Chapter 1: The Commission
The letter arrived during the
monsoon of 1900, sealed with crimson wax that bore the impression of a crescent
moon. Inside, elegant Urdu script promised payment in gold mohurs beyond my
wildest dreams for a single task: map the interior of Haveli Siyah before its
abandonment to the British colonial authorities. The signature belonged to
someone claiming to be Nawab Mirza Shahryar's heir—impossible, since the
nobleman had no family and vanished during the Rebellion of 1857.
I should have questioned it.
Should have wondered why a condemned haveli needed mapping, or why the payment
was enough to buy a small estate in Lahore. Instead, I packed my instruments
and headed for the village of Kala Pahar, driven by greed and the promise of
cartographic glory.
The village greeted me with
silence thicker than the dust storms of summer. When I mentioned the haveli,
conversations died like snuffed oil lamps. Children scattered behind their
mothers' dupatta. The village elder's wife touched her taweez and whispered,
"Woh wapis aa gaya hai—he has come back for another one."
"Who?" I pressed in
broken Punjabi.
Her eyes went distant as evening
stars. "The last naqsha-nawis. Said he'd map the cursed place too. Found
pieces of his compass scattered across the fields three days later. Never found
him. Allah have mercy."
Chapter 2: First Entry
Haveli Siyah crouched against the Nurri Hills like a diseased beast, its Mughal arches twisted into impossible
geometries. My compass spun wildly as I approached, needle dancing as if the
very earth was possessed by djinn. The great wooden doors, carved with verses
from long-forgotten texts, hung open—had been open, the villagers claimed,
since the night Nawab Shahryar disappeared.
Inside, the cool marble floors
echoed my footsteps wrong. Each sound returned distorted, as if the haveli was
mocking me with broken impressions of my movements. I began sketching the
central courtyard, noting the dimensions of its surrounding rooms, when I
realized something that turned my blood to ice water.
My measurements didn't add up. The
interior was larger than the exterior by impossible margins—larger than the
entire hilltop the haveli sat upon.
Room by room, I documented the
impossibility. Corridors lined with intricate tile work that stretched farther
than the building's outer walls should allow. Staircases that climbed forty
steps when the haveli was only two stories high. A durbar hall whose ceiling
soared into darkness that my oil lamp couldn't penetrate, adorned with mirror
work that reflected things that weren't there.
By evening prayer time, my map had
become a fevered nightmare—lines that crossed through solid walls, chambers
that existed in the same space, and architecture that defied God's natural
laws.
Chapter 3: The Other
Cartographer
In what should have been the
library, its shelves lined with mouldering volumes of Persian poetry and
astronomical treatises, I found the first body.
He sat hunched over a low desk,
qalam still clutched in skeletal fingers stained with henna, his map spread
before him like a prayer mat. The man wore the silk robes of a Mughal court
official, his brass nameplate reading "Ustad Mirza Daniyal, Royal
Cartographer to His Majesty." Impossible—the Mughal Empire had fallen
decades ago, yet this man looked as if he'd been working since the time of
Akbar.
His map was identical to mine.
Every impossible room, every twisted corridor, drawn in the exact same hand—my
hand. At the bottom, in my own careful nastaliq script, were the words:
"Day 847: Allah forgive me, I understand now. We never leave. We just...
continue the work."
I stumbled backwards, my map
crumpling like dead leaves, when I heard it—the scratch of a qalam on
parchment, coming from the desk. Daniyal's corpse was moving, adding new lines
to his map, sketching rooms I hadn't discovered yet, rooms that were materialising
even as he drew them.
His skull turned toward me with
the sound of grinding bone. Empty sockets regarded me with impossible
awareness, and when he spoke, his voice was the whisper of sand through
hourglasses.
"Welcome back, my
brother," he said through teeth like broken pearls. "How many
incarnations is this now? I've lost count since the British came."
Chapter 4: The Gallery of
Selves
I fled through corridors decorated
with frescoes that moved when I wasn't looking directly at them, but the haveli
had different plans. Every carved archway I passed through led to the same
room—a portrait gallery lined with miniature paintings of cartographers. Dozens
of them, spanning centuries, all holding maps of Haveli Siyah. All wearing my
face beneath different turbans and caps.
