Sohini Chattopadhyay
Chapter 1: The Rented Room
Tuhina Roy arrived at the old mansion just as the late November light began to fade into the haze of North Kolkata’s dusk. Ahiritola Ghat loomed just beyond the house—a crumbling stretch of stone steps and moss, where the Hooghly whispered its slow secrets. She was here to research colonial bathhouses, but what drew her was something less academic, more instinctive. A longing she couldn’t explain.
The house stood like a reluctant witness to time. Faded green shutters flanked its tall windows, the wrought-iron balconies sagging under decades of neglect. A strand of spider silk drifted in the breeze like a silent flag of warning. Inside, the air was cool and smelled of old incense, burnt milk, and something else—wet earth, maybe. Or mold.
An elderly woman named Sulochana Buri met her at the door with a brass oil lamp in hand. “You’ll be in the upstairs room. It gets the morning sun,” she said, though her voice didn’t carry any warmth. “Don’t try to open the attic door. It’s been sealed since my husband died.”
Tuhina nodded, not asking why. She had lived in enough old Kolkata homes to know some doors were locked more by memory than by keys.
Her room was sparse but oddly charming—peeling blue walls, a high ceiling, a wooden bed that creaked if you breathed near it. The window faced the ghat, and through its rusted iron grille, she could see the river gleaming dully under the evening sky. On the far end of the hallway stood the attic door: chipped, faded red, with an old alpona design ghosted onto its surface. A small brass lock hung crookedly from it, as if more symbolic than secure.
That night, the city’s usual lullabies—tram bells, rickshaw horns, the calls of night hawkers—seemed distant. What Tuhina heard instead was… humming.
It started faintly. A single note, wavering in the air like a remembered lullaby. There were no words, no rhythm, just a low sound rising and falling with a strange, mournful grace. She sat up in bed, heart beginning to pace. It seemed to come from above.
The attic.
She shook her head. “Old houses have old sounds,” she whispered to herself, and pulled the shawl tighter around her shoulders.
But in the mirror above the washbasin, she caught something—a ripple, a brief shadow moving behind her, though the door was closed. She turned, quickly. Nothing. The room was still.
Still, except for that hum.
By midnight, the sound had stopped. Tuhina lay awake for a long time, staring at the ceiling where faint stains traced across the plaster like ancient maps. When she finally drifted into sleep, the humming lingered in her dreams—soft, feminine, and unbearably lonely.
Somewhere above her, the attic remembered. And now, so did she.
Chapter 2: Humming in the Fog
The next morning, the fog rolled in heavy, thick like boiled milk. From the window, Ahiritola Ghat was barely a silhouette, the river beyond it only a smear of silver-grey. Tuhina wrapped herself in a thick shawl and stepped out onto the veranda that creaked like an old violin. The air was heavy with dew, and the city hadn’t yet found its voice.
Down by the ghat, someone lit incense. The scent mingled with the river’s smell—damp stone, fish, wet ash.
But it was something else that made her shiver.
The humming had returned.
Not as a dream now, but drifting in through the cracked windowpane. It was fainter in daylight, but present—low, trembling, a note that didn’t belong to the living. She leaned against the balustrade, straining her ears. It seemed to come not from outside, but from within the walls, from the very wood of the house.
She went back in and climbed the narrow stairs to the attic landing. The red door stood exactly as before—shut, dull, unthreatening. But the air around it was different. Cooler. As though something breathed on the other side.
She pressed her palm to the wood. It was wet. Not just damp—truly wet, as if it had rained behind that door.
By the time she returned to her room, the fog had seeped in, curling along the floor like it had crept up from the river and never left. Her books, placed neatly the night before, had shifted. One had fallen open to a random page. Another lay spine-up on the chair. She paused.
“I must have done it myself,” she murmured, but didn’t quite believe it.
As she reached for her water bottle, her fingers brushed something cold.
A few droplets on her desk. Perfectly round, glistening. She touched one and brought it to her lips. River water. Brackish. Bitter.
The humming rose again in the distance.
That afternoon, she visited the local library—more out of habit than hope. The librarian, a middle-aged man with paan-stained lips, chuckled when she mentioned the house near Ahiritola.
“That old one? It’s called Raktobindu Bari, did you know? Blood-drop house,” he said casually. “A woman lived there once. Alone. They say she used to sing by the river. Then one night, she simply vanished.”
Tuhina’s throat dried.
“Any records?” she asked.
The librarian shrugged. “No name. Just a story. Like fog—you can see it, but try to hold it…”
That night, she lit a candle in her room and recorded audio on her phone. For hours, there was nothing. Just her breathing, the occasional tram bell outside.
