It waits, p.1
It Waits, page 1
It Waits
Andaleeb Wajid
Published by PPS Publish, 2025.
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
IT WAITS
First edition. December 18, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 Andaleeb Wajid.
Written by Andaleeb Wajid.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
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Chapter 1
Trishna drives through the steady downpour, sheets of rain obliterating her vision. The headlights are on even though it’s just afternoon. Seated next to her is her twelve-year-old son, and on the seat behind is her thirteen-year-old daughter. Heads bent, eyes glued to their phones. She might as well be travelling alone.
‘Bleagh! Varun, you sicko! You just farted,’ Jia yells at her brother from the backseat, glaring at him.
‘I did not,’ he retorts, turning around and flinging his packet of potato chips at her.
The silence was better, Trishna thinks, as the two of them break out into a loud fight.
‘Guys! I’m driving in the rain, okay? Just stop it,’ Trishna finally snaps. Jia snorts and rolls down her window. Varun gets a blast of chilly air and a good lashing of rain, and he turns around and yells at her to roll the windows back up.
It’s been this way from the morning, since they left Bangalore. Fifteen days ago, her mother’s house help, Chinnamma, had called to tell her that her mother had tripped on the stairs in her home and broken her neck. Her mother, who had been strong and healthy and could easily have outlived her, was dead. She hadn’t seen her in nearly two decades.
The kids had been suitably chastened on hearing that their grandmother had died. But then, they had never really known her. Trishna’s mother was just a name and a photograph to them. Shankar’s death six months ago had affected all of them, and another death in the family so soon was hard to accept, so they hadn’t been curious when Trishna hadn’t returned to Dakhara.
The truth was that Trishna hadn’t wanted to see her mother like that. In her mind, her mother would always remain the way she’d been the last time she saw her. And she hadn’t been too keen to face the townsfolk who would inevitably be there at the funeral either. But for the past couple of days, she’d been feeling increasingly restless. She was surprised to realize that it was a yearning to go back. She wanted to go back to her hometown, to the house where she’d spent a good part of her growing years. Her mother’s lawyer, Mr Devaiah, had called her too, asking her to come and speak to him regarding the property her mother had left her.
And so, nearly twenty years after she left Dakhara, she is on her way back.
‘When are we stopping for lunch?’ Varun asks her for the umpteenth time.
‘When we see a restaurant,’ Trishna replies, looking ahead stoically. The town of Dakhara, where she grew up, is still an hour away, and the chips and chocolate bars have long been eaten. She almost misses the chaos from when they were small kids because at least it meant that they’d tire themselves out and fall asleep.
‘Nani used to live alone?’ Jia asks suddenly.
Trishna sighs loudly. ‘Yes,’ she replies.
‘Why didn’t she ever visit us in Bangalore? Why didn’t we visit her here for our summer holidays?’ Varun asks.
‘Haven’t I told you both before?’ she asks.
‘Yes, yes. We know about your big fight with her. But you never met her again?’ Jia asks.
How casually Jia dismisses the event that shaped Trishna into the adult she’d become, thinks Trishna. Her mother refused to leave Dakhara. And there had been no chance she was ever going back. But how could she explain it to these two?
‘We fight all the time. Can you imagine not seeing us for so long? Can you really be so angry at someone you love for so long?’ Jia persists.
‘No. Never with the two of you. But...things between my mother and I weren’t like how they are with us,’ Trishna tries to explain. ‘I...I left home when the situation was really bad. And my mother never forgave me for that.’
‘Hmm,’ Jia muses.
Trishna looks at her for a second and then turns her focus back to the road. She wonders what’s going through the minds of these two kids.
Lush green fields pass them by outside, and the air is heavy with moisture. The rain lets up and Trishna lets her internal radar relax.
‘Are you feeling bad that you didn’t meet Nani all these years?’ Varun asks.
‘Yes,’ Trishna replies after a moment of silence. Jia is looking out of the window. Trishna wishes they’d go back to their bickering.
‘What kind of a person was Nani?’ Jia finally asks.
Cold. Distant. Trishna keeps the thought to herself, unsure of what she can tell them. She glances at the mud-spattered milestone on the side of the road. It reads Dakhara: 70 km.
Chapter 2
In his clinic on Main Street, Inder Kapoor is feeling restless. Is it weird that his heart still does that little jump in his chest every time he thinks of her? Even though it was such a long time ago? Sighing, he leans forward and shakes the mouse on its pad. His computer screen comes to life. For a minute, he stares at it and feels an anger pulsing through him. Anger that he’s stuck in this quagmire of a town, anger that he hasn’t amounted to anything, hasn’t done anything worth shit in his life, unless being the town doctor counts for anything. And the woman he’d been crazy about once upon a time was going to be back in town, according to Devaiah, one of the trusted lawyers in Dakhara, and she would see how dismal his life had become. If she even remembers or notices him, he thinks. Immediately, he feels ashamed of himself. He can’t focus on their history. Not now, when she’s grieving.
