from the Tulsi plant, from the black gap beneath Sewali’s own doorstep, from inside the house where Rimjhim lay sleeping.

Sewali ran. She does not remember crossing the courtyard. She remembers only the door slamming under her palm, the iron bolt biting into her skin as she threw it shut, and standing with her back pressed to the wood, broom still gripped in one white-knuckled hand, listening.

For a long moment there was nothing. Then, very softly, from just outside the door – so close it might have been leaning against the wood, the way a tired woman leans against a wall while rocking a child to sleep – the crying began again. It went on for perhaps a minute. Then it thinned, and stretched, and became something that was almost, but not quite, laughter, and then it was gone, folded back into the ordinary sound of frogs and wind and the far-off barking of a dog.

Rimjhim’s fever broke by morning, as fevers do. The courtyard, when Sewali finally made herself look, showed nothing – no footprints, no disturbed leaves, only the broom lying where she had dropped it in the dirt, half the courtyard swept clean, and half left exactly as it was, as if something had stopped her, mid-stroke, and would not let her finish.

She never swept after dark again. And on nights when the wind moved strangely through the bamboo, she made sure the door was bolted well before the sky went the colour of a bruise, and she never, ever, touched a broom after the sun bade farewell to her part of the world.

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