Book 3 of the Haveli series
Do you think when terrible things happen, it leaves a stain on the place where they occur?' she asks me, touching my stone-cold heart, warming it with her cheek. 'Why do I feel it has left one on me?' she questions. D I am not at liberty to disclose the cause of her pain, even to her. The dreams that haunt her, the otherness she feels, all stem from her past. A past she has misplaced, suppressed. I wish I could hold her, wrap my arms around her, a gesture she rarely allows. I yearn for my inanimate self to...only for a moment, become alive. Not because I want to experience touch, but so I can give her a moment of respite from the nightmares that haunt her on some nights. in this arch. Any She is Charu, the third daughter of the large Sharma family that inhabits me now. I am Anwar Haveli-the Haveli with hundred doors. A solemn baby, she was born with eyes too old in her infant face. I knew then that she was an old soul who had chosen to be reborn. She was special. The quietest of the siblings, she held my stone-heart in her palms since she lost her sight at nine years of age. It was sudden. The devastation her parents underwent was nothing compared to what the little girl had to come to terms with. Her confusion, helplessness, and anguish on sensing her parents' inability to handle the irreversible change in her circumstances were agonising to watch. They tried to do the best they could, but sometimes our best is not enough. I have weathered the storms of progress in this old colony of Naugraha. In the last 150 years, I have seen old Delhi's lanes grow narrower; the outcrops and illegal constructions almost choke the streets. Once, horse carriages rode regally here. Large water fountains stood resplendent in every courtyard the trickling water, perfumed with ittar, attracting a hoard of butterflies fluttering around the flowers. Art and culture were celebrated through the lively mehfils and mushairas. Such happy days they were, yet so short-lived. We used to be nine Havelis once. Soon the loneliness, the ignominy of the lives that surrounded me, usurped me. The new era shook me to my very foundations and obliterated many of my counterparts. Slowly, the families moved away, but the nostalgia lingered, haunting the sprawling mansions, reminding us of the changing dynamics of time. The grandeur faded, and so did we. The sepia hue took over all the facets of our existence and, like the gauzy film of dust that lies unmoving, we watched silently as the world continued its rotation. I wonder what would have become of me had the Sharma family not moved in. The head of the Sharma family, Arun, came as a young boy brimming with promise and ambition. His father's heavy-handedness and Arun's unfulfilled dreams made him into the man he is today-passive and resigned. His half-brother Varun also grew up in my rooms. Two brothers separated by warring mothers. Arun's wife, the devout Uma, who walks with a limp due to a past illness, joined this dysfunctional family. Full of gumption and emotional strength, she resolved to find a peaceful solution to the constant unpleasantness. She reinstated Arun's mother as the matriarch and set up Varun's mother and her son in a modest house in another part of the city. This small victory instituted by handing over her gold and appealing to the lady's vanity, Uma was able to weed out the chaos from their lives. It was my Uma who shook away my malaise. Airing out my shuttered rooms, she let in the sun and restored my pride with a quick coat of paint. The glass panes shone again, and the lattice jalis were scrubbed clean of cobwebs. The gardens flourished, the fountain gurgled, and I felt revived...rescued. The children came within a few years of each other. Aruna, the eldest, then Bhavya and, finally, Charu, my sweet sunflower. I had thought they had given up having more children after Charu, but Uma had always wanted a son. Maybe, it was to save her crumbling.
Dreams are mystical wonderlands that can be traumatic and yet shine a light on the hidden depths of our consciousness. Charu, the blind third daughter of the Sharma family, uses her psychic abilities to find victims as part of an SIT headed by Ravi, her lover. Back into the fold of the Haveli, Charu wakes up from a horrific dream to answer a phone call from an old friend, Prithvi Chauhan, the suave Minister of State. He asks Charu to help him locate his kidnapped younger daughter, Myra, for old times' sake. Like a Matryoshka doll, Charu and Ravi uncover the nefarious intentions behind the polished lives of the Chauhans even as Charu battles with dreams that claw at her psyche and memories.
New Delhi-based Harshali Singh is a Member Judge in the Consumer Commission. She has written in several N literary genres poetry to fiction, columns to essays. She is the contributing author in several anthologies and regularly writes for e-magazines. She has written several books on women-centric issues like domestic violence, alienation, female foeticide, marital rape, and women empowerment. Her novels, A Window to her Dreams and The Anatomy of Choice, form part of an eight books series, called the Haveli Series published by Readomania. She has written several short stories in anthologies that traverse varied genres from Historical Fiction, mythology, horror, erotica, and many more. Her poems are part of a woman-centric bilingual anthology of poems called She the Shakti. She has been on the organizing committee of Kavya Kumbh, an International Trilingual Poetry Fest where her poems feature in the anthology. She has won the prestigious Write India-Season 2, a short story contest organized by The Times of India Group on Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's prompt. In 2020, Amitav Ghosh selected her short story in the Top 10 for his prompt. She has also chaired discussions and has been part of various panels with eminent personalities in their chosen fields of World Peace, meditation, infertility, and social causes and stalwarts in writing. As a painter, she expresses herself and her observations of her surroundings in oil paintings, which have been exhibited in solo and group shows in India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, and also in Gurugram.
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