The Screaming Fields

7 AM

Mrs. Rathi waved her son off toward the school bus stop at the lane's end, fresh in a sky-blue salwar suit, a white dupatta pinned neatly at her shoulder, her hair still damp from the morning bath. "Watch out for the traffic!" she called after him, and only when his school bag had bobbed out of sight around the bend did she turn to the hibiscus by her gate and begin picking flowers for the puja.

"Good morning, bhabhi ji!"

She did not need to turn around. Only one voice on the lane could make good morning sound like a complaint. Mrs. Kapoor stood at her own gate in a faded nightgown, a stole thrown hastily over her shoulders, a bag of kitchen waste swinging from one hand.

"Good morning, good morning," Mrs. Rathi said, snapping a bud off its stem and dropping it into the steel bowl on the gatepost. "You must have only just woken up?"

"Oh, no, not just now, bhabhi. I had to pack the older one's tiffin, so I was up quite early - I only lay back down for a little while. We slept a bit late last night, so my head still feels heavy." Mrs. Kapoor eyed the damp hair with mock accusation. "And you've even bathed already. Tell me honestly, what time do you get up?"

"Five. The bus timing never changes, so we're the ones who have to."

"And my husband is waiting on his tea - the milkman is late again today. Not a drop made yet."

"That's how it is with him every day," Mrs. Rathi said, reaching for the next bloom.

Down the lane, one woman was already at work, her hair still knotted in last night's braid, her broom scratching the strip of road before her gate in slow, sleepy strokes. Farther along, a gate creaked open and a second woman stepped out, yawning into the back of her wrist, a cup of tea in one hand and a broom tucked under her arm. Across from her, a young daughter-in-law with her dupatta knotted around her waist and her eyes still puffy from the pillow beat a doormat against her outer wall, dust puffing out with every thwack. Loose strands had escaped their hastily knotted hair and stood up at odd angles. Only Mrs. Rathi looked like a woman who had finished her morning an hour ago.

Mrs. Kapoor started toward the colony's garbage bin at last, the bag swinging from her hand.

It was she who saw them first - kites turning in slow circles high against the bright morning sky, far too many for one neighbourhood, and below them the crows, a restless, quarrelling cloud that lifted and settled and lifted again, more than the usual handful that fought over the colony's bins. She lifted a hand, meaning to point it out to no one in particular, when the woman sweeping nearest her turned first, her own arm already raised, urgency sharpening her voice.

"What is going on?" she said, loud enough that every woman on the lane turned to look. The scratch of the broom stopped, and the thwack of the doormat with it.

Far above the rooftops, a dozen kites circled in a slow, patient ring, turning over something none of the women could see from the ground, while lower down the crows swirled in loose, noisy clouds, dropping onto wires and rooftops and lifting off again, never quite still.

"It must be a piece of meat," one of them offered. "They've probably come for that."

"But so many of them?" another asked.

The first woman who had spotted them turned slightly, pointing now toward a second patch of sky, further off, where another ring of kites turned with the same unhurried patience, a smear of crows beneath it. "Look," she said. "So many more circling over there too."

A third woman turned to look in an entirely different direction, the doormat hanging limp from her fist, and went quiet before she could say anything at all. One by one, the women turned their faces to the sky - behind them, above them, over the rooftops on either side - and found the same thing wherever they looked: ring after ring of kites turning slow and high, each with its cloud of crows beneath it, each far from the next, scattered so wide across the sky, in every direction, that it seemed the whole city lay beneath them.

"Looks like," Mrs. Rathi said finally, the hibiscus forgotten in her fingers, half-laughing in the particular way people laugh when they don't know what else to do with their fear, "someone has scattered pieces of some animal all over the city in the night."

None of them noticed the street dog until she was already halfway down the lane - trotting low and quick, something clamped gently in her jaws, her muzzle and chest streaked with a dry rust-brown stain that might have been mud, her three half-grown puppies tumbling after her, yelping and snapping at her heels, old enough now to know what it meant when her jaws came home full. The women watched them go without quite knowing why they were watching, until mother and pups turned together into a narrow gully and disappeared from sight.

"What was that?" Mrs. Kapoor asked, to no one, of nothing in particular.

"Was that... a human hand in its mouth?" the young daughter-in-law whispered, her fingers tightening on the doormat.

