Arundhuti Basu
Chapter 1:
It was the kind of cold that crept under your skin and settled in the bones—a Lucknow winter that made the air brittle and the silence of Baraf Bagh Street even more unnerving. Saswata Mehta arrived at dusk, his suitcase in one hand and a stack of crumpled manuscript pages in the other. The mansion stood like a forgotten relic—its yellowing façade blotched with moss, tall arched windows sealed shut, and wooden eaves sagging under decades of neglect. The gate creaked in protest as he pushed it open, a cry so human it made him pause. The driver who had dropped him off didn’t wait for a tip or a goodbye. “I don’t come back here after dark,” the man had muttered, eyes averted. That suited Saswata just fine. He hadn’t come to be social. After the loss of his wife Anjali, sleep had become a distant luxury, and the apartment in Delhi a suffocating tomb of shared memories. His publisher had been chasing him for over a year for a new book, but Saswata had nothing to offer except scribbles and insomnia. He had rented this house—sight unseen—for peace, for isolation, and perhaps, for absolution. The agent had warned him: “It’s a little dusty. No one’s lived there in years. But it’s quiet. Very quiet.” That promise of silence had been all Saswata needed. Yet as he stepped over the threshold, the air felt dense—not with dust or age, but something else. Something waiting.
The house was larger than he expected. A wide hallway opened into multiple rooms: a sunken drawing room, a dining area still bearing faint traces of British colonial grandeur, and a library filled with moth-eaten volumes and dried inkpots. His bedroom was upstairs, and adjacent to it, a small study with a desk pushed toward a frosted window. It was here he decided to write. He unpacked methodically, as he always did: books, notes, an old Remington typewriter (a habit he never broke), a framed photograph of Anjali, and finally, the heavy woolen shawl she had once knitted for him, still faintly smelling of eucalyptus and her perfume. Darkness fell quickly. By seven, the only light came from a table lamp and the fire he managed to coax to life in the grate. The caretaker, Mrs. Bakshi, had left food in the fridge and sheets on the bed but was nowhere to be seen. He hadn’t expected company. He made a cup of black tea, wrapped the shawl around his shoulders, and tried to write. But his mind, as always, wandered—back to Anjali’s voice, her laughter, her final cough that echoed in the hospital walls. That night, unable to sleep, Saswata sat at the desk in the study, staring out into the black window, his typewriter untouched. The wind outside carried the occasional creak of tree branches, or so he thought. Until, at precisely 1:17 a.m., he heard it—soft, rhythmic, unmistakable. The sound of typing. Not from his room. From the one adjacent to his.
He froze. For a long moment, he didn’t breathe. The typing continued—measured, deliberate. Not like the frantic hammering of modern keyboards, but the heavy thud of a vintage machine, the kind that left black-inked ghosts on paper. Heart thudding, he rose and tiptoed to the door. The hallway beyond was still. The room next to his was supposed to be empty—bare, according to the house layout. But tonight, a faint sliver of light glowed beneath its door. Saswata reached for the handle, paused, then slowly pushed it open. The room was dark. Still. Dust motes floated in the moonlight. The typewriter he had thought he’d heard was nowhere in sight. Only a small wooden writing desk stood against the far wall, its chair slightly pulled out—as though someone had just been sitting there. He turned on the lights. Nothing. No paper, no machine, not even footprints in the dusty floorboards. But the silence had changed. It had weight now, and presence. He checked his own study again, convinced he was imagining things. But when he returned to his desk, something was there. A page. Inserted into his typewriter. A page with a line he had not written:
“The house gave him the story. But it wanted something back.”
