The Mansion

The Vignette Gazette Edition #3 | Cascade

Photo by Remy Gieling on Unsplash

The mansion, built in 1910 was a wedding gift from the nawab to his youngest daughter, Surayya Begum. She had been married a month when the First World War broke out, and her husband—no nawab, but an officer in the army—joined the fighting. At first, he wrote to Surayya regularly from the front. Then the letters stopped. Abruptly.

Surayya pulled every string she could, but nothing worked in her favour. Weeks turned into months. Having exhausted every resource at her disposal, she let melancholy consume her. She stopped going out or receiving visitors. Soon, she dismissed her attendants. Alone in the mansion, she gave up food and water. She lay in her bed and wept—letting tears cascade down her fair cheeks, waiting for a letter that never arrived.

Weeks passed. One night, the silence broke. The telephone in the grand hallway began to ring. But Surayya was too weak to leave her bed. The phone, shrill and insistent, kept ringing through the night. It was still ringing when Surayya breathed her last just before dawn.

Decades passed, and Ivy grew on the mansion’s crumbling walls, but Surayya’s roses continued to bloom; the chandelier glimmered whenever anklets sounded on the stairway. And the old phone rang only once—every year.

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