In the center hung the largest
portrait: Nawab Mirza Shahryar himself, painted in the classical Mughal style,
but with my eyes, my nose, my mouth. The gold nameplate beneath read simply,
"Al-Awwal—The First."
A voice behind me spoke my
thoughts in perfect Urdu: "Pareshan mat ho, —don't be troubled. You are
exactly where your soul belongs."
I turned to find myself facing...
myself. Another me, wearing the cream-colored sherwani I remembered putting on
this morning, though I couldn't recall doing so. This other me smiled with lips
that moved wrong, as if someone was learning to operate my face through memory
alone.
"I came last month," he
said casually, adjusting his matching pagri. "Or was it during the reign
of Bahadur Shah? Time flows like the Ravi here, sometimes forward, sometimes
back. You're the one from next week, I think. Or perhaps you're from 1757,
mapping the haveli for Nawab Sahib the first time."
My vision blurred like heat
shimmer on the Grand Trunk Road. "This isn't possible."
"Isn't it? Check your
equipment bag."
With trembling hands, I opened my
leather satchel. Inside were dozens of identical maps, all in my precise
nastaliq script, all documenting the same impossible rooms. Some were yellowed
with the patina of centuries, others looked freshly drawn with ink still wet.
One was dated 1757 in the Hijri calendar. Another bore the mark of 1857. The
newest carried tomorrow's date in both Islamic and Christian reckonings.
"we are all the same
person," the other me continued, his voice carrying the weight of
centuries. "Nawab Mirza Shahryar, master of maps and measurements, drawn
back to his haveli again and again, trapped in a cycle of his own architectural
obsession. Every time we think we're someone new—a different name, different
memories, a different village of birth—but the haveli knows the truth of our
soul."
Chapter 5: The Revelation
The memories crashed back like the
flooding Indus, washing away the lie of my current identity. I remembered
commissioning this haveli, designing its impossible architecture as an
experiment in sacred geometry, trying to build a physical representation of the
mystical concepts I'd studied in the books of Sufi masters. I remembered the
first time I got lost in my own creation, how panic had driven me deeper into
passages that defied the laws of mathematics and nature.
I remembered dying here, alone and
mad, in 1757, the year the British began their conquest of our lands.
I remembered being reborn as a
revenue surveyor in 1763, drawn back to map my own tomb. As a military engineer
in 1803, commissioned by the Company to study the haveli's strategic value. As
an archaeologist in 1857, seeking the lost Nawab Shahryar during the great
uprising, seeking myself.
Every identity was a lie the
haveli told me, a new mask worn by the same trapped soul. The villagers'
warnings, the elder's fear—they'd witnessed this cycle play out dozens of times
across generations: different faces, different names, same doomed man returning
to his architectural prison.
"but this time will be
different," I whispered, the words feeling rehearsed like a well-practised
ghazal. "This time I'll break free."
My doppelganger laughed—a sound
like shattering bangles. "That's what we always say. That's what keeps the
game interesting for centuries."
Chapter 6: The House Reveals
Its Purpose
The haveli began to shift around
us, marble walls folding like the pages of an illuminated manuscript, revealing
its true nature. We weren't trapped in a building—we were imprisoned inside a
living map, a dimensional diagram I'd drawn with my own blood and mathematical
madness, inspired by the geometric patterns of Islamic art taken to their
impossible extreme.
"You wanted to map the
impossible," my other self said as reality warped like a reflection in
disturbed water. "So the haveli made itself your eternal project. Every
time you think you've finished, it creates new rooms based on new geometric
principles and architectural impossibilities. You feed it with your obsession,
and it feeds you new mysteries to solve. A perfect fusion of science and djinn
magic."
Through the translucent walls, I
could see other versions of myself—dozens of them, all mapping different
sections of the infinite haveli. Some had been working for centuries, their
maps sprawling across entire rooms like vast Persian carpets made of ink and
parchment. Others had just begun, their faces still bright with the hope of
discovery and the promise of British gold.