Chapter 2:
Morning brought no clarity—only fog, the thick, swallowing kind that blurred the outlines of the mansion and turned the outside world into a ghost town. Saswata Mehta woke to the sharp bitterness of the Lucknow chill seeping through the old window frames. For a moment, he lay still under the thick quilt, hoping the night’s eerie events had been the product of sleeplessness and grief. But the moment he glanced at his desk, his heart clenched. The page was still there. Crisp. Centered perfectly in the Remington typewriter he’d barely touched. The house gave him the story. But it wanted something back. He stared at the sentence, running his fingers lightly across the keys. They were cold to the touch. He checked the paper’s alignment, hoping to find signs of disturbance—a smudge, a misaligned edge. Nothing. Whoever had typed it, if anyone had, did so with care. A practical voice in his head—the old Saswata, the rational one—suggested it was a prank. A caretaker’s trick, a leftover manuscript page, maybe something he himself had written and forgotten in his haze. But somewhere deeper inside, another voice whispered: What if it wasn’t a prank? What if the house did write it? He tore the page from the carriage, folded it, and stuffed it into his coat pocket, as if concealing it might reduce its power. But the silence around him had already shifted. It wasn’t just quiet—it was listening.
He went back to the room next door in the daylight. No light glowed now, no sliver under the door, no phantom typewriter. It was exactly as he had first seen it: sparse, empty except for the wooden writing desk, a threadbare carpet, and an old bookshelf missing half its slats. He dusted the chair, inspecting the worn grooves in its arms—places where someone’s fingers had rested for hours, perhaps days, as they wrote. There was no evidence of anyone else having been there. No footprints, no creaking boards beyond his own. But something felt off, as if the very air was bruised by presence. Saswata leaned closer to the desk. A tiny notch in the wood, barely visible—he touched it. It looked like a name had been etched and worn away. He squinted: R. Malik? Or was it P. Malhotra? It was too faint to tell. He stepped back, heart pounding slightly faster. He hadn’t slept more than an hour. Maybe this was his mind retaliating. But when he turned to leave, something caught his eye on the bookshelf. A single, slim leather-bound journal tucked behind other volumes. He reached for it, blowing off a decade of dust. The pages were yellowed, the handwriting tight and spidery. The entries were dated nearly thirty years ago. The first one read:
“The whispering started last Tuesday. At first, I thought it was rats in the walls. But rats don’t speak your name.”
Back in his study, Saswata stared at the journal as the wind howled beyond the icy windowpanes. He lit the fireplace and began reading the entries slowly. The writer—who signed only as “S.”—described the same things: the nightly typing, a growing sense of being watched, dreams that felt written rather than experienced. Saswata’s own reflection in the darkened glass looked older, paler than it had days ago. That night, he drank two cups of black coffee and forced himself to stay awake at the desk. Midnight passed. At 1:17 a.m. on the dot, the sound returned. Typing. Exactly the same tempo. Same rhythm. Same presence. He rose, slower this time. The adjacent room was locked. Not just closed—locked. There was no key. He jiggled the knob, pressed his ear against the wood. No sound now. Only his heart, hammering. Then, just as he was about to turn away, a sheet of paper slid out from beneath the door. Clean. Centered text. Typewritten. He knelt, picked it up with trembling fingers. It read:
“Characters don’t die. They become tenants. Keep writing, Saswata.”
Chapter 3:
The next morning unfolded under a pale, reluctant sun, bathing Baraf Bagh Street in a light that made everything appear older, dustier, more fragile. Saswata Mehta stood on the veranda with the strange page still clutched in his coat pocket, the words echoing inside his skull like a warning and a dare: Characters don’t die. They become tenants. He hadn’t written it. He was sure now. His fingers trembled when he touched the typewriter’s keys. The sense of control—of authorship—was slipping from his grasp, and something deeper, ancient and predatory, had begun to write through him. That morning, the silence was interrupted by a knock—three soft, hesitant raps. He opened the door to find a hunched woman in a thick maroon shawl, a red dot on her forehead and eyes that had seen too many winters. “Mrs. Bakshi,” she said, as if he should’ve already known. “Caretaker. I brought you eggs and milk. Thought you might be needing them.” Her voice was gravel rubbed against wood, and her smile never touched her eyes. He invited her in. She declined. “I don’t step inside after sunrise,” she added, which made him pause. “Why?” he asked, managing a smile. Her answer was a small shrug, followed by, “It’s the house, sahib. She prefers to keep her secrets. Too many feet have walked her halls, and not all of them left.”