And then, at 2:47 AM, the humming began. Clear. Closer. The recording showed no spikes, but her ears were full of it.
She looked at her mirror.
And saw a blurred outline standing behind her.
Chapter 3: The Lady by the River
Tuhina didn’t sleep. After the blur in the mirror vanished, she sat upright with the candle flickering beside her. Her phone, still recording, buzzed with silence now. But her ears rang with the echo of that humming—gentle, slow, and full of grief.
In the morning, she took her audio file to her friend Arjun, a sound editor who owed her more than a few favours from their university days.
He listened with headphones in his studio flat. Then he frowned and rewound the clip.
“There’s no waveform change during the humming. It’s like the sound… isn’t real. Or rather, not captured by your mic,” he said. “But I can hear it.”
“So can I,” she replied quietly.
Arjun looked at her. “You’re staying in that house near Ahiritola?”
She nodded. He rubbed his jaw. “My grandmother used to warn us never to walk past that building after dusk. Said it had a ‘water-curse.’ A woman who kept waiting by the river, even after she drowned.”
That night, Tuhina stood at her window as the mist thickened again. The ghat was quiet. A stray dog barked, then whimpered and ran off. Then, just past the Banyan tree near the base of the steps, she saw a figure.
A woman. Draped in a red-bordered white saree, the kind widows used to wear. Her long hair hung wet over one shoulder. She was facing the river, unmoving. And she was humming.
Tuhina held her breath.
The woman turned slightly. Not toward her—but enough to reveal her face.
And yet, she had none.
Just the blur of water on a mirror’s surface. As if she had been erased by time.
Tuhina’s knees weakened. She shut the window quickly, hands trembling.
She dreamt of the woman that night. Or perhaps she didn’t sleep at all. In the dream, she stood at the edge of the river, holding a broken comb. A harmonium played somewhere. The woman sat by her side, humming that same sorrowful tune, brushing her hair, over and over.
“Come with me,” the woman whispered—not with lips, but from within the river’s voice.
Tuhina awoke gasping, her bedsheet tangled and wet with sweat. The humming had stopped, but the air in the room felt changed—charged, metallic.
In the morning, she visited an old priest at the ghat. His white dhoti was stained with ash, and he looked at her through rheumy eyes.
“Raktobindu Bari,” he said. “That house? It holds a soul that was denied farewell. Her body never returned from the water. No pyre. No prayers.”
He pointed to a stone ledge near the ghat.
“She used to sit there. Sing to the river. Some say she jumped. Some say… she was pushed.”
Tuhina closed her notebook. The story was changing from legend to something more personal.
That night, the humming returned—but this time, it was inside her room. No
t distant, not faint. It was right behind her ear.
Chapter 4: Forgotten Rituals
Tuhina didn’t scream. When the humming brushed past her ear, she froze. Her breath caught in her throat. She turned—slowly, deliberately—but the room was empty. The candle on her desk trembled, the flame bent unnaturally toward the attic door.
She didn’t sleep that night. Instead, she sat on the floor with salt spread in a loose circle around her. Her grandmother used to do that during power cuts—“to keep bad air out,” she’d said. Tuhina hadn’t believed it then. Now, it felt like her only anchor.
At dawn, she returned to the old priest, who sat warming his hands near the temple’s blackened altar.
“She is not angry,” he said before she even spoke. “She is unfinished.”
Tuhina felt the words settle into her chest.
“She waits for someone to bring her closure. Someone who hears her.”
He dipped his fingers in oil and began drawing patterns on a banana leaf.
“There was a ritual,” he muttered, voice lowering, “called Nirbodhi Tarpan—a farewell for the nameless. No family, no fire, only water and chant. But no one does it anymore. Forgotten, like most things.”
Tuhina asked him to teach her. That afternoon, she gathered what she could—a white cloth, some hibiscus flowers, a pot of river water, and turmeric. She sat by the ghat where the woman had been seen and whispered an offering of peace into the wind.
But as she dipped the edge of her cloth into the Hooghly, the air turned. The sky, cloudless moments ago, darkened. The river roiled.
And from beneath the steps, she heard it again—that humming. Closer now. Not just sound. Memory. Weight. A song without words that clung to the skin like a bruise.
When she looked up, the woman was standing across the river, on the opposite ghat. Watching. Her saree fluttered, though the air was still.
That night, the attic door groaned once. Then again.
Then silence. The next morning, Tuhina found a wet footprint on her mirror—just one. A right foot, small, faint, facing the bed.
She called Arjun. “I think she wants me to finish something for her,” she said. “But I don’t know what.”
There was a pause. Then Arjun’s voice, cautious.
