It was the day after Ghatasthapana, the official start to the Dashain holidays. After a lifetime of being confined to the noisy dustbowl called Kathmandu, we were finally let loose in the plains. And the first thing to do, naturally, was to build a house which would witness all our adventures over the next month.
Elsewhere in our real wooden house roofed with corrugated iron sheets, cousins nudged each other until all seven of us threw off the blankets and stealthily slunk out to the open fields behind the cowshed.
We pretended not to hear as our mothers called out, tea and satu in hand. All we could hear were our excited heartbeats. We were finally going to be landlords!
Jay dai was the chief engineer, he knew where we would lay the foundations.
"Here," he pointed to the shade beneath our huge berry tree, "this is where we start digging." He marked a rectangular shape with his stick, no bigger than three feet by four feet.
We fell to the brittle ground, and chunks of mud flew away as we dug diligently with sharp stones to make little holes – a total of around twenty pits where the pillars would stand.
"Now go out and look for sticks," Luna didi commanded us.
But before we could do so, a shadow loomed over our blueprint. Hajurbuwa! Our grandfather stood before us in his signature gumboots and fiercely defined eyebrows.
"What are you all doing here, spoiling the fields?" he asked. He never raised his voice, and he spoke in his usual soft timbre now. I quaked nevertheless. Our playhouse did not seem like a grand idea anymore.
"What is this?" he asked again. None of us answered.
It turned out we did not have to, our grandmother had already come to our rescue. Hajurama, not more than half the height of her husband, answered easily, "The kids are having fun, let them do it. They come home for such a short time, anyway."
Hajurbuwa stomped away to his favorite fields further ahead. Our savior marched off on her little feet to her beloved cows impatiently calling out to her.
The battle had been won before it had begun. We giggled deliriously as we made a contest of searching for the fattest, driest, sturdiest sticks. There was soon a pile of them heaped onto the red-brown mud, enough to light a bonfire.
"Now straw," we were sent out again.
I raced with Ashish dai to the mound of straw, and we pulled out fistfuls of the golden yellow stuff. "Do you know that people sometimes pull up green and grey snakes resting inside the straw?" I queried the city boy.
He smiled lazily, refusing to be frightened. We walked back to our site, where two of the eldest cousins had already planted the sticks and secured them with sticky sludge.
It was now time to thatch the roof. For this, our cousins expertly weaved bamboo twigs with straw, lacing them into a rough crisscross formation. After two hours of hard work, our house faced us proudly, open on one side but with pretty secure walls on the other three sides. If we crawled into the house and held our breath, we could even fit there for a minute or so.
There was a problem, though. "I want a house of my own," yelled Bina.
The rest of us winced. As the youngest child of the sons, Bina was the most pampered little girl we knew. She was also pretty powerful. She had her personal swing while the rest of us squabbled over one. We knew that not letting her have her way meant our grandmother would chastise us.
We set to work again, but halfheartedly this time. The sticks were hurriedly bored into the ground without any fanfare, there were no intricate walls, and we just did not have time to do the roof.
"Why don't you use the new towel?" someone suggested innocently to Bina. Fortunately she liked the idea, and came down with the furry orange towel which she promptly draped over her rickety establishment.
By this time, the delicious smells of goat curry lured us into the kitchen. We streamed out, plates in hand, determined to have a banbhoj next to our new buildings. The picnic tasted wonderful, even though insects kept falling into it, and once in a while we had to swat away a stray cat.
The entire day, the houses remained our primary sources of affection. Instead of trying to squeeze into them, we sat nearby, told extremely tall tales, and argued on which subjects were the absolute worst. Our mothers were probably ecstatic that their bored children had found new meaning in life.
Alas, dusk fell too soon, and we were all herded back to our rooms.
"Why can't we stay here?" I muttered petulantly.
"We are going to," Ashish dai confided in me. The two boys had already decided that they would spend the night in our house. Our uncles had tried hard to dissuade them, recounting tales of thieves and dacoits, but my brothers had already transferred a mat and noodles and candles into the house.
Immediately, my heart was aflame with jealousy. I wanted to stay in our house too, the one we had built so industriously. But even at eight years of age, I knew that I wouldn't be allowed to. I was younger, I was more easily scared, and I was a girl.
Envy gnawed at me as I fell asleep, imagining my cousins huddled beneath our beautiful masterpiece of a home.
The next morning, yellow sunlight slanted in through the window and screamed into my eyes.
My first thought was the house. Our precious abode which my brothers had probably dismantled in their sleep.
I was about to race down the stairs when I caught sight of Jay dai fast asleep. I peered at the bed next to him – sure enough, that was Ashish dai's brown hair. Did the boys not go to the house, then? But I knew they had, I saw them trooping out after dinner.
My brown-eyed cousin opened his eyes just then.
"Why did you come back?" I whispered to him.
He stared at me sheepishly.
"What?" I asked. I was curious now. Who would give up a chance to spend the night outdoors?
"We were scared," he murmured. "Almost as soon as we settled down for the night, we saw a white ghost parading around, and ran home. We had to knock for a bit before Mailobuwa opened the doors for us."
I shivered a little. It sounded really spooky.
Downstairs, I joined the melee of elders grinding flour, picking out stones from lentils, doing the dishes, chopping grass into fine bits.
"There was a white ghost in our house under the bayar tree," I announced. "We will not be going there during the nighttime now."
Two of my aunts looked at my uncle and laughed. I concentrated on my warm, frothy milk.
It was years before I realized just who had haunted the house.
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