Saswata felt the air around them shift subtly, like the wind had changed direction, though the trees were still. He asked her what she meant, more out of journalistic instinct than real curiosity. But Mrs. Bakshi only smiled again, this time letting the silence answer for her. “You’re the third writer who’s taken this lease,” she finally said, almost in passing. “The others didn’t stay long. One man burned every page he wrote and walked barefoot to the Charbagh station. Another simply… vanished. Left his manuscript open on the desk, and his shoes by the fire.” Saswata frowned. “What happened to them?” “The house gave them stories,” she said, her gaze drifting to the staircase behind him, as if listening for something. “But it wanted something in return.” She handed him the bag of groceries and turned to leave, but just as she reached the gate, she looked back over her shoulder. “If the house starts whispering your name,” she said calmly, “stop writing. Or write faster. Whichever comes first.” Saswata stood frozen long after she’d gone. That evening, as the fog returned, he scoured the house again—walls, floorboards, attic beams—for any logical explanation. But there were no microphones, no speakers, no signs of tampering. Only the faintest scent of ink in the walls.
That night, he decided not to sleep at all. He brewed pot after pot of black tea, took out a fresh stack of paper, and began typing—anything to stay ahead of whatever the house wanted. But his fingers typed without guidance. Not his story. Not his plot. A tale unfolded that he had no memory of outlining: a man, a mansion, a dead wife, whispers in the dark. It was his story—but it wasn’t his doing. The typewriter hummed like an extension of the house itself. At 2:03 a.m., he paused. From the mirror behind his desk, he saw her. A flash. Anjali. Hair damp, eyes wide, mouthing something he couldn’t hear. He turned instantly—nothing. Just the empty room. But the chill returned, stronger than ever. He checked the door of the adjacent room—it was ajar. A new page lay waiting on the floor, freshly typed. This one was different. It bore only a single line, and this time, it was signed:
“Do not stop. We remember. —P. Malhotra”
Chapter 4:
The name haunted him more than the whispers. P. Malhotra. It wasn’t just a name scribbled in a fading journal or on a typed page—it was a presence now, coiled around the very air he breathed. Saswata Mehta searched through old files and local archives the next day, using his phone’s weak connection to browse aging forums and public records. There it was—a reference buried in an old literary journal from the 1980s. Parth Malhotra, a promising author who had disappeared while working on a novel titled The Winter Guest. Last seen in Lucknow. Rumored to have suffered a breakdown. Never found. Saswata stared at the grainy black-and-white photo attached to the article—Parth’s eyes looked frightened, even then. Haunted. He matched the writing style from the torn journal entries in the library and the typed pages from the night before. It was unmistakable. Parth had lived here. Written here. And then vanished. Saswata felt a deep pang of dread—not fear of death or ghosts, but of becoming. Becoming just another voice in the wallpaper. Another man who once had stories. He opened the drawer in his desk and found all his new manuscript pages were no longer in his own handwriting. Not his usual syntax. Not his punctuation. Someone—something—was writing through him. Editing him.
As night fell, the mansion darkened unnaturally early, as though the walls themselves hungered for shadow. The fireplace crackled, but the warmth never reached Saswata’s skin. Instead, he felt it in the walls. The subtle twitching of old plaster. The tiniest breaths between wooden panels. That night, he heard more than typing. He heard his name. Softly at first, then firmer—spoken as if by a thousand overlapping voices from inside the wallpaper. “Saswata… write for us… finish what we could not…” He clutched the Remington, refusing to give in, but when he looked up, the wallpaper across the room had changed. Shapes emerged—faces, perhaps. Figures embedded into the floral patterns, their eyes wide, pleading. One figure stood out: a woman in a scarf, her face almost photographic in its clarity—Anjali. Not as he remembered her in life, but the version from the ICU—the oxygen mask, the bruised lips. She looked at him as if trapped inside the wall, her expression begging him to stop. But the typewriter clacked again—on its own. He hadn’t touched it. Another page slid out slowly. He hesitated, but his hand reached for it, trembling. It read:
“We are all drafts here, Saswata. Keep us alive. Or join us.”
