The tire’s final gasp occurred several hundred yards from the village. Diya checked her phone again, fruitlessly, knowing the battery remained dead. The few shops lining the main road were closed, though it was still early afternoon and a season of pleasant weather, not yet hot or rainy or both. Behind the road was a large, empty square that might have known green grass at some point but now boasted only a few yellowed clumps.
In thirty minutes Diya had managed to walk the length of every lane, feeling increasing dread as she did so. All of the houses were built in an old style once typical in the area, now likely to be called heritage in tourist brochures: large, one-story structures formed from whitewashed brick with wooden pillars supporting an overhanging red-tiled roof. Inside, Diya knew, the houses’ rooms would face an open air courtyard. There was no deviation in the architecture or exterior decoration of the houses in the village—they appeared to her as if they had all been erected by the same builder at the exact same time, carbon copies that had somehow managed even to age at the same rate. The phrase arrested decay popped into her mind, which she’d learned during a previous project photographing historic buildings that local authorities had agreed to maintain only to the extent that they wouldn’t be allowed to collapse.
There was a small patch of bare land in front of each house but nothing had been planted there, no clotheslines strung up or animals wandering around, no remnants of flowers blown out of garlands from previous auspicious days, no outward signs that any house was inhabited. Yet the place also had the feeling of one only recently abandoned, the air charged and unsettled like in a room a person has just exited. Like everyone there had seen her coming and immediately retreated, seeking not just invisibility but nonexistence.
As Diya made a second loop, looking more closely at the houses, she noticed that above each weathered teak door was a word or words in the same script. She recognized the looped strings of characters as her (grand)mother’s language, remembering the way she’d always thought the script matched the soft, rounded vowels of the words spoken aloud when she’d overheard them, rarely. The way some curved letters, to her wholly untrained eye, appeared just like her grandmother’s cupid-bowed lips forming the sound ooooo.
Initially, Diya had taken the writing above each door as the family name of each house’s residents, a single nod to individuality amidst the jarring homogeneity. But as she completed her second pass, she felt confident that all of the writing spelled exactly the same word or phrase. Perhaps the name of the village, she thought. Or maybe one large, extended family had settled in this place, and each house bore that same name.
She made a third pass through the lanes, this time knocking on each house’s door. The doors were more solid than they looked, thick slabs of wood that seemed to absorb all sound. A few times she thought she detected rustling fabric, the slap of a sandal. But no person returned to open the door, and this seemed so unfathomable, given what she now knew of the local culture, having immersed herself for some time in her (grand)mother’s city, in the constant desire to know another person’s business, the almost overbearing hospitality, that she began to doubt she’d heard anything. It seemed impossible that there were people within each of these houses listening to her and feeling no compulsion to even open a window and peer out at the woman making all this noise.
The sun was now tracing the lower half of its arc toward the horizon. Diya had walked around the side of last house in the last lane and was standing beside a curtained window. She covered her face with her hands, feeling the sweat and road grit that coated her face. It was easier to think with her eyes closed, in that darkness. She pressed her eyes with her fingertips until she saw sparks.
She’d go back to the road, she thought. Wait for a vehicle to pass or start walking until she came to another village.
She sensed the wind picking up, whistling through the dried palm leaves. But no—not the wind, which could not form words—for as she listened closer Diya realized she could make out murmured words, the cadence of chanting, coming from behind the window. Someone inside, whispering what sounded like a prayer.