Three days passed before anything else happened.
I spent them pretending that the window had cracked on its own, that old glass was prone to such things, that the crow had been a coincidence and the flickering streetlight had been nothing more than a faulty wire. I spent them walking to school, sitting in class, eating my mother's dal-chawal in the evening, and sleeping badly in between.
I did not mention the crack to anyone. Not because I was afraid—though I was—but because I had no language for it. How do you tell someone that a window broke because you looked at it? How do you say those words without hearing how absurd they sound?
So I said nothing.
On the third night, I dreamed of water.
I was standing in the middle of a river I did not recognize, the water rising to my knees, then my waist, then my chest. It was not cold. It was the temperature of blood—warm and thick and wrong. I tried to move my feet, but the riverbed had turned to clay, sucking at my soles, holding me in place.
Something was beneath the water. Something that wanted me to look down.
I did not look down.
I woke up with my mother's hand on my forehead.
"You were screaming," she said.
I touched my throat. It was raw. "I don't remember."
She looked at me for a long moment—the way she used to look at me when I was small and feverish and she was trying to decide whether to take me to the doctor or wait it out. "You've been different lately," she said. "Quieter than usual."
"I'm always quiet."
"Not like this. This is different."
I did not have an answer for her. I pulled the blanket up to my chin and turned toward the wall. After a while, I heard her leave the room. The door closed with a soft click, and I was alone with the dark and the memory of water that had not touched me but had somehow soaked into my bones.
The next morning, I opened my math notebook and found the first words.
They were written in the margin of page twelve, next to a quadratic equation I had solved incorrectly. Blue ink. My handwriting. My pen, which was still in my pencil case, which had been in my bag, which had been zipped shut and sitting on the floor beside my bed all night.
You are not nothing.
I stared at the sentence for a full minute. Then I closed the notebook, put it back in my bag, and went to have breakfast.
My mother had made parathas. Stuffed with aloo, fried until the edges were crisp, served with a dollop of white butter that melted slowly into the cracks. I ate two of them without tasting a single bite.
"You're not listening to me," she said at some point.
"I'm sorry. What did you say?"
"I asked if you wanted pickles."
"Yes. Please."
She handed me the jar of mango pickle—the good one, the one she had made herself last summer, the one she usually saved for Sundays. I took it without comment. She watched me spoon a generous amount onto my plate. She watched me eat. She watched me the way the crow had watched me through the window, and I did not know what either of them was looking for.
At school, I opened the notebook again.
The words were still there. You are not nothing. I had not imagined them. They had not disappeared in the light of day. They sat in the margin in my own handwriting, as permanent and inexplicable as the crack in the window.
I considered showing Karthik. He sat next to me. He had noticed the crack. He might notice this too. But what would I say? Look at what my hand wrote while I was sleeping? He would think I was playing a prank, or losing my mind, or both.
I tore the page out instead.
I crumpled it into a tight ball and dropped it into the dustbin behind the teacher's desk. Then I returned to my seat, opened to a fresh page, and copied the quadratic equation again. This time, I solved it correctly.
For the rest of the day, I did not think about the words.
That night, I checked my English notebook.
I had not opened it since Monday. The last thing I had written was an essay on the role of women in the Indian independence movement—three pages of careful, forgettable prose that had earned me a B-plus and the comment "Good but could be more passionate." I had not been offended by the comment. Passion was not something I had ever been accused of having, and the accusation felt accurate.
I opened to page twenty-three.
The same margin. The same blue ink. The same handwriting.
Stop pretending you don't feel it.
My hand trembled as I closed the notebook. I set it on my desk. I picked it up again. I opened to a different page—page thirty-one, the middle of my essay on Rani Lakshmibai.
Nothing. Clean margins. My boring prose. The faint smell of old paper.
I turned back to page twenty-three.
The words were still there.
I tore this page out too. I did not crumple it gently. I ripped it into small pieces, as small as my fingers could manage, and I carried the pieces to the kitchen and dropped them into the flame of the gas stove. They curled and blackened and turned to ash, and I watched them burn until there was nothing left but a grey smear on the burner.
My mother was sleeping. The house was silent. The streetlight outside was still broken, and the darkness in my room was the kind that felt heavy, like a blanket made of wet wool.
I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling.
You are not nothing.
Stop pretending you don't feel it.
I did not know what "it" was. I did not know who was writing to me. I did not know if the writer was inside my head or outside my window or somewhere else entirely.
But I knew one thing, and the knowing sat in my chest like a stone:
Someone—something—had been waiting for me to notice.
And now that I had noticed, they were not going to let me look away.