He couldn’t sleep. He didn’t try. Instead, Saswata walked the hallways barefoot, the wooden floors cold as bone beneath him. In the dead hush of 3 a.m., he followed the sound of soft humming—faint, feminine, eerily familiar. It led him to the downstairs library, where he discovered that the bookshelf, the one from which he’d retrieved the journal, had shifted slightly. He dragged it away from the wall, revealing a hidden recess. Inside: a sealed wooden box, blackened with age. He broke it open with a fire poker and found what looked like pages from The Winter Guest, unfinished chapters typed in a similar format to his own manuscript, but more disjointed—like the mind that created them was slipping. As he read, a wind surged through the room, extinguishing the fireplace. The walls began to breathe, the wallpaper pulsing in and out like lungs. Whispers swelled. He dropped the pages and staggered back. In the flickering candlelight, the faces in the wallpaper twisted—Parth, Anjali, strangers—all screaming silently. He covered his ears, but the voice found him anyway, not in his ears but in his mind:
“You’ve opened the edit. Now we write you.”
Chapter 5:
The mirror had always stood quietly in the corner of the bedroom—tall, arched, rimmed in dark rosewood, aged to a gentle tarnish that blurred the reflections just enough to suggest memory rather than reality. Saswata had barely looked into it since his arrival, avoiding its gaze like a guilty man avoids his own shadow. But that morning, something changed. He stood before it after washing his face, the water freezing against his skin, and caught the briefest flicker in its surface—not his own face, but Anjali’s. It was there for just a second, barely more than a suggestion: her eyes, rimmed with tears; her lips moving, soundless. He whirled around—nothing behind him. He looked back. The reflection had reverted to his own sunken eyes and hollow cheeks. Yet the mark remained: a smear on the glass in the shape of a palmprint, too delicate to be his. Later, as he sat down at the typewriter, he kept glancing back at the mirror, unable to shake the feeling that she was watching. The house had always felt like it had eyes, but now it had her eyes. He found himself talking aloud, to the walls, to her. “Is it really you, Anjali? Are you… are you in this house too?” The silence gave no answer, but the mirror shimmered faintly when he mentioned her name—as if stirred.
That evening, he lit no fire. He let the cold gather in the corners of the room like old friends returned. Wrapped in her eucalyptus-scented shawl, Saswata sat by the mirror and stared. He watched as shadows moved in unnatural ways, crawling up the reflection’s edge while the actual room remained still. Sometimes Anjali appeared clearly—sitting on the bed, writing at the desk, her hair pulled into a loose bun like she used to do when cooking khichdi on sick days. Sometimes it wasn’t Anjali at all, but a twisted version of her: bruised skin, hollowed eyes, lips blackened as if suffocated. These were not memories. These were echoes, warped and rewritten by something else. Once, he even saw her dragging her fingers across the typewriter keys with bloodied knuckles, spelling out something he could not read before the vision vanished. Saswata dared to ask questions: “Did you leave me, or did I lose you?” “Is this house a gate—or a grave?” But the mirror never answered, not directly. Instead, it responded in fragments, in flickers, in the slow, terrifying erosion of his own voice. That night, as he tried to write, the typewriter jammed. He lifted the carriage—and inside, tucked beneath the ribbon, was a photograph. An old Polaroid. He gasped. It was of Anjali and him, taken five years ago on a trip to Nainital. But there was something wrong. Behind them stood the mansion on Baraf Bagh Street.
