Kainat Hamza Shaikh--The City That Never Tells You Everything

I am not a ghost hunter. I am a writer and a mother who lives in this city and pays attention. What I am offering you here is not a listicle of thrills. It is something closer to memory — mine, and the city's.

I was in the ninth standard when two students from my school were in an accident on Holkar Bridge. I remember the way the news moved through the corridors — quietly at first, then in a rush, the way water finds every crack. I did not know the students personally. But I knew the bridge.

Holkar Bridge spans the Mula-Mutha river and was built in the early nineteenth century, named after the Maratha leader Yashwantrao Holkar. It is old in the way Pune is old — quietly, without fuss. Beneath it lies a cemetery, its stones going back to the 1790s. Most people who cross the bridge do not think about what is beneath them. Most people do not need to.

But locals avoid the bridge late at night. The accidents that happen there are too many to be coincidence — that is what people say. The ones who walk across after midnight speak of a heaviness in the air, of the inexplicable feeling of being watched from below. My school friends and I never tested this theory. We did not need to. The two empty seats in the classroom for a week were enough.

Some places do not need ghosts. They carry their weight in the living memory of those who grieve near them.

Sassoon General Hospital is Pune's oldest government hospital. Its British-era stone facade has watched over the city for nearly two centuries — through plagues and partitions, through independence and its aftermath. It has seen more death than any building in this city, and it wears that knowledge in its walls.

There is a story that circulates among the older residents of Pune — spoken in the particular tone people reserve for things they half-believe. They say a nurse's spirit has been seen in the maternity ward at night. Not a benign presence. A nurse, they say, who did not leave her cruelties behind when she died. Women who were admitted there for delivery have reported the feeling of being watched by something cold and purposeful. Some claim to have seen a figure in white at the foot of the bed.

I would have filed this away as the kind of story cities tell about their oldest hospitals — until my sister-in-law told me about her mother's admission there. She was pregnant. The family was still holding the happiness of my sister-in-law's birthday, just two or three days earlier, when something strange happened during the night watch. I will not give details that are not mine to give. What I will say is this: they were discharged one day before whatever it was that followed. One day.

When she told me, I felt the particular cold that has nothing to do with temperature. The kind that settles in when you realise how thin the line is between a story you tell and a story you live.

Every Punekar knows Shaniwarwada. You cannot grow up in this city and not know it — the burnt orange of its gates, the history lessons, the school trips. What the textbooks tell you is this: it was the seat of the Peshwa rulers, built in 1730, partially destroyed by a mysterious fire in 1828.

What they do not tell you — what you learn from older people, from the neighbourhoods that surround the fort like a held breath — is about the night of Narayan Rao Peshwa. He was thirteen years old. He was murdered inside these walls by his own family, his uncle's men cutting him down as he ran, screaming for his uncle to save him. Kaka mala vachva. Uncle, save me.

On full moon nights, the people who live near the fort say they hear it still. A child's voice. Thin and desperate, rising from inside the stone. I have never heard it myself. But I have stood outside those gates at dusk and felt something I cannot name — a quality of air that seems to press back against you, as though the space itself is occupied.

History is never really past in a place like Shaniwarwada. It lives in the stone, and sometimes at night, it speaks.

Lady Halima Begum Urdu Primary School in Kondhwa is twenty, perhaps twenty-five minutes from my home. I have passed it. It is the kind of building that does not announce itself — a school like many schools, unremarkable from the outside.

And yet. The stories that attach themselves to this school are of a particular unsettling variety — not the dramatic kind, not chains and wailing. Students reported seeing something egg-shaped, hovering. Notes found in classrooms: You will die soon. The reports became persistent enough that the school was, for a time, emptied of its students.

I think about this differently because I am a mother. Because I think about small children sitting at small desks, and what it means for the ordinary safety of a classroom to be broken. Whatever the explanation — mass suggestion, genuine phenomenon, something in between — the fear was real to those children. It was twenty minutes from my door.

That proximity changes things. When a haunting is abstract, it belongs to story. When it is close enough to walk to, it becomes something else.

These are not the only places. Victory Theatre, one of the oldest single-screen cinemas in Pune, has long carried reports of disembodied laughter and screams heard between reels. The Pune Cantonment, where soldiers once lived and died, is said to carry the restless energy of the men buried there — invisible presences that push and prod. Sinhgad Engineering College has its own grief: a student who did not survive his failures, and who is said to still attend classes he never passed. On MG Road, an old house offers unexplained fragrances and a girl's voice that rises from whisper to shriek to cackle for no one who can be seen. And Sinhgad Fort holds the memory of a school bus full of children, sixty of them, that was run off the road at a blind turn — locals say they still hear the echo of children's voices approaching from the bend, then nothing.

I want to be careful about what I am claiming. I am not claiming that ghosts are real in the way that tables are real. I am claiming something more complicated: that places absorb what happens in them. That cities have a texture made not only of roads and buildings but of accumulated grief and violence and love and loss. That sometimes, walking through Pune at the wrong hour, you feel layers beneath the surface.

I live here. I drink chai and take my child to the park and know the good sabzi vendor and the bad one. I also know which bridges to avoid after midnight, and I felt something unexplainable when I stood near the gates of Shaniwarwada at dusk. Both of these things are true at once.

The Pune that is clean and progressive and easy-living — that Pune is real. But it is not the whole story. The whole story includes the boy who cried out in the fort and was not saved. It includes the cemetery under the bridge and the two empty desks in my classroom. It includes my sister-in-law's voice going quiet when she remembers what almost happened, and the particular silence that followed.

Every city has two faces. Pune simply has the grace — or the courage — to let you see both, if you are willing to look.

Kainat Hamza Shaikh is a writer based in Pune, India. She writes personal essays, horror fiction, and romance, and is currently building her freelance writing career. "The City That Never Tells You Everything" draws on her lived experience as a Pune resident and her personal connections to the places described.

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