"It must be something else," said the woman with the tea, in the voice of someone who has never lost an argument to her own imagination. She dropped her voice for the rest - "People, honestly, they'll imagine anything" - pitched so that it could be heard but not quite made out, leaving no one sure enough of the words to answer back.

Something light struck the crown of her head and bounced onto the road at her feet. Neither hand was free - one held the cup, the other pinned the broom against her side - so she jerked her head instead, scowling, and glared upward: first behind her, then straight up, then left and right, hunting for whichever boy on whichever rooftop had thrown it. But there were only the birds, wheeling on, unbothered. Muttering, she bent down to see what had landed, and stayed bent for one long second, her face inches from a pale, curled finger, a heavy ring still biting into its base.

Then she screamed - and the cup slipped from her fingers and burst on the road.

Within seconds, gates were flung open all along the lane, neighbours spilling out of their houses at a run, drawn to such a sound. A small boy darted forward through the crowd to look, but his mother caught him by the shoulder and hauled him back, scolding him to get inside at once. He retreated exactly one step, planted himself behind her, and went on peering around her hip.

Those who pressed close enough to see why she had screamed went quiet. The newly married daughter-in-law took one look, clapped a hand over her mouth and stumbled to the drain by her wall, where she was violently sick. "Kavya! Kavya, beta!" someone cried, rushing to hold back her dupatta.

Only one man was unshaken - a neighbour in a vest, a toothbrush still in his mouth, who bent over the finger the way he might have bent over a dropped coin. "It's a human finger, all right," he said, taking the toothbrush out. "Look, there's even a ring." A young man crouched a few feet away, his hands not quite steady, photographing it with his phone from one angle, then another. The words passed back through the crowd, and the lane broke into overlapping voices - whose is it, where did it come from, how did it get here - everyone talking at once and no one stepping any closer.

"Some kite or crow must have dropped it," a voice offered. "God knows where it picked it up from."

Only one door opened slowly. An older woman stood in it, one hand on the frame, breathing hard from the effort of getting there; she had heard the scream, and then the voices, and had understood a good deal of it through the wall. Her face was drawn in a way that pulled every eye away from the road.

"Oh, go and watch the news - you'll find out where that finger came from," she called across the lane. "There's been a massacre outside one of the Oberoi Group's farmhouses. At least fifty bodies, they're saying - torn to pieces. I think a crow must have carried it from there. It must belong to someone from that farmhouse. The kites and crows are swarming over there too."

"Then Kavya must have been right," Mrs. Kapoor said slowly, and the voices thinned around her. "Bhuri must have had a human hand in her mouth too." Everyone knew which dog she meant.

"Nobody touch that finger," the man in the vest said, and this time nobody argued. "And ma'am, which way did Bhuri go with the hand? We'll have to call the police and tell them everything."

Mrs. Rathi pointed, without a word, toward the narrow gully.

"And if anyone sees anything else out of the ordinary," he added, raising his voice for the whole lane, "don't touch it. Inform the police at once."

Someone had already pulled out a phone. "Listen, listen - it's on YouTube too," a boy said, holding the screen up for the man beside him to see.

"Look at this," the other man said, squinting at the ticker crawling along the bottom. "It says here - across the whole city, kites and crows are dropping human remains out of the sky." He said it slowly, as if trying the words out to see if they made sense - as though the birds weren't simply dropping what they carried, but choosing to let it fall.

At her door, the older woman looked up once, briefly, at the nearest ring of circling birds, and did not look again. "God knows what calamity has come upon this whole city overnight."

Around Four Hours Earlier

2:50 AM

The cloth was pulled off Arjun's eyes and mouth. He was in an open field behind the farmhouse, with trees far off on one side, bare plowed earth on another, and an abandoned road. The crickets were so loud the man gripping his arm had to shout.

“Boss, we brought him.”

Karan walked down from the rear veranda and stopped in front of Arjun.

“Well, well. Look who's here. Come to kill me.” He laughed mockingly. “You said a man's time comes and no one can save him. Mine hasn't come yet, Arjun. Yours has.”

Arjun swayed weakly between the two men holding him up.

“You got the land,” he said, his voice thin. “Why are you still doing this?”

“The land was never the point.” Karan's tone changed. “My father's disgrace doesn't end because I own a plot of dirt. Your death will end it.”

He paused, then corrected himself.

“No — not even your death. My father's disgrace happened because of those orphans. It was always them. Only their ruin gives his soul any peace.”

“The children haven't done anything to you.”