For his forty years, Inder is in decent shape. He walks everywhere, and that certainly helps. There’s a smattering of salt-and-pepper stubble on his chin, there because he’s too lazy to shave regularly rather than any sense of vanity. He leans back in his chair, wondering if she’s already reached Dakhara.
He gets up from his chair, knowing that vehicles coming from out of town have to pass the road by his clinic. He’s torn between going back home and sticking around to see if he can spot her car. God, how pathetic can he get? Even so, he can’t stop wondering how long she plans to stay in town.
TRISHNA, ON THE OTHER hand, is so glad to see the sign for Dakhara that she could stop on the side of the road and weep. The kids have started fighting once more, and she has a massive headache that is making her vision blurry. All she wants to do is lie down, sleep and not get up for at least two days.
‘We’re here,’ she announces. The kids look around, unimpressed. Dakhara in itself is no beautiful hill station. It’s a small town whose only claim to fame is the nearby coffee plantation. The spectacular scenery on the way as they entered Coorg had subdued the kids but now that they’re in the town there’s nothing to wow them.
Involuntarily, her thoughts go to Inder. She wonders what he’s doing. He probably moved out years ago, she thinks. She hasn’t really spared much time thinking about him all these years. She’s been too busy living. But now that she’s back here, all the memories are flooding back. She wonders if he too thinks of her fondly and wistfully.
Looking around as she drives slowly to her family home, Trishna takes in the town she’d fled two decades ago. There have been quite a few changes. For one, there are more hoardings, advertisements for mobile phone plans, and a few more buildings and houses than she remembers. Despite all that, there’s still a diffused quality to the air that she’d completely forgotten about in Bangalore. With just about eight roads, there’s not much to the town and literally everything is within walking distance. So naturally, many people do tend to walk everywhere.
She passes by Main Street and tries to see the town through the eyes of her kids. To them, her city-bred children, everything would look very ordinary, not even quaint in a charming way. There’s a desperate attempt towards modernity in some of the buildings and yet there are the old stuccoed houses as well, clinging on to their tiled roofs.
‘Wow, hardly any traffic,’ Varun says as he looks out.
‘Yup. Best part about living here,’ Trishna agrees as they see the few aut
‘Well, thank god we’re not living here. How long are we staying?’ Jia asks.
Trishna hasn’t decided that. She’d just felt the compulsion to return. But now that she’s here, back in the midst of the mediocrity which she grew up in, she feels a jolt, reminding her of the many times she’d walked to the nearby shops or to the cinema with Inder and their group of friends.
‘It depends on how long it takes to get all this property work done. But we can go back after a week. What’s the hurry? You’re on summer vacation anyway,’ she says.
Jia merely rolls her eyes, which Trishna sees in the rear-view mirror and shakes her head.
‘Are you sure you can take a week’s leave from your job all of a sudden?’ she asks after a moment.
Trishna lets out a breath. She’d quit her job as a senior copy editor in an advertising agency when Shankar died, but her boss had told her that she could rejoin them whenever she was ready. She was thankful to him for keeping her options open – she had returned to the job just to keep her sanity. But recently, she had begun to reconsider it. She was getting exhausted by the whole job scene now. Maybe this one week here would let her make up her mind about her life too.
‘Yeah, Vinayak won’t mind,’ Trishna assures Jia and takes the left turn to the house. Another left turn some 500 metres later and a right turn. There it is.
She stops the SUV outside the gate and stares at the house.
‘Wow. It’s huge,’ Varun says.
‘I didn’t know Nani was loaded,’ Jia whispers as the two of them get out of the car.
Stop! Trishna screams out to them in her head but doesn’t actually open her mouth. Her heart is racing. Her mouth is dry and her throat is blocked.
Varun pushes the black gate and it gives way. Feeling more energetic, he pushes it further to open the gate fully. It lets out a groan of protest.
‘Come on in, Mom! Drive through,’ he calls out to her. Jia walks inside, looking around with a great deal of interest.
The house hasn’t changed at all. It’s the same hunkering mass of stone that she’d escaped when she was eighteen. It almost looks like a face, with those windows on the top floor peering out like eyes. Eyes glaring at her, accusing her of abandoning it. Trishna looks at the lichen covered stones that make up the walls of the house, wondering why her mother continued to live here when she was all alone. What had kept her here? She could have moved into a smaller and more comfortable house, some place closer to the town’s residential areas. Not isolated, like this.
Here, there are none of the allusions to modernity that they’ve seen in the rest of the town. Everything is decaying or dying. In several places, the stones have crumbled away but there’s a solidity to the structure. The squashed human features she’s always spotted in it seem to say that it’s here for the long run.