He dropped the photo. That was impossible. He had never been to this house with Anjali. He had only found the listing six months ago, after her death. But the evidence was in his hands. They were both smiling in front of the same ivy-choked archway by the front gate. Had he repressed something? Had they visited once long ago, before the trauma? No memory surfaced—only a dull ache in his chest. He spent the next few hours scouring the house for more clues. In the kitchen drawers. In the attic. In the corners of mirrors. And there, in a cupboard behind a false panel near the fireplace, he found another journal. This one wasn’t old. The entries were in his own handwriting—but he didn’t remember writing them. They were dated during the months after Anjali’s death, filled with fragmented phrases like: “She’s not gone. She’s waiting.” “The mirror listens.” “If I write her out of memory, she comes back.” Panic rose like bile in his throat. He turned to the mirror again. This time, it showed not just Anjali—but himself, standing behind her, typewriter in hand, blood on his sleeves. He dropped to his knees. The room spun. He heard a whisper not from the walls—but from within his own mind, crawling out like a buried voice long ignored:
“You didn’t lose her. You wrote her away.”
Chapter 6:
The letter had arrived by post—strange in itself, given the address was barely functional, and Baraf Bagh Street wasn’t on most modern delivery routes. It was a neatly folded handwritten note, its edges curled slightly from winter damp. It read:
“Dear Mr. Mehta,
I am a literature student at Lucknow University and currently writing a thesis on the evolution of psychological horror in Indian literature. I recently came across your early work and was deeply moved by the emotional currents beneath the narrative. I heard you were in the city and would be honored to meet you—purely for academic interest. If you’re open to it, I would be grateful.
Sincerely,
Ipsita Kapoor.”
He read the letter several times. He hadn’t told anyone he was here. He had no social media, no public itinerary. And yet, her note felt oddly… precise. As if she knew what he was really doing here. Still, curiosity overrode caution. The house had wrapped itself around his soul like ivy—tight, constant—and he needed an anchor, any voice that wasn’t his own or the whispering walls. So when she arrived the next afternoon, wrapped in a teal scarf and holding a copy of The Pale Lake, he surprised even himself by opening the door with a nervous smile. Ipsita Kapoor was polite, wide-eyed, and intelligent—an academic with a warmth rare in literary circles. She didn’t mention the house’s unsettling aura, though her eyes did linger on the mirrors longer than most.
They sat by the drawing room fire, where Ipsita flipped through her notes and asked surprisingly deep questions—not just about narrative arcs or symbolism, but about the psychological state of the writer while writing horror. “Do you think,” she asked at one point, “that authors can be vessels for stories they don’t own?” Saswata’s hand twitched involuntarily. He nodded slowly. “Sometimes, the story isn’t ours. It… finds us. Or chooses us.” Her eyes met his, calm and curious. “Then does that mean a haunted house can be an author too?” He didn’t answer. Instead, he excused himself and fetched the old journal signed by “S.” Ipsita flipped through the brittle pages, then froze. “Parth Malhotra,” she whispered. “Wait—I know this name.” She pulled out her phone, showed him a faded article from a student archive: “Local Author Vanishes from Baraf Bagh Street: Unfinished Manuscript Found in Locked Room.” Saswata’s fingers clenched. “It wasn’t locked,” he murmured. “Not for me.” Ipsita’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?” He told her about the typing. The mirror. The messages. She didn’t laugh or scoff. She only asked, “Can I see the room?”
They walked through the hall together. When he opened the door to the adjacent room, the one where the pages had first appeared, it was empty—no desk, no chair, just warped wooden planks and a thick scent of ink. Ipsita stepped inside cautiously. She pressed her palm against the wall. “There’s something behind here,” she said. “Listen.” Saswata pressed his ear to the plaster and heard it too—faint scratching, like pen on paper, over and over again. Ipsita stepped back. “I think this house is more than haunted,” she said softly. “I think it’s a kind of… archive. For unfinished stories.” Her theory chilled him more than ghosts. It explained the manuscripts, the fragments, the whispers—but also hinted at something more terrifying: What happens when the house runs out of drafts? That evening, Ipsita stayed longer than expected, helping him catalog the loose pages scattered through the house. She found references to other names—authors he’d never heard of, dates that didn’t match. “I think it’s not just one story being told here,” she said. “I think it’s all of them.” When she left, she touched his arm gently and said, “Be careful what you write next. The house might decide that’s your ending.” Saswata nodded, but deep inside, something darker stirred. Because that night, as the typewriter began again on its own, the paper it fed out bore a chilling message: “Ipsita doesn’t leave.”
