The Girl Behind the Hithadhoo Cemetery

In 2018, Ameen (not real name) was still in school in Hithadhoo. He and a few of his friends had developed a habit of slipping away during Isha prayer to smoke, choosing a time when they knew most people nearby would be at the mosque.

Their usual place was an old hut behind the cemetery. The boys had gone there often enough that the graveyard no longer felt unusual to them. The mosque lights reached the entrance and some of the path beyond it, but farther back the graves and palms were left in darkness. Near the hut, they could sit without being easily seen, talk among themselves and smoke before heading home.

One night, while they were sitting there, Ameen became distracted by the sound of the leaves above them. The palms were moving in the dark, and after listening for a while he began to hear something in the rustling that reminded him of whispering. His friends were still talking around him, apparently unconcerned, so he tried to ignore it and return his attention to their conversation.

A little later, he heard someone call his name.

The voice was soft, but he heard it clearly enough to stop listening to everything else. He waited to see whether one of his friends would say his name again, but none of them were looking at him. They continued talking as before. The call had come from somewhere beyond them, from the direction of the cemetery.

Ameen turned and looked towards the graves. At first he could make out little except the trunks of the palms and the uneven darkness between them. Then he noticed a small figure standing near one of the trees.

From its height, he thought it might be a child. He kept looking, expecting the figure to shift its weight, turn its head or make some other ordinary movement. It remained completely still. In the poor light, he could not make out the body properly either. Some parts were visible, while others seemed to disappear into the darkness around the tree, making it difficult to tell where the figure ended.

Ameen stared long enough for his friends' conversation to fade into the background. He blinked, and when he looked again, the figure appeared to be closer than before.

He had not seen it move.

For several seconds he could only sit there and look at it. His fingers had begun to feel numb, and although his first thought was to get up and leave, he could not bring himself to move. His friends were within reach, still talking beside him, but he could not call out to them either. He remained fixed on the small figure facing him from the cemetery.

As his eyes adjusted, he caught a clearer glimpse of its face.

It was grinning.

The smile stretched much farther across the face than Ameen expected a human mouth to stretch. He kept staring at it, unable to look away, while his heart beat hard against his chest. He could hear his friends close by, yet none of them seemed to notice what he was seeing only a short distance away.

Then the figure disappeared.

Ameen continued looking at the palm tree. There was no one beside it now. He had not seen the figure walk away or move behind the trunk. The place where it had been standing was simply empty.

He did not tell his friends while they were still near the cemetery. He waited until the following morning, when they were together again, and told them about the voice that had called his name and the small figure he had seen beside the palm tree. He described how it had appeared closer after he blinked and how its face had looked when he finally saw it clearly.

Ameen expected the others to laugh at him.

One of them did not.

He was the quiet one in the group, the friend who never joked about things like this. As Ameen spoke, he listened without interrupting. By the time Ameen finished describing the figure beside the palm tree, the boy had gone pale.

He looked at Ameen and said,

“I’ve seen her too.”