Karan laughed. “Haven't they? Their whole lives are the reason you did any of this. So my peace has to come from ruining them.”

He stepped closer, almost gently.

“Every boy in that ashram, I'll turn into a thug. Whoever refuses, I'll take his limbs off myself and put him on the street to beg. And the girls — the girls I'll send to the broth—”

“Karannnnn.”

The word dragged up out of Arjun's throat like something surfacing from underwater. Karan stopped mid-word.

Arjun's swollen eyes were open now, his chest heaving. But there was no fear in them. Only that same sound, closer to a wolf's throat than a man's.

Karan scoffed. “What's that stare meant to do? Fifty men are standing on this land tonight, all of them mine. Not even a bird lands here without my say-so.”

“Death holds no interest for me.” Arjun's voice was quiet.

Karan's confidence faltered for a moment. He noticed it himself, then covered it and leaned in.

“You still think you can take revenge on me?” Karan asked, genuinely astonished.

“And who exactly is coming for you? Krishan, that useless musician friend of yours? Those orphans? Those strays you feed scraps to?” He straightened, amused again. “Or your parents' spirits — the ones your whole colony loves to whisper about, watching over you? Let's see who shows up tonight, Arjun.”

Then the mocking grin slid off Karan's face, and he spoke like an adult explaining a universal truth to a child.

“Revenge needs resources, Arjun, and you have none. No one who'd lift a finger for you.”

He signaled, and the men let go of Arjun. He staggered, but forced himself to stand straight.

“It was never about resources,” he said. “They're everywhere.”

He stepped forward, barely a foot from Karan.

“The question is — do I have the vision to see them.”

Karan's face hardened. He punched Arjun twice himself, straightened his collar, and gestured to the men.

“Let the dogs soften him up first.”

Arjun was thrown to the ground. A goon opened a cage and came forward, dragging two chained bloodhounds. The moment he saw them, his courage seemed to collapse and he scrambled backward on his palms.

Satisfied with Arjun’s helpless terror, Karan waved the handler back.

“All right,” he said. “Take your chance. Run. If you even can.”

Arjun realized this was his only chance, and he got up and stumbled into a run.

He ran for the distant trees, perhaps hoping the dark under them would hide him.

His breath gave out well before the halfway mark.

Karan cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Run, Arjun, run! Run, Arjun!”

The whole field roared along with him.

“Release the dogs,” Karan said, still smiling.

The dogs broke loose without a bark. That silence was worse than barking.

Arjun looked back twice, and each time the sight of them gaining made him run faster. He had almost reached the trees when his foot slipped in the mud.

There was no time to get up. One arm came up to shield his face. The other rose toward the dogs on its own, not a plea, just the body's blind reflex, the way a man throws a hand up against a blow he has no power to stop. As if some buried part of him still believed a raised palm could hold back teeth and everything closing in. It couldn't.

It shouldn't have.

But it did.

The dogs stopped.

Not stopped — flinched. Both heads snapped away from him in the same instant, as if something unseen had cracked across their faces. The turn took their legs out from under them, and they went down together, skidding through the mud in a tangle of claws.

Karan and his men stared at the dogs whimpering in the mud. The dogs scrambled up with their tails tucked between their legs and backed away. A little distance off, they shook themselves as if they had broken free of a trap. They were clearly not in their right minds. Instead of heading home, they bolted toward the road, and within moments they were out of everyone's sight.

Karan took half a step back without seeming to notice.

"That — what just happened —" he said. "Were those dogs rabid or something?"

Nobody answered. Then one of the men, low: "Boss... you don't think it's really his parents' —"

Before the man could finish, a drunk, bald goon nearly twice his size smacked him on the back of the head.

"Shut your mouth. If there were a ghost, would it let him get beaten like that?"

Arjun hadn't run. He had read their body language and understood that running was no longer an option. The goon jogged up to him.

"Let me see which son of a bitch's ghost this is."

He kicked Arjun in the stomach until he spat blood, dragged him up by the hair, and slapped him twice more. Then he turned to Karan, grinning.

"See, boss? No ghost. Want me to finish it now?"

Karan and his men relaxed, confident again.

"Not like this. I'll kill him with my own hands." Karan raised his voice for the field. "We'll make his death something worth remembering." He pointed at the nearest man. "Go get my axe from inside."

The man ran.

"The rest of you, come with me," Karan called. "Watch how Karan Oberoi kills a man himself."