Chapter 7:
Chapter 7: The Manuscript
Ipsita returned the very next morning. She hadn’t planned to, but she said she couldn’t sleep—not after what she’d seen, not with that sentence still lodged in her mind: Ipsita doesn’t leave. Something about it wasn’t just disturbing; it felt… prophetic. “What if it’s not a warning,” she asked Saswata as they sat at the long oak dining table, “but a command? Or an edit the house is trying to make?” Saswata didn’t laugh it off. Not anymore. The air in the mansion had thickened with a kind of narrative inevitability, as if each room had already decided what must happen within it. They returned to the hidden compartment in the library, the one behind the old bookcase. This time, they searched it more thoroughly. Beneath a false bottom, Ipsita discovered something neither of them had expected—a thick, bound manuscript wrapped in waxed cloth. Its title, scrawled on the first page in black fountain ink, read: “The House on Baraf Bagh Street”. The author: Saswata Mehta. Dated—next month.
Saswata felt his body go cold. He had never seen this manuscript before. Yet every page bore his name, his style, his voice. Ipsita flipped through it carefully. It was a complete novel—nearly 280 pages. She read sections aloud. Each scene they had experienced in the past few weeks was described in disturbing detail: the typing, the mirror, Mrs. Bakshi’s words, even Ipsita’s arrival. It didn’t stop there. The final chapters they hadn’t lived yet. Pages where Ipsita discovers a second room behind the mirror. Pages where Saswata follows her inside. Pages where one of them dies, and the other keeps writing. They sat in silence as that revelation sank in. “This isn’t memory,” Ipsita whispered. “This is prophecy. Or… authorship reversed. The house isn’t giving you stories—it’s drafting you.” Saswata tried to reject it. “Then who wrote this?” She pointed at the back of the manuscript. Scribbled faintly on the final page was a sentence that chilled both of them:
“When the writer finishes, the house edits the writer.”
That night, neither could bring themselves to leave. Not out of fear—but because something in the house had shifted. The doors to the outside stuck. The fog wrapped tighter around the gates. Baraf Bagh Street itself seemed to recede. Ipsita insisted they burn the manuscript. “If it doesn’t exist, maybe the story breaks,” she said. But Saswata hesitated. There was a strange draw to the pages. Something intimate. Familiar. As if the manuscript wasn’t just fiction—it was memory. His fingers ran across a chapter where Anjali speaks to him through the typewriter. In that version, she says: You wrote me away once. Don’t let the house do the same to you. The lines blurred between his grief and the house’s grip. That night, as they sat by the hearth with the manuscript between them, the fire suddenly died out—snuffed, not extinguished. A low wind slithered through the floorboards. The typewriter began again. Neither had touched it. The page it typed fed out slowly, as if relishing each word. They approached together.
Chapter 8:
They didn’t speak for a long time after the page printed. One stays. One finishes. Choose. The words sat heavy in the dim room, more final than a gunshot, more devastating than fire. Saswata Mehta ran his hand through his disheveled hair, his fingers twitching. Ipsita stood near the window, staring out into the fog where the street used to be, now swallowed in an otherworldly white silence. “There’s no way out, is there?” she said quietly. Saswata didn’t answer. He already knew the truth. The house had built its trap not with locks or chains, but with narrative. With inevitability. It had cast them as characters in a book neither of them meant to write, and now the plot demanded sacrifice. The manuscript lay on the desk, the pages fluttering as if breathing. Ipsita opened it again, flipping to Chapter Eight. It was already written—in Saswata’s style. Word for word, their current conversation. Her standing by the window. Him by the fireplace. The question. The fear. The despair. But the next lines—those hadn’t happened yet. In the manuscript, Ipsita turns, kisses Saswata, and says, “Let me go. I can finish this. It’s your story, but I’m the ending.” Saswata read the words and blinked. Ipsita had not yet spoken them, but she turned. Her eyes welled. And she said it.
