Before she was Granny—the one who smelled of warm turmeric and wore glass bangles that jingled softly—she was just a quiet girl living in a village. Her family’s house stood on the edge of a field, a weathered old structure with cracked lime walls and a roof that held more secrets than tiles.
Whenever relatives visited, which was often, she was asked to sleep in the terrace room. It was expected. She never protested. Her own room would be given to the guests, and she’d climb the steep stone steps to the roof, where a small room sat like a forgotten corner of the house.
That room had a wooden bed, rough and slightly tilted, and a ceiling fan that shook with each turn like it might fall at any moment. The windows had no glass—just iron bars and a curtain faded by the sun.
One evening, after the guests had settled in and the house had gone quiet, she made her way upstairs. The village was still, the air thick with the smell of earth and distant cow-dung fires. Crickets chirped somewhere in the darkness.
As she stepped onto the terrace, her eyes caught something unusual.
A crow sat on the terrace fence.
It looked sickly, its feathers unclean and stuck together like wet thread. But what froze her in place were its eyes—milky and pale. The crow was blind.
And yet, somehow, it stared directly at her.
It didn’t flinch. Didn’t fly. It sat motionless, its head slightly tilted, as if it could see something inside her.
She felt a cold shiver run down her spine. Clutching her shawl tighter, she took a cautious step forward and whispered, “Shoo.”
Nothing.
She waved her hand, but the crow didn’t budge. It just kept watching.
Unnerved, she turned away and stepped into the terrace room, drawing the curtain shut. She lay down on the wooden bed, its frame creaking under her weight, and tried to sleep. The fan groaned overhead, spinning lazily like it was tired of holding on.
But sleep refused to come.
Instead, there was a sound—not from below, not from the room, but from outside.
A flutter. Then many.
She sat up and peered through the curtain.
The terrace was swarming with crows. Dozens of them. They weren’t just flying—they were fighting. Tearing at one another with beaks and claws, their cries piercing and unnatural.
The sky above her was filled with chaos—feathers spinning, wings flapping, beaks snapping.
Then, as if pulled by some invisible force, the chaos shifted.
The crows stopped attacking. Their movements turned precise, synchronised. They began to spiral downward together, a vortex of black wings and screeching calls.
And then, they began to form something.
It rose in the centre of the terrace, tall and undefined. Not quite human. Not quite bird. Just a looming, writhing shape made of feathers, beaks, and darkness—like a figure stitched together from nightmares. At its centre were two glowing white eyes—the same blind eyes as the crow on the fence.
She backed away from the window, trembling. Her lungs felt tight.
The air around her had grown thick—not heavy like weight, but as if it were filled with something invisible pressing in from all sides, making it harder and harder to breathe.
It felt like the darkness was slowly closing in, trying to squeeze the life out of the room.
She couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak. She shut her eyes and whispered a prayer her grandmother had taught her as a child. Over and over.
When she opened her eyes again, the noise had stopped.
The terrace was silent.
By morning, it was empty.
No crows. Just a line of deep scratch marks on the wall, and near the railing, a small pile of black feathers—motionless, as if whatever left them had vanished into thin air.
She didn’t tell anyone. Who would believe her?
But she never slept on the terrace again.
Years later, after she became Granny, she told the story once to a cousin visiting from the city. She ended it with a soft laugh, calling it a silly village dream.
But her voice had trembled.
And she never told him the final part—the part she couldn’t forget:
That sometimes, even decades later, when the wind blew just right at dusk, she could feel something watching from the terrace. Something cold. Something waiting.
And every so often, if she looked too long toward the roof, she’d see them again— those same pale, blind eyes.
No comments:
Post a Comment