As part of Book Week on AIM magazine, we publish an exclusive short story by upcoming writer Dina Begum.


The Landlady

Her eyes are red as she looks at me. She examines my face through heavy eyes, as though it is the first face she has seen in a long time. And for a while it seems she’s going to cry.

And her eyes are so red I think her tears may be red. Like blood. Or be blood. And then she does cry. It’s a quiet kind of cry, like she’s forgotten the sound of it, soft and muffled against the backdrop of chirping spring birds. And it’s just salt tears. Not red. No blood. Just tears.

"Would you like some tea?" she offers, suddenly smiling. It’s a striking smile and it hits my heart all upside down. "No. Thank you." I decline. I press my hands down onto my knees, trying to steady myself in the gradual unfolding of strangeness. I can feel the clamminess through the cotton of my dress, a feint reminder of my mortality.

"Sofia." She calls my name softly.

"Are you afraid of me?" She is still crying, as though it was my name that had made her cry.

"No." I smile back at her. She sees right through it and her knowing smile jolts me back to reality.

I am sitting here with her. We might have had tea, like two normal people. But I had declined. There is no more room left for tea now.

"Sofia. Such an exotic name, is it Indian?" she says through her last tears that meet the white tissue in her hands. "No it"s not," I say, acutely aware of the soft sounds of the tissue in her hands and the remnants of her sniffling.

"I"ve always wanted to visit India. Such an exotic place. I like the sun there." She speaks ignoring me. "My aunt married an Indian you see, but Grandpa was always so adamant that crossbreeding is not good. Scientifically I mean." She shoots me a knowing look expecting something in return, but I offer nothing.

"Where in India was he from?" I ask despite myself. "Oh he was from Wisconsin. One of the tribes there," she smiles. "That's not exactly India is it?" I frown. "Well not exactly but you know it's all the same to me." Her ignorance irks me. "Oh dear!" she begins crying again.

"Are you all right?" I felt I ought to ask her at least. Out of humanity. In all honesty though I wanted to leave. I didn't care if she was all right or not. What I cared about was the madness of all this. Her offering me tea while she was crying. Her with a box of tissues in her lap like all she ever did was cry and offer people tea that failed to materialise.

"What does your name mean?" she was asking the meaning of my name. I feel like telling her to shut up. Instead I smile and beg her pardon. "Your name must mean something" she insists.

I stand up, thinking it was time for me to leave. She looks up at me, a wild confused look widening her blue eyes until they thin into the transparency of marbles. Did she want me to leave or did she want me to stay?

"I don't know what my name means," I offer. A note of evasiveness seeping into my hesitant words.

"I see". She also stands up. Giving me the kind of look that implies I know nothing if I don't know the meaning of my own name.

"I know who I am," I say feeling indignant.

"Of course you do, Sofia." And I get the feeling that it was I who had been crying all day and going mad instead of her. "Right! I"ll get the tea things now," she says walking up to a table, her mouth curving upwards. The table was empty. She stared at the table then looked around, until her eyes rested on me, blank as a piece of slate.

"I must have put the tea things away," she shrugs the disappearance of tea away like that's what had really happened instead of her forgetting or never having had tea there in the first place.

"Never mind. Would you like a cigarette? Do you smoke? Is that permissible in your culture?" She flips open an expensive looking silver cigarette case and then when she realises there's only one inside; her offer of a cigarette becomes half-hearted and sheepish.

"No thank you, I don't smoke." I fall back into my seat grudgingly.

"Well good! I can have this smoke after all." She sits down opposite me and crosses her legs and smoothes her skirt and pushes back her neat curly red hair and pretends everything's fine.

Nothing had changed since she had broken down. She was still my impeccably dressed well-groomed landlady from this morning. I told her I had to be on my way and she nodded and showed me to the door.

And as I left I could not help thinking that she was watching me, not as you watch a person leave, but observing my every step until I was outside by the pavement in front of her house and she was peering down at me, through an inch of white lace.

When my lift arrived she was still watching, thinking I couldn't see her. John leans over and opens the passenger door for me. I turn my face to receive his kiss, the kiss from a pale man and I almost feel the fall of white lace as she lets it go and turns away.

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Dina Begum is an East London based writer currently working on her first novel 'Six Yards of River', as well as writing short stories for Creative Week Newspaper.