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The mess kitchen at Arunima Girls’ Hostel was squeezed between the water tank room and a shuttered storeroom once used for chemicals back when the building housed a defunct pharmacy college. Every girl joked about the weird echo in the narrow room, how even simmering water seemed to hiss a syllable or two before boiling.
Maitreyi, a scholarship student with no fondness for hostel food, often heated cup noodles near midnight after study hours. The others warned her but in the mild, teasing way students do — stories about the ‘midnight echo’ that pinged back your own words, changed.
She laughed it off until the first night she heard her name.
“Mai… tri… eee.”
It hadn’t been loud. Just soft enough to blend into the hissing kettle. She froze, then slammed the induction off. She left her uncooked Maggi on the counter and didn’t speak about it.
Two nights later, she dared to try again.
This time the door wouldn’t shut. The old hydraulic arm, usually stiff, hung loose as if resisting her entry. She had to draw it closed and wedge a folding chair under the handle. She began humming to drown the strange stillness. And then her humming came back to her — layered, delayed, twisted.
“Hmm hmm-mmm, hmm hmm-mmm,” she sang.
“Hmm hmm-mmm, hmm hmm-mmMmm,” replied a harmony voice.
She yanked out her earbuds in panic. There was nothing behind her. She opened the door, but the hallway was empty. When she came back, the cutlery drawer stood ajar, though she hadn’t opened it. The spoons had arranged themselves into a circle. She didn’t stay to clean it.
Still, doubt crept in like termites in a paper wall. Maybe it really had just been acoustics. The kitchen ventilation was a strange maze. Old pipes still ran into the ceiling.
She returned the next week with her phone camera recording, determined to catch it.
On camera, she didn’t hear her name. But the kettle’s hiss became a low male voice on playback.
“Where did you bury them, Ratna?”
She dropped the phone. Who was Ratna?
That night, she searched the dorm history. Nothing came up. No mention of a Ratna in alumni records or college archives. But in a 1997 newspaper clipping scanned into a defunct urban development pdf, she found a single sentence.
“After the tragic disappearance of three students from Arunima Pharmacy College, the girls’ hostel was shut pending investigation. Dorm kitchen reported signs of forced soil disturbance under tiling.”
Soil. Beneath tiles.
It rained heavily that weekend, which knocked out the power for a night. On a dare — or perhaps just rage at the mocking unknown — Maitreyi returned to the kitchen with a crowbar.
She removed four floor tiles before hitting soil, wet and pungent. Underneath, in a flat space shaped oddly like a bone plate, lay spoons curled with rust. Some too large to be dinner spoons. One had tiny flecks of what looked like enamel.
The lights returned.
She stood.
The cutlery drawer snapped open by itself.
Inside, fresh silver spoons gleamed. Not ones she had ever seen in the hostel. They were pristine… and humming. Not vibrating, but singing — a slow note that seemed to burrow into her ears.
“We remember Ratna.”
Suddenly, every metal surface in the kitchen began reflecting not her face but three others — girls in old-stitched uniforms, twin braids, all staring directly at her, their mouths moving, but her reflection screaming silently.
Behind the echoes, a trickle of words emerged.
“She fed us lye, then buried us here. We were her rivals. She said the hostel was hers.”
Maitreyi ran.
She moved out the same week. She told only one girl — Pooja from Room 107, who liked ghost stories but didn’t laugh when told one. Pooja stayed back to check.
That was six weeks ago.
Pooja vanished without taking her phone or charger. All she left behind was one silver spoon placed delicately on Maitreyi’s pillow.
The kitchen’s now padlocked, but some say if you stand outside it at 2:13 AM and hum a tune in monotone, the utensils inside will hum back… in three-part harmony.
And occasionally, in the reflection of the microwave’s steel cover, Ratna still checks her hair — waiting, perhaps, for one more roommate to remember.
