Dar-e-Salaam

Dar-e-Salaam.

That's where the neighbor's son went. To make money.

I don't remember a day that went by without her coming home to meet Mu and tell us about Dar-e-Salaam. I'd asked Mu where it was. It was somewhere far. Far far away. Farther than the road beyond the green fields. Farther than even Pondicherry where my parents lived.

The neighbor in her crisp white dress with her crisp red mouth who spat betel juice in a quaint old jar that she carried when she came home. She wouldn’t spit in Mu's garden. Oh no. Deference, my first sight of it.

Mu would offer her tea everyday which she would gracefully decline pointing to her blood red mouth.

Mu would sip her tea and listen to her stories. Of big buildings. Bigger cars. Lavish lifestyles. Of letters with exotic stamps which she would graciously give me. I steamed out the stamps and pressed them, still with fragments of ink from a strange country into my notebook. My notebook pages that whispered to the stamps from Dar-e-Salaam.

The stories were always happy. They made my neighbor happy, that is.

I'd sometimes go over to her in a fit of boredom and sit on her mulberry lined wall.

"Tell me about Dar-e-Salaam" and she would tell me stories of tigers that roamed the streets and animals of colors that existed not even in the paint box I got last summer.

"Are there ghosts in Dar-e-Salaam?", I once asked her.

She thought about it.


"Yes", she decided. People die even in Dar-e-Salaam.

And went on to tell me some of the most fearsome stories I'd heard in my childhood. And in my ignorance, I didn't realize that the ghosts in Dar-e-Salaam too spoke last words in Malayalam to their victims.

Mu put an end to those visits after she was repeatedly woken several nights by my tugging of her saree. The toilets were too far and too dark and the way was paved with ghosts of increasing cruelty.

But the other stories continued. Though Mu was unhappy with her for scaring me with her stories, I think Mu visited the Dar-e-Salaam in her head when she spoke. I had one too. Full of dark blue tigers and orange peacocks and ghosts with white sarees. That I would never go there was certain.

It was then that it happened. Her son died. I don’t know how, but he died. And he was brought home in a brown box.

It didn’t have a stamp on it.

We went visiting. Her screams of grief terrified me. Mu hastily walked me back home.

I brushed aside the uneasy feeling that there perhaps was someone else who walked with us that evening.

His ghost after all would be in Dar-e-Salaam.