The lane I grew up on had a streetlight that had been broken for eleven years.
No one ever fixed it. Not because the municipality was lazy—though they were—but because the people on our lane had learned to navigate the darkness. We knew where the stones jutted up from the pavement. We knew which step of which house creaked. We knew the sound of each other's footsteps before we saw each other's faces.
That was Suryanagar for you. A town that had forgotten itself so completely that even the electricity gave up.
I was born in the house at the end of that lane, the one with the faded blue gate that screeched if you didn't lift it slightly before pulling. My mother, Anjali Raizada, had painted that gate herself when she was eight months pregnant with me, and she had never painted it again. The blue had turned the colour of a bruised sky, and I liked it that way. It matched the rest of us.
Our mornings began with the sound of her grinding spices. Five-thirty AM, like clockwork. The heavy stone ammi moving in slow, deliberate circles against the base, crushing coriander and cumin and red chillies into a paste that would make the whole house smell like war and comfort at the same time. I never needed an alarm. The grinding was my alarm, and even now, the thought of it makes my chest ache in a way I cannot explain.
My father, Dev Raizada, had died when I was two years old. I had no memory of him except for a single sensation—the scratch of his unshaven cheek against my forehead, and a laugh that vibrated through his chest into mine. My mother never spoke of him. Not once. I had asked, when I was seven, and she had looked at me with an expression I did not understand at the time. Regret, I know now. But also terror.
She changed the subject. I never asked again.
By the time I turned sixteen, I had learned that silence was a language my mother spoke fluently, and I had become fluent in it too. We moved through our days like two planets in the same orbit—close enough to see each other, far enough to never collide. She made my breakfast. I ate it. She asked about school. I said it was fine. She nodded. I nodded. The conversation ended before it began, and neither of us seemed to mind.
Or perhaps she minded and did not say. Perhaps I minded and did not know how.
Suryanagar Government Higher Secondary School was a ten-minute walk from my house, past the tea stall where old men argued about cricket and politics in equal measure, past the temple with the broken bell that no one had rung in twenty years, past the open drain that smelled of everything that should not be smelled. I had made that walk five days a week for eleven years, and I had never once been late. Not because I was disciplined. Because I had nowhere else to be.
I sat third from the back, by the window. That was my spot. Not the last bench—that invited attention from teachers who wanted to catch slackers sleeping. Not the front—that invited questions from teachers who wanted to reward attentiveness. Third from the back was invisible territory. The place where you could stare at the rain on the glass and no one called your name.
No one called my name anyway.
I was not bullied. I was not popular. I was not anything that required a label. I existed in the margins of every classroom, every lunch break, every group photograph where I stood at the edge and smiled a smile that reached exactly the right distance and went no further. The other students were kind to me in the way people are kind to furniture—they did not trip over me, but they did not remember me either.
I told myself I preferred it that way.
I told myself a lot of things.
My only companions were the old paperbacks I borrowed from the town library, a building that smelled of dust and termites and someone else's childhood. Mysteries, mostly. Stories where things happened to people who wanted things. Where clues led to answers and answers led to endings and endings led to the satisfaction of a closed circle. I read them slowly, savouring each page, because the library only had forty-seven books in the mystery section and I had already read thirty-two of them twice.
On the evening everything began to change, I was reading my thirty-third mystery for the third time.
The book was called The Silent Witness, and it was about a woman who saw a murder but could not speak because she had taken a vow of silence. I had always liked that premise—the idea that someone could know everything and say nothing. It felt familiar to me.
I did not know that in three weeks, I would become that woman in reverse. I would see nothing and know everything. And the silence would break whether I wanted it to or not.
The first crack appeared on a Tuesday.
I remember the date because it was the day after my mother had burned the dinner dal and cursed in Punjabi—a language she only used when she was truly angry—and I had laughed so hard that she had thrown a kitchen towel at my face. It was the last time I laughed like that. The last time laughter felt like something that belonged to me.
The crack was not in my life yet. It was in the window.
Mr. Venkatesh was drawing a diagram of the human eye on the blackboard—the cornea, the iris, the lens, all those parts that worked together to make sight possible. His chalk made that terrible squeak, the one that made half the class wince and the other half cover their ears. I was not wincing. I was not covering my ears. I was watching a crow on the windowsill, and the crow was watching me back.
It was a ordinary crow. Black, scruffy, with a missing claw on its left foot—an old injury, healed badly. It tilted its head at me, first one side, then the other, and for a moment I felt something pass between us. Not a thought. Not a feeling. Just a recognition, as if the crow had been looking for me for a long time and had finally found what it was searching for.
Then the glass cracked.
Not loudly. Not like in the movies, where glass shatters in slow motion and everyone screams. It was a single, quiet tchk—the sound of something giving up, something letting go. A thin line ran from the top left corner of the windowpane to the bottom right. Perfectly straight. As if someone had drawn it with a ruler while we were all looking elsewhere.
The boy next to me, Karthik, looked up from his notebook. "Did you see that?"
I did not answer.
Mr. Venkatesh turned around, chalk still in hand. "What happened?"
"Window cracked, sir," someone said from the back.
The teacher walked over, examined the crack, frowned. He tapped the glass with his knuckle. Solid. No rock outside—the window faced the courtyard, not the road. No branch near enough—the nearest tree was ten feet away. He looked at the ceiling, as if the crack might have fallen from above. Nothing.
"Old building," he muttered, and went back to the cornea.
But Karthik was still looking at me.
"You were staring at it," he whispered.
I shrugged. "Crows do strange things."
"That's not—"
"The cornea," Mr. Venkatesh said loudly, "is responsible for focusing light. Without it, you would see nothing but blur."
I looked back at the window. The crack was still there. The crow was gone.
That was the first lie I told myself.
It was nothing. Old buildings crack. It happens.
I would tell myself many more lies in the days that followed. Each one would be harder to believe than the last. Each one would crack something inside me, a little more, a little deeper, until I could no longer pretend that I was ordinary.
But that night, I walked home in the dark, past the tea stall and the temple and the open drain, and I did not look up at the sky. I did not notice that the stars seemed brighter than usual. I did not notice that the streetlight—the one that had been broken for eleven years—flickered once as I passed beneath it, then died again.
I did not want to notice.
I never wanted answers.
But answers, I would learn, do not care what you want.