He staggered back. “No. Don’t. Don’t repeat the page. Don’t let the house write you.” Ipsita stepped closer. “It’s already writing both of us. But maybe we can change the line. Just one. Even one word could change the outcome.” Her voice trembled. She held his hand. “You lost your wife, Saswata. You lost your words. Don’t lose yourself too. If you go any deeper, the house won’t just finish the book—it’ll finish you.” But he wasn’t sure there was anything left of him to preserve. Wasn’t it Anjali he had tried to resurrect in every page? Hadn’t he come to this place hoping the ghosts might help him remember how to live—or die properly? Saswata walked through the house in silence, retracing every room they’d touched. The walls no longer whispered—they pulsed, like lungs. The mirrors no longer reflected—just shimmered with pages. He entered the study again and found, taped under the desk drawer, a final journal entry from Parth Malhotra:
“The house offers a choice, but it lies. It never wanted a story. It wanted voice. Yours. Mine. All of ours. It feeds on language like breath.”
When he returned, Ipsita stood with the manuscript in her hands. “If we burn it, we risk becoming unwritten. If we finish it, one of us stays—forever.” Saswata took the pages from her and slowly began to rip them out—one by one—feeding them into the fireplace. But they wouldn’t burn. The flames curled around the sheets like dancers avoiding contact. The pages fluttered back out—reassembled, unscathed. Then, the typewriter burst to life again. This time it typed faster, almost furious. Pages spilled to the floor. On them: lines from his life he had never told anyone, arguments with Anjali, dreams he’d buried, lies he’d written into his books. Ipsita stepped forward and pressed her hand to his chest. “Let me finish it. I’ll rewrite the end.” But Saswata saw something behind her. A figure. Anjali. In the mirror. She was nodding. Not to him. To Ipsita. As if giving permission. As if she had known all along. “No,” Saswata whispered. “You don’t belong to the house. I do.” He pulled Ipsita close, kissed her forehead, and sat down at the typewriter. “You leave,” he said. “I’ll write it.” The house went still for a moment. Waiting. The mirror shimmered again—this time not with Anjali, but with him, already older, hollow, endlessly typing. Ipsita ran for the door. This time—it opened. Just once. And as she stepped into the fog, she turned and saw Saswata begin the last chapter.
The house had its voice again. And it began to write back.
Chapter 9:
He began with a single word. Not a title. Not a name. Just a word. It flowed from Saswata Mehta’s fingers onto the Remington keys as if pulled from the marrow of his bones—Silence. Outside, the fog thickened like closing curtains, and the fire in the hearth dimmed to embers. The house around him had grown utterly still, like a waiting audience. Saswata felt its breath behind his shoulders, the same way one senses a reader turning pages in another room. But now he was the page. And he understood, finally, that the house had never been haunted in the conventional sense. It wasn’t the dead who wandered here—it was unfinished stories. Narratives that had been silenced, abandoned, or stolen by time. The whispers in the wallpaper weren’t voices—they were paragraphs. The faces in the mirror weren’t spirits—they were characters yearning to be remembered. As he typed, the paper glowed faintly, the ink coming out not black but deep crimson. The words no longer came from him. He wasn’t composing—he was transcribing. He recognized pieces from Parth Malhotra’s notes, fragments of Anjali’s letters, lines he had only dreamed. The house was feeding him its entire library, and in return, it took—his sleep, his fear, his memories.
He no longer remembered what day it was. He no longer remembered if Ipsita had truly left, or if that too had been a chapter he’d imagined. All he knew was that he had become the final conduit, the closing author, the signature at the end of a story that had begun long before him and would continue long after. Between pages, the walls trembled. A voice—not human, not quite linguistic—hummed behind him, layered and tonally complex. It wasn’t threatening. It was mournful. Saswata turned once and saw through the mirror a parade of faces now familiar: Parth, Mrs. Bakshi as a younger woman, a child clutching a pencil, a crying woman in a 1950s sari, an old man with a manuscript stitched to his chest. They were not ghosts. They were chapters. Characters. Drafts. And he saw Anjali too—smiling now. Not the hospital version, but the one he remembered on their first anniversary. She mouthed one word to him: “Thank you.” The keys slowed. His vision dimmed. He had reached the final lines. And then, the house itself whispered—not through the walls this time, but through him:
“Every story ends. But not all stories end with you.”
