The Blind Crow on the Terrace

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. 

The Shadow Behind the Window

It was a cold winter night, the kind where the chill from the wind seeped through the thin walls of the house, making the bones ache. Granny, back then just a little girl in middle school, lay on the narrow wooden bed at the end of the room, with her two cousin sisters fast asleep beside her. The house was quiet, the kind of quiet that wrapped around her like a heavy blanket, pressing down on her chest. The only sound was the creaking of the old wooden floorboards and the distant howling of the wind outside.

The room had a small window that faced the barren property next door. It was an old property that nobody cared to visit anymore. For years, it had been abandoned, left to rot. Sometimes, late at night, people—alcoholics, thieves—would sneak in to steal scrap metal to sell. Granny and her cousins would often hear muffled voices and the clinking of metal as those people worked under the cover of night. But it wasn’t unusual. It was just the way things were in that part of the village.

But tonight… tonight was different.