Daniyal Mueenuddin - In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

When they had finished, she walked around the garden, looking at the fruit trees, the leaves colored and falling as the autumn season advanced.

‘What would you have us do with this?’ asked Ghulam Rasool, leading her to the cabin, which sprouted a television antenna and bouquets of crude plastic flowers, their petals thick as tongues, bought by Rezak soon after his marriage, nailed up along the roof one day, to please his wife’s innocent heart. ‘The old man didn’t want his family to have anything from him.’

It seemed to her vividly alive, a motionless hirsute pres ence, the antenna, the flowers, the four massive legs, the pipe that drained the inside spittoon trailing into the grass as if drawing nourishment.

She told them to bring it up to the big estate and park it in a shaded corner somewhere not too visible, as a memorial. Her husband, a raconteur, could show it to his guests and tell them about Rezak, the old man who entered service bringing his own house.

At first the cabin sat inviolate below the swimming pool, locked, Rezak’s things still in the cupboards and drawers. Sonya went once to look at it, then not again, her attention fading. Gradually, like falling leaves, the locks were broken off, one person taking the thermos, another the wood tools — files and a hammer, a plane, a level. The clothes disappeared, the last cupboard emptied, even the filthy mattress pulled out and put to use, taken by the sweeper who cleaned the toilets in the big house. The door of the little cabin hung open, the wind and blown rain scoured it clean.