“Did you find anything… personal? Something she might’ve left behind?”
Tuhina thought of the attic.
She hadn’t dared enter. But now, she realized, she’d been summoned.
That evening, as the city turned golden in the setting sun, she stood before the red attic door with a trembling hand. The lock was old, rusted—but unlocked.
She turned the handle.
The door opened with a sigh.
And the air beyond it smelled of jasmine, river silt, and something else—music long forgotten.
Chapter 5: The Attic Breathes
The attic was not what Tuhina expected.
It wasn’t dusty or choked with cobwebs like old rooms in North Kolkata usually were. Instead, the space was eerily clean—as though someone had been inside recently. As though someone still lived here.
A tattered rug covered the floor, faded red and gold. In one corner stood a rusted harmonium, keys yellowed with time. Beside it, a wooden trunk sat half-open, lined with moth-eaten silk sarees and hand-stitched blouses, all soaked faintly with the scent of naphthalene and something floral. Jasmine, again.
On the far wall, nailed crookedly above a dressing table, was a black-and-white photograph. It showed a young woman seated at the very same harmonium, hair tied in a braid, eyes soft and proud. She wasn’t beautiful in the traditional sense, but her gaze commanded the frame. Below her feet lay a single sheet of paper, musical notations scribbled in careful Bengali.
Tuhina bent to pick it up. It was damp.
She unfolded it—one of the corners torn clean off—and saw a half-finished composition. No title. Just a raga that broke midway. The notation ended mid-measure, as though interrupted. There was no signature.
Suddenly, the harmonium let out a breath.
Tuhina staggered back.
The bellows hadn’t moved. No one had touched it. And yet, the instrument exhaled—a soft, hollow wheeze, like lungs remembering how to sing.
Then came the humming. Not from the attic. From within her. The tune echoed in her head, perfectly matching the incomplete raga in her hand. Her vision blurred. A flash—red saree, anklets clinking, river foam, music fading in water.
She fell to her knees, gripping the paper like a lifeline.
The walls around her trembled slightly, as if exhaling secrets. The photograph above the mirror seemed to shimmer, its edges curling inward like burnt paper.
She reached for the broken comb on the table. The teeth were stained with something dark—age, or something more recent.
In that moment, she knew. The woman had been a singer.
And her song—unfinished, unheard—was the reason she remained. No final note. No audience. No farewell.
Tuhina took the page, the comb, and the harmonium’s key. She left the attic with a promise beating in her chest.
The final dip in the river would not be a ritual. It would be a performance.
Chapter 6: The Last Dip
It was still dark when Tuhina reached Ahiritola Ghat. The river stretched before her, thick with silence and mist. Not even the morning pujaris had arrived yet. Just the hoot of a far-off steamer and the rustle of palm fronds shifting in the breeze.
She stood barefoot on the cold stone steps, the harmonium key clenched in one hand, the broken comb in the other, and the sheet of music pressed to her chest.
The priest had taught her the words, but she didn’t use them.
Instead, she hummed.
Not the ghost’s humming, but her own voice—delicate, unsure at first, then rising slowly. She followed the faded notations, completing the raga note by trembling note. Her voice echoed faintly across the water, a soft offering woven into morning fog.
As she reached the final line, her voice faltered. She stepped into the river.
The Hooghly curled around her ankles like memory.
She laid the comb down first—watching it float briefly before sinking. Then the harmonium key, which gleamed once before vanishing. Finally, she opened her palm and let the music sheet go.
It didn’t sink.
Instead, it drifted away, riding the water like a boat made of breath.
The moment was still. Time folded in on itself.
And then, the humming stopped.
Not just paused—but ended.
A final note. A conclusion.
The air lifted. The fog pulled back.
When Tuhina turned, the sun had broken through the east—soft golden light spilling over the ghat like forgiveness.
Back at the house, she found her room dry. The mirror was clean, no footprints, no scratches. Her books were just as she’d left them.
She checked her phone. The audio file from the night before had been replaced by something else. A single clip titled:
“Thank you.”
She pressed play.
Nothing at first. Then a soft exhale. The faint clink of anklets. A woman’s voice—clear, strong—singing the final notes of the raga, completed.
Tuhina wept silently.
That evening, she walked once more past the attic door. It was shut, sealed again. But it no longer felt heavy.
She moved out a week later, her research done. But she carried the story with her—not in notes or voice recordings, but in the hush between songs, in the light above old ghats, in the final breath of a melody once forgotten.
On her last day in Kolkata, she returned to the ghat. There was no fog now. Just air, light, and water.
And in the stillness, she could swear she heard the river hum back.
End
