Halfway into her first semester teaching “Sufi Stories and their Literary Alchemy BA427”, Layla Rashid discovered a dead body in the library. She knew then that she hadn’t run far enough or well enough from her past.
The day began as it usually did with no helpful warnings of impending disaster.
A short stop at the café before work, five days a week. A tall chai-latte with cinnamon, and the table by the window. Sultan out of the pet-carrier for that brief time, and in her lap. Her hand in his silky black pelt, comforting them both. She, nibbling at her lemon muffin. He, judging with a golden stare.
Layla’s days followed each other in disciplined monotony like ducklings in a neat little row, Keeping to a severe albeit fulfilling routine left no time for anything else. She had moved here eight months ago and had built a somewhat new routine for her brand-new life. Layla found routine enriching; it so often slipped into ritual. Routine and ritual had helped her construct her life, day by day, for thirty-two years.
Build your house with straw and sticks and the big bad wolf people’s opinions, your own insecurities, a million other things would blow your house down all too easily. But build your house, brick by brick, with routine, unearthing your true self as you negotiate with yourself and your life, honouring the trivial as you go along, and you imbue it with the protective magic of identity. And Layla had painstakingly done exactly that.
She was content.
She took another sip of her chai-latte. Almost content. There was no denying that something had finally blown her house down. She had found the old woman's picture eight months ago. That had been the catalyst for her move. Would it matter though? Would her quest end at last? But then, Layla believed every experience was useful. Even pain and failure.
Especially, pain and failure.
The library, which doubled as her office, was in a separate block from the university and only five minutes away from the cafe. Students hardly ever came to this building a neglected archive with no electronic keys.
Most days she came half an hour early to avoid the rush hour.
She often sat outside in the quad, enjoying the musical psithurism of the leafy tall trees, poplars, oak, maple, the Ohio buckeye, so beautiful and so different from the sparse landscape she'd grown up with in that horrid place. She remembered things in flashes pictures, sometimes a sound or smell. Vegetation had been minimal there, just stunted barely-green bush, except for the hills of deodar forests which she remembered seeing only once. And here, there was hardly a rush hour in the small university town.
The rush-hour mentality was a relic from her New York days.
It was a chilly silver-blue morning of late September. She put the pet carrier down and inserted the old-fashioned key into the lock. It stuck in the out-of-date lock and took a few minutes of precious time before it turned. Not the best day for it to happen. She hadn’t slept well, thanks to her recurrent dreams, and she was already running late according to the schedule she’d set for herself.
She opened the door and stepped in. It was the noisome air that struck her first, alerted her senses to everything else that was unfamiliar. She was a creature of habit because it meant safety.
Even the slightest of changes sent alarm bells ringing inside her head. There was something in the air, a different smell than the usual dusty-book smell she loved. It was more than the musty odour of the library. It was almost recognisable; almost familiar.
She turned the lights on and put her bag and Sultan's heavy carrier on her desk. He growled in the back of his throat, adding to her mounting unease.
Her eyes snagged on the splash of red on the floor. It was a plush crimson velvet cloak. At first, Layla was afraid it was blood. But there was no blood. Just the red cloak.
And the dead woman on the floor.
Heart hammering in her chest and her throat tight, Layla stared at the still, porcelain face of the woman. Empty blue eyes stared at the ceiling. Lips, drained of colour, slightly open, as if her mouth had just begun to form a scream Layla could not hear.
The stillness was eerie. The silence, sinister.
She stared at the corpse. A dead woman on the floor of her library. The woman was pretty. She was also petite; anyone could have carried her easily inside in the thick of night.
Her breath congealed in her chest. Layla rested her hands on the desk for support. Stories might emerge from reality, but reality emerged from stories too. She did not remember much of her past, but she remembered enough to know that if it ever caught up with her, she would be in trouble. The kind of trouble that was staring her in the face. The cold, acrid stench of the room made her gag. The woman was naked and spread-eagled in an obscene, vulnerable fashion. The smell in Layla's nostrils was her own rancid fear, not just the heavy curdling of dead blood.
Layla’s legs wobbled. She grabbed the back of her chair and sank into it. She turned again towards the body on the floor.
There was a bluish tinge to the face of the woman. The red cloak was too bright in contrast, too reminiscent of life to be attached to something dead. It drew her attention repeatedly. Its vivid colour belied the coldness of death. Was it murder? Was she looking at a murdered woman?
She got up with a start, turned to run, to flee the scene and let someone else deal with the responsibility, the attention of being the one to find a dead body.
But she didn’t.
Instead, she stepped closer to the dead woman on the floor.
There were bruises on her throat, a dark line visible from beneath the fold of the cloak. Had the dead woman been strangled with its strings? The hood lay half buried under her head, golden hair parted and curled, the slightly darker roots visible.
Something stirred in her memory. Something she had seen? A movie? A picture? Then, just as quickly, vanished like a swift-footed animal into a neural black hole of shock. This naked, dead body had plucked the memory of the other naked, dead woman she had seen on another campus, just a few months earlier, and superimposed itself on all other thought. This was not the first young woman's dead body she had seen.
That first time, Layla had been in the middle of changing jobs. At the time, she had barely registered the murder. She had been too busy thinking of the practicalities of her move and her reasons for doing so. She had considered the murder an unfortunate incident on campus, a bit of sad news at the periphery of her life. Something that had happened at a place that was already a past she was leaving behind.
And now this.
She stepped away from the dead body and called the police.
Excerpted with permission from The Sufi Storyteller, Faiqa Mansab, Penguin India.
