The crow came back the next morning.
I woke to the sound of tapping. Not the gentle tap of a branch against glass, not the irregular tap of rain carried by wind. Three taps. Pause. Three taps. Pause. The rhythm of someone who knew I was listening and wanted me to know they were there.
I sat up in bed. The room was still dark—my mother had not yet started grinding spices, which meant it was before five-thirty. The tapping continued. Three taps. Pause. Three taps.
I walked to the window.
The crow was sitting on the sill, its missing claw tucked against its belly, its head tilted at that same angle from three days ago. It looked at me with eyes that were not ordinary eyes—too bright, too aware, too full of something that might have been recognition or might have been warning.
I opened the window.
It did not fly away.
"Go," I whispered. "Shoo."
It cocked its head to the other side. Then it opened its beak and made a sound that was not a caw. It was softer than a caw. More deliberate. A sound that felt less like bird and more like speech in a language I had forgotten I knew.
I closed the window.
The crow stayed.
I went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. When I came back, the crow was gone. In its place, on the windowsill, was a single black feather. I picked it up. It was warm. Feathers should not be warm.
I put it in my pocket and told myself it meant nothing.
The second letter arrived at noon.
I was in the school library, hiding in the back corner behind the shelf of encyclopedias that no one had touched since 1998. The librarian, Mrs. D'Souza, knew I was there and did not care. She had stopped caring about most things around the time her husband had left her for a woman half her age, and she had turned her indifference into an art form. We understood each other, Mrs. D'Souza and I. We were both waiting for something we could not name.
I was reading The Hound of the Baskervilles for the fourth time when I reached for my water bottle and found an envelope instead.
It was sitting on the table beside my elbow. Cream-coloured. Heavy paper. No stamp, no postmark, no address. Just my name, written in black ink, in handwriting I did not recognize:
Nyra Raizada
The library was empty except for me and Mrs. D'Souza, who was reading a film magazine at her desk with her back to me. The door had not opened. The windows were closed. The envelope had not been there when I sat down forty minutes ago. I was certain of this. I was always certain of small things—the position of my water bottle, the angle of my book, the weight of my bag against my leg.
I picked up the envelope.
Inside was a single sheet of paper, same cream colour, same heavy weight. Typewritten. No signature. No date. Just three lines:
Report to Astraea Adhyayan.
Sector 12, Kalidas Marg.
Tomorrow. 6:00 AM.
I read the words three times. Then I folded the paper, put it back in the envelope, and slid the envelope into my bag. I did not tear it. I did not burn it. I simply closed my bag and went back to The Hound of the Baskervilles as if nothing had happened.
My hands were shaking.
I did not look at Mrs. D'Souza. I did not look at the window. I looked at the words on the page—Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!—and I tried to convince myself that my life was still ordinary, still small, still mine.
But the envelope was in my bag. And the feather was in my pocket. And somewhere inside me, a door had opened a crack, and something was pushing its way through.
That evening, I did something I had never done before.
I asked my mother about my father.
She was chopping onions for dinner, her eyes already red, her movements sharp and efficient. The kitchen smelled of garlic and cumin and the faint sweetness of the tomatoes she had crushed into a paste. I sat at the table and watched her for a long time before I spoke.
"Amma," I said. "What was he like?"
Her hands stopped moving.
The knife was suspended above the cutting board, a half-chopped onion clinging to its blade. She did not look at me. She looked at the wall, at the calendar from the local pharmacy, at the photograph of me on my fifth birthday, wearing a pink frock and a smile that showed all my teeth.
"Why are you asking?" she said.
"I just want to know."
"You've never wanted to know before."
"I want to know now."
She set the knife down. Slowly, carefully, as if the knife might break if she handled it too quickly. She wiped her hands on her apron. She still did not look at me.
"His name was Dev," she said. "Dev Raizada. He was tall. Taller than me by a head. He had a laugh that filled the whole room, even when the room was empty."
She paused.
"What else?"
"He loved poetry. Urdu poetry. He used to read it to me at night, in bed, before we went to sleep. I never understood most of it, but I loved the sound of his voice. It was like warm milk. It made everything soft."
I waited.
She picked up the knife again. She began chopping the onion, smaller pieces now, almost mincing it. Her hands were steady, but her voice was not.
"He died when you were two."
"How?"
"An accident."
"What kind of accident?"
She did not answer. She scraped the onions into the pan, where they hissed and spat and released a cloud of steam that hid her face from me. When she spoke again, her voice was muffled, distant, as if she was speaking from the bottom of a well.
"Some questions," she said, "do not have answers that make things better."
I wanted to ask more. I wanted to ask why she never spoke of him, why there were no photographs in the house, why she had looked at me with terror when I was seven and asked for the first time. But I saw the way her shoulders had tightened, the way her hands had begun to tremble around the knife, and I decided to stop.
I left the kitchen and went to my room.
I opened my bag. The envelope was still there. The words were still there. Report to Astraea Adhyayan. Sector 12, Kalidas Marg. Tomorrow. 6:00 AM.
I did not know what Astraea Adhyayan was. I did not know where Kalidas Marg was. I did not know why someone would send me a letter without a stamp or a postmark, or how they had placed it on my table in a locked library, or why my mother had looked at me like I was a ghost when I asked about my father.
But I knew one thing.
Tomorrow, at 6:00 AM, I was going to find out.
I did not sleep that night. I lay in bed with my eyes open, watching the ceiling, listening to the sounds of the house—the creak of the third step when my mother went to the bathroom, the hum of the refrigerator, the distant bark of a dog somewhere down the lane.
At 5:00 AM, I got up.
I dressed in my school uniform—white shirt, navy blue skirt, navy blue sweater because the mornings were cold. I brushed my hair. I put the feather in my pocket. I put the envelope in my bag. I wrote a note for my mother and left it on the kitchen table:
Went for a walk. Back before school.
It was a lie. I did not know if I would be back before school. I did not know if I would be back at all.
The streetlight was still broken. The lane was still dark. The air smelled of wet earth and the distant smoke of someone's morning chai. I walked past the tea stall, past the temple, past the open drain, and I did not look back.
Sector 12, Kalidas Marg, was a forty-minute walk from my house. I had never been there. I had never needed to go there. But I had looked it up on my phone before leaving—a small map, a blue line, a destination I did not understand.
The sun was beginning to rise when I reached the address.
It was a gate.
Not a grand gate, not the kind you see in movies. A simple iron gate, painted black, set into a wall so high I could not see the top. There was no sign. No nameplate. No bell. Just the gate, and the wall, and the silence.
I stood there for a long time.
The crow landed on the gate. It looked at me with its too-bright eyes. It opened its beak and made that sound again—the one that was almost speech, almost language, almost something I should have understood.
Then the gate opened.
No one was there to open it.
I stepped through.