Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(61)

The orphanage was a house of many doors.

A long time ago, during the British Raj, we were told, it was a hospital with two wings that flanked the courtyard. The east wing was the smaller building with limited rooms for dying or contagious patients, as if they were the same. It had a long corridor that ran parallel to the courtyard and formed a semicircle connecting it with the west wing, where the rest of the patients were housed.

These rooms were ours now and we loved playing in them. Most of us had mirrors above the washbasin and we pretended that people from the past still stayed within our rooms, that the change of morning and afternoon light in the mirrors meant they were stirring and moving about and such cohabitation made us all a big family. The lives of our family spanned centuries.

I remember one afternoon when we were playing Ice Water. Barefoot, we rushed at the fleeing team, trying to touch their arms or torsos, to pretend-petrify them into captivity. The escapees would circle back and try to tap the captives “awake.” Half of my sisters were already statues frozen by the chasing team, but Neha cheated by hiding, which wasn’t allowed.

It had rained the night before. The ground was marked with footprints. The trees whispered in the courtyard and the mirrors in our rooms rippled when we ran past the open doors, and I thought I heard Neha giggle and dive into one of the rooms at the end of the east corridor. I sprinted across the courtyard, shouting her name. She giggled again and waved a spindly arm from the doorway. I reached the corridor and went in after her.

No one was in the room. A large wet crow with a broken wing perched on the edge of the skylight. It watched me with red beady eyes and shook raindrops off its feathers.

I whirled, taking in each corner. I remember feeling a sense of loss. Daylight was waning, and when I turned again it wasn’t the room I’d entered. Instead of the sparse wooden charpoy there was a finely made bed with pillows and brocaded quilts, a sandalwood footstool placed at its end. A body-length mirror gleamed beside the bed. The walls were hung with canted paintings whose beauty, strangely, could not be admired: the moment I leaned in for a closer look, the pictures blurred.

I turned to look at the mirror. It was a fabulous piece of workmanship, its edges carved in mahogany with sparrows in flight. The girl in the mirror looked back at me with wide, black eyes. She couldn’t have been more than my age. Her eyelids were swollen, her lips red, shaped like leaves felled by autumn rain. A bruise flowered from the root of her left ear, all the way up her scalp. She looked neither happy nor unhappy. A passing ghost, I thought, gone forever the moment I departed from this strange new room.

As I watched, the girl in the mirror leaned back, pointed at me, and began to laugh. The sound filled the room, a cacophony of maddened birdsong. She laughed and laughed and the air heated with her laughter and the skylight darkened with night. A whoosh of blistering air, my nostrils filling up with a bitter smell like charred flesh or feathers, and the girl in the mirror was smoking. Coils of gray-black rose from her hair like braids. Smoke ringed her eyes, now orange-blue. She flapped her skinny, crinkling arms, and I cried out and turned, knocking over the footstool, and fled from the room.

Later, after I was calmed by Sangeeta Apa and Bibi Soraiya with hot tea and a thin slice of buttered bread, I told them about the room and its fiery inhabitant. Sangeeta Apa and Bibi glanced at each other.

“Was there a stove in the room?” Bibi Soraiya asked.

“I didn’t see one,” I said.

She nodded. “Go to your room, bachey. Shut the door and get some sleep. I’ll tell your sisters not to bother you.”

Neha came to my bed that night. We were roommates, three of us, but our third was sick and they’d put her up in the east wing. “What happened?” Neha asked, draping an arm across my body.

I told her. When I got to the part about following her into the room, her eyes widened, like the girl-in-the-mirror’s had and she began to breathe irregularly—an exacerbation of her asthma. We had to rush her to Mayo Hospital where the doctors made her spend that night and the night after.

To this day she insists that girl with the spindly arm wasn’t her. Neha was hiding atop one of the courtyard trees and showed me fresh scratches from the branches on her left arm. I believed her. I have always believed her.

That was the first time I saw a ghost in the orphanage. There were two more instances.

Both on the night before Sangeeta Apa’s wedding dinner.


In story hour on a Friday, Sangeeta Apa told us the tale of the mythical bird Huma. Persian legend holds, she said, that the Huma never rests. It circles ceaselessly high above the earth forever, invisible to prisoners of earthly time; impervious.

Furthermore, they say (said Sangeeta Apa):

It eats bones. The female lays her eggs in the air. As the egg drops, the hatchling squirms out and escapes before the shell hits the earth. It is a bridge between the heavens and earth. It’s a bird of fortune. The shadow of the Huma falling on a man bequeaths royalty on his person. The Huma once declined to travel to the far ends of the earth, for wherever its shadow fell the masses would become kings and the Huma is very particular. Like the phoenix, it is old and deathless. In an alternate form, it has seen the destruction of the world three times over

and

it cannot be taken alive. Whosoever captures it will die in forty days.

It is a story I have thought about many times since.


We were all in love with the bird man. Who wouldn’t be?