"The commission
letters," I gasped, understanding flooding through me like the call to
prayer at dawn. "I send them to myself."
"every single time. Can't
resist a good mystery, can we? The heir who doesn't exist, the impossible
payment, the haveli that needs mapping before the British seize it." He
grinned with my face, adjusting his pagri. "We write them when we're lucid
between incarnations, hide them in the past for our future selves to find. The
perfect bait for the perfect trap. Even we can't resist the promise of mapping
the unmappable."
Chapter 7: The Choice
"so what happens now?" I
asked, though I already knew the answer.
"Now you choose. Accept the
truth and join us willingly, continuing to map forever with full knowledge of
what you are—a soul bound by your own genius and ambition. Or..." He
gestured to the walls, where I could see other versions of myself working
frantically, their eyes mad with geometric fervour, some speaking in tongues,
others weeping over calculations that couldn't be solved. "Fight it.
Convince yourself you can escape, that this incarnation is different. Drive
yourself insane trying to solve the unsolvable, to map the infinite."
I looked at my hands, already
stained with ink that hadn't been there moments before, patterns appearing on
my palms that matched the geometric designs on the walls. My map was updating
itself, adding new rooms I hadn't discovered, sketching passages that hadn't
existed until I observed them into being.
"There is a third
option," I said slowly in Arabic.
"Oh? What wisdom do you
offer?"
I began tearing up the map,
ripping it into smaller and smaller pieces. With each destroyed section, the
haveli shuddered. Marble cracked. The infinite corridors started to collapse
like a house of cards in the monsoon wind.
"If I am the haveli, and the
haveli is my map, then destroying the map should”
"Should kill us all,
yes," my double finished in Persian, the language of poetry and sorrow.
"Every version of ourselves, trapped here since before the British came.
Is that really what your soul desires? To end all our incarnations?"
I looked around at my other
selves, bent over their endless work, mapping rooms that spawned new rooms,
solving geometric puzzles that generated new mysteries. Was this existence of
eternal creation truly worse than the void?
The torn map pieces scattered to
the marble floor like fallen petals, and with them, pieces of the haveli began
to vanish. Windows sealed themselves. Archways collapsed. The impossible Mughal
architecture was collapsing into mundane, British-approved reality.
Epilogue: The Final Twist
I woke up in Kala Pahar's only
inn, the morning sun streaming through simple wooden shutters. The innkeeper's
wife was gently shaking me awake, her dupatta covering her greying hair.
"Bad dreams, son?" she
asked kindly in Punjabi.
I sat up, my head pounding like a drum.
On the wooden table beside my charpoy was a commission letter, sealed in
crimson wax. With trembling fingers, I opened it, already knowing what I would
find.
"Map the interior of
Haveli Siyah before its transfer to British authorities. Payment: 100 gold
mohurs."
The signature belonged to Mirza
Shahryar.
Outside my window, the haveli
stood intact against the morning hills, its impossible architecture piercing
the clouds like minarets of madness. In my hands, the letter crumbled to ash,
and new words appeared on the blank paper in elegant nastaliq:
"Welcome back. Ready to
begin again?"
I reached for my equipment bag,
knowing with sick certainty that I would find my maps inside—dozens of them,
all identical, all waiting to be drawn again. The cycle wasn't broken. It had
simply reset itself like the seasons, like the monsoons, like the endless
conquests of our land.
As I packed my instruments, I
caught my reflection in the small mirror by the washbasin. For just a moment,
my eyes weren't my own. They belonged to Nawab Mirza Shahryar, the first
cartographer, the one who built this prison of maps and mathematics and mystical
obsession.
I smiled with his lips and headed
for the door, already composing in my mind the commission letter I would hide
for my next incarnation to find, already calculating the gold that would tempt
my future self.
After all, every good map needs a
legend written in the margins. And every legend needs someone foolish enough to
believe it's just a story told by villagers in the shadow of cursed
architecture.
The haveli always wins. Allah
knows best.
THE END
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