Prologue: The Garment
I had a dream once.
In it, I was drying my clothes in the courtyard of my childhood home. The house was the same—whitewashed walls, red clay tiles, the old neem tree that my grandmother said kept away evil spirits. The afternoon sun was harsh, the heat shimmering off the concrete floor. My clothes hung on the line, swaying in the hot wind. A lungi. A couple of shirts. My mother’s saree. They danced like tired ghosts, their shadows falling across the compound wall that separated our house from the one opposite.
That house had always been there, of course. A two-story building with peeling paint and shuttered windows. We had grown up with stories about it. The family that lived there had died in a fire, they said. Or fled in the night. Or never existed at all. The windows were always dark, the door always locked. It was a black hole in the middle of our street.
I had been careful all my life. Everyone in the neighborhood was careful. The rule was simple: if a garment fell on the other side, you didn’t retrieve it. You left it there. You mourned it. You bought a new one. Some families even burned the clothes that fell, to sever any connection to that house, to that side, to that fear.
That was the rule. That was the fear. It had been the fear for as long as anyone could remember.
But in the dream, one of my shirts fell. It didn’t just fall—it drifted, as if carried by a hand I couldn’t see, and landed on the compound wall itself. The boundary. The threshold. Not on the other side. On the wall itself. The place where the two sides met.
And in the dream, I did something I had never done in waking life. I walked to the wall, my heart pounding, my palms sweating. I reached out, my fingers trembling. The fabric was warm from the sun, rough against my skin. I closed my hand around it. And I pulled it back.
I woke up with my hand still extended, grasping at empty air.
