The Concrete Garden

In the summer of 1997, our neighborhood was a patchwork of half-built houses and drying laundry. At its heart stood a block of flats that seemed to absorb light, its facade stained like old tea. The residents of that building never ventured out after eight, and the ground floor flat was a mosaic of sacred images, their colors faded but their eyes always watching. Two guards, silent and stoic, flanked the entrance, their presence a warning more than a welcome.

The building sat at the edge of a neglected park, a place where teenagers went to smoke and whisper secrets. It was there that a boy named Ravi found himself one evening, his bladder urgent from the cheap cola he’d drunk. He stepped behind a crumbling wall, away from the prying eyes of the guards, and as he relieved himself, he felt a strange pressure behind his eyes, as if something was pushing against his skull from the inside. Then blackness.

He woke to a stranger’s hand sprinkling water on his face. The man, an elderly watchman from a nearby construction site, helped him up. ‘You were out cold, son,’ he said, his voice raspy. ‘Must have been the heat.’ But Ravi felt a chill that had nothing to do with the evening air. His head throbbed, and a metallic taste lingered on his tongue. He walked home in a daze, the world around him strangely muted.

The next day, Ravi’s mother noticed he pushed his plate away. ‘Not hungry,’ he muttered, retreating to his room. He stopped answering calls, avoided his friends, and when his father asked him to run an errand, he just shook his head, eyes fixed on the wall. At night, he lay awake, listening to a faint scratching sound coming from the direction of that building, as if something were clawing its way out.

Weeks passed. Ravi grew pale, his cheeks hollow. He began to sketch obsessively, filling notebooks with images of the flat’s wall, the gods’ faces distorted into something monstrous. His parents, desperate, took him to a doctor, but the doctor found nothing wrong. ‘He’s just going through a phase,’ he said, but Ravi’s eyes had a faraway look, as if he were seeing something else.

One night, Ravi vanished. His bed was empty, the window open. A search party combed the area, and they found him in the park, sitting cross-legged before the building, his lips moving in a silent chant. He was taken home, but the next night he was there again. On the third night, the guards didn’t stop him. They just watched as he walked through the entrance, up the stairs, and into the flat that was never opened.

The flat was bare, the pictures gone, the walls clean. In the center of the room, a single chair stood. Ravi sat in it, and as he did, he felt a surge of joy, a lightness he hadn’t felt in weeks. He looked at his hands, clean and familiar. Then he noticed the picture frames hung on the wall, each one holding a photograph of a different boy, each with a date scrawled beneath. The last one was dated 1987, with a face he recognized from a faded school photo his mother kept in the attic. It was his father.

The door creaked shut behind him. The guards outside exchanged a glance, then resumed their silent watch. In the coming months, the residents of the building saw a new face occasionally peering from the window of the ground floor flat, but it was always gone by morning. And in our neighborhood, children learned to cross the street, to avoid the building and its watchful eyes, and to never, ever drink cheap cola before dark.