Her breathing is shallow as she steps on the accelerator to let the SUV glide inside. Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, what am I doing here, she thinks as she comes to a stop outside the door.
There’s that same profusion of dead plants everywhere because most of the gardeners who came to work here always wanted to leave for some reason. The weeds just kept growing back, the gardeners complained, and most of the flowers just died before they bloomed properly.
Varun and Jia amble up slowly, looking around. Do they feel it too, she wonders? The house, while not truly Gothic, does have a sense of hugeness about it, something all expansive. As if it would consume everything in its vicinity.
‘I think we’d make a lot of money if we sell this house,’ Jia says slowly, turning around and looking everywhere. She’s standing under a canopy of dried bougainvillea near the door.
‘Just think of all we can do with the money,’ she says, her arms outstretched, her eyes shining with the possibilities. And just like that, one of the branches of the dead tree snaps and falls on her.
Chapter 3
‘Jia! Look out!’ Trishna screams as Jia steps to the side, startled by her mother’s shout. The branch hits her shoulder with a thud.
‘Ow!’ Jia cries out and swivels to look at what hit her. Trishna is at her side immediately, checking for cuts and bruises.
‘I’m fine! I’m fine,’ Jia insists as Trishna rubs her shoulder lightly, the ball of panic and unease solidifying in her stomach.
The door to the house opens and a woman wearing a saree draped in the typical Coorgi style steps outside. Her hair is greying and her face is lined, but Trishna suspects she’s younger than she looks. This must be Chinnamma, she thinks. She had been hired by her mother to take care of the household long after Trishna left, so they don’t know each other. But of course, they knew of each other. Trishna’s mother had probably talked about her traitorous daughter who had left and never come back. And in the bi-annual phone calls they shared, Trishna sometimes heard her mother mention Chinnamma.
She tries to fit the image of the woman with the caller on the phone two weeks ago. Chinnamma had been calm as she conveyed the news to her about her mother. While initially shocked, Trishna had recovered her wits enough to arrange for the cremation and everything else.
Chinnamma had not asked her why she was not coming back for the cremation, and Trishna was relieved at her indifference. But now, she has no idea what to expect from the woman who is sizing them up. There is an air of experience to her face, one that is not very forthcoming or welcoming.
‘Come on in, guys,’ Trishna says, smiling at Chinnamma, wanting to dispel her stare. The three of them trudge towards the door. Before they enter the house, Trishna looks at her SUV longingly. She feels like getting back inside and heading straight back to Bangalore.
‘Hi. I’m Trishna and these are my kids, Varun and Jia,’ she says, hoping her smile will diffuse this tension.
Chinnamma continues to be silent and Trishna spots Varun rolling his eyes as they walk inside the house. If she’d thought that Dakhara had changed, she hadn’t been prepared for the punch that this house would deliver. Everything is almost exactly the same. The furniture, the placement, the paintings on the walls, the walls themselves. If she closes her eyes, she can almost imagine skipping down the stairs from her bedroom to the dining room before running to school. Or later, sneaking out through the kitchen door to meet Inder in the garden.
Shaking her head to clear the memories, she looks at the kids, wondering what’s going on in their heads.
‘Did you say this house has eight rooms?’ Jia asks, looking around.
Trishna doesn’t respond to that. ‘Guys, I think we should freshen up, and then let’s get something to eat,’ she announces. Jia turns around because Chinnamma has followed them inside. Trishna can feel her frustration mount as Chinnamma continues staring at them with barely concealed hostility before turning around and walking back to the kitchen.
‘What’s with her?’ Varun whispers.
‘No idea. Let’s get settled in the rooms upstairs and I’ll make lunch for you guys. Okay?’ Trishna suggests.
The kids climb the stairs wearily and Trishna follows them, leading them to her old bedroom, which – surprise, surprise – is exactly the way she left it, right down to the faded bluebell patterned bedspread on her bed.
‘Eww. Backstreet Boys?’ Jia says as she inspects the peeling poster on the wall. ‘I expected better taste from you, Mom.’
Varun is looking around at her dusty desk. She hopes they don’t find anything incriminating inside before she can clean it all up.
‘Who’s Inder?’ Varun asks, and Trishna feels her stomach fall. What?
‘Why?’ she asks, striding up to him, only then realizing that he’s opened the desk drawer and is looking through a notebook she used to scribble in.
‘Here.’ Varun shows her the last page.
‘Er...’ Trishna has no words. She’d played that stupid FLAMES game with her name and Inder’s. She can feel her face heat up as she snatches the book from him and tears out that sheet and crumples it in a ball.
‘Mom’s old boyfriend,’ Varun says in a stage whisper, to which Jia pretends to vomit.
‘Shut it, you two. I was just a kid back then,’ she says, defending herself, even though she hasn’t thrown away the crumpled ball of paper in her hand.