As the final word hit the page, the room pulsed with heat and cold simultaneously. The mirror shattered—not with violence, but with resolution. Like glass completing a purpose. The walls sighed, the wallpaper peeled back slightly at the seams, revealing layers of other texts beneath it, as though the house had lived through thousands of stories layered like rings in a tree. The fog outside receded. The windows unlatched. A faint bird cry rang in the distance—the first natural sound in weeks. The house had eaten well. Saswata sat back in his chair, the typewriter still beneath his hands, the final chapter complete. He felt empty. Not in despair—but in release. He was no longer the author. He was the authored. And as he looked to the pages beside him, he saw the title again: The House on Baraf Bagh Street. This time, the author’s name read: Saswata Mehta & Others. He closed his eyes, not to sleep, but to dissolve. Somewhere beyond the fog, Ipsita’s voice called out faintly. A new story, perhaps. A sequel. Or simply another voice waiting for the keys.
Chapter 10:
Ipsita Kapoor walked for what felt like hours through the retreating fog, her boots crunching over gravel she didn’t remember being there before. Baraf Bagh Street was visible again, but distorted—houses leaned slightly at odd angles, streetlamps flickered as though unsure of their own glow, and not a single soul passed her. She didn’t speak. She didn’t cry. Inside her coat pocket was the final page she had managed to grab before leaving: the last line of the manuscript typed by Saswata. It read: “She stepped out, but she would never be the same.” And Ipsita wasn’t. The house had left a mark on her—not a bruise or scar, but something subtler. The kind that lives in dreams and forgotten corners of the mind. She returned to her flat in Hazratganj, but her reflection sometimes flickered, her words sometimes emerged not her own. Her professors noticed it too—how her thesis now spoke in voices too mature, too layered. And her writing—it changed. She wrote like someone who had seen the story from both sides of the page. Eventually, she completed her dissertation and called it Haunted Syntax: Language, Memory, and the Indian Gothic. It opened with a quote: “A house remembers everyone who tries to forget it.” She never mentioned Saswata’s name again. Not aloud. Not to anyone.
But she returned to Baraf Bagh Street one year later.
The mansion looked older. Smaller. As if time had finally started to catch up with it. The gate creaked the same way. The air still tasted of paper and ash. She knocked, more from instinct than hope. No answer. She stepped in. The door was unlocked. The house was quiet—deathly so. Everything was covered in white sheets, but beneath the dust and stillness, Ipsita sensed it: the presence hadn’t left. Just… paused. She walked to the study. The typewriter was still there, but the ribbon had dried. The last page sat in place, yellowed. She read it again. The words had faded, but the message hadn’t: “Characters don’t die. They become tenants.” She turned toward the mirror—but there was no reflection. Not of her. Not of anyone. Instead, she saw text—floating, shimmering faintly:
“New draft loading…”
She backed away. But something stopped her at the threshold. The scent of eucalyptus. The hum of keys. A faint voice—Saswata’s—softly whispering her name like the last line of a poem. She closed the door behind her and never opened it again.
Years later, people would still talk about the house on Baraf Bagh Street. Rumors, whispers, new owners who stayed only weeks. Writers came. Writers left. Some left stories. Some became them. And on particularly cold nights, if you passed by just before dawn, you might hear the rhythmic tapping of a typewriter, even though the windows are boarded and no electricity runs through the house. They say the house keeps its tenants. Not as ghosts. But as edits. As margins. As unspoken lines. You’ll never find Saswata Mehta’s name in any official record after 2025. But you’ll find him in the stories—sometimes as a footnote, sometimes as a shadow in a mirror, sometimes as the narrator who knows too much. And Ipsita? She never returned again. But she never stopped writing. Not once. Because deep down, a part of her knew:
The house gave her the ending. But it took something else in return.
-End-