That word, watch, jolted Arjun into action. He tore free and managed two steps before a gunshot echoed across the fields. The stubborn crickets fell silent for a few seconds, then returned louder and more frantic.

"Wow, boss," someone said, half in awe. "Perfect shot even in this moonlight."

Karan smiled proudly. Arjun lay groaning in the mud with a bullet in his leg.

"That's it. The offer to run is off the table now."

The men closed in. Arjun rolled onto his stomach and started crawling toward the trees, inch by inch.

"Come on, man," Karan said, almost fond about it. "How long is he going to keep hoping?"

The axe man came jogging back from the farmhouse, with two more men who hadn't wanted to miss the show.

"Here you go, boss," the man said. "I told them to wait, but they insisted on coming."

"Good," Karan said, taking the axe and tossing it lightly to feel its weight.

Then he turned and took one step toward Arjun.

But his foot never landed.

It hung there a beat too long. Every head around him swung slowly from the ground to the nearest face, then the next, mouths slightly open. Heads tilted like men straining to catch a sound that had just gone.

"Did everyone feel that?" he said.

"The crickets..." a voice near him managed. "All at once... why did they stop?"

For the first time all night, a voice carried clearly to every ear. They had been shouting over the crickets for hours. Now there was nothing to shout over.

Karan looked automatically for the man who'd mentioned ghosts earlier — and found him already staring past his shoulder, toward Arjun, who had by now hauled himself against the base of a tree and was trying, uselessly, to fold his body small enough to hide behind it.

One by one, following each other's eyes, every man ended up looking at the same thing.

Karan pointed at the bald man nearest Arjun — but the man only turned back, head tilted.

Karan's mouth opened, some word half-forming, when a hand landed on his shoulder from behind.

"Boss. Something's happening."

Karan turned. The man's eyes were on the treetops, one finger raised.

"Look. The leaves aren't moving. But it sounds like the wind's blowing."

In the wet, breathless heat left behind by the rain, every man had been sweating for an hour — a real wind would have been a mercy, and every one of them would have felt it land. None came.

Karan looked back at the bald man, who was rubbing his own neck now, blinking too fast, shaking his head once, hard, like a man trying to stay inside himself.

"Shoot him. End it," Karan shouted.

The man only frowned back at him, lips moving around a word that made no sound. Karan opened his mouth to shout it again and found nothing came out. Behind him, another man dropped to his knees and was quietly sick into the mud.

Sweat ran into Karan's eyes. He turned to the bald man a third time, mouth opening — and instead of words, his tongue ran fast over his lips and retreated, his throat working once around a swallow that never quite finished.

"Baldy — hurry — put a bullet in his head," someone finally screamed at him.

This time it landed. The bald man nodded, straightened, planted his feet, took a long breath. Cocked his gun.

He managed two steps, staggered on the third as if bracing against a fall that had already started somewhere inside him — and then he was going down, backward, and the gun still in his hand fired on the way.

The shot went wide of Arjun and straight into the man standing beside Karan, who folded without a sound. Karan flinched at the crack of it, certain for a second it had been him — and it took three or four seconds, watching the other man crumple, watching the blood already spreading black under him in the mud, before the relief reached him that it hadn't.

"Everyone — drop your guns. Now," he said, and had to say it a second time, louder, before anyone moved. "Nobody keeps one in their hand."

He bent and pulled the fallen man's revolver out of the mud for himself before anyone could point out the order was supposed to include him too.

Of the fifty-odd men standing in that field, barely three or four had carried anything more than a knife or a lathi. Only those few small revolvers would matter, and once they were thrown down into the mud, black metal in black earth, nobody was finding them again without a torch.

"Boss," someone near him said. "Something's very wrong here."

"Listen to us. Forget Arjun. Save yourself. Let's get out of here."

"Save myself?" Karan repeated.

His jaw locked. The revolver he'd taken off the dead man came up, shaking.

"You're all scared of him," he said. "Fine. I'll kill him myself."

He took a step forward.

Something struck his face like an open palm, out of nowhere.

The gun went off into the empty dark.

Karan touched his cheek first. Then he looked at his men.

Every one of them was staring straight up, mouths open.

Hundreds of bats and owls had torn out of the trees and into the air. They flew upside down, twisting and wheeling, and they made no sound at all. They just slammed into each other and dropped, one after another, out of the sky.

That was when the other sound came.

Hundreds of rats poured out of the treeline in a screaming tide. They trampled each other toward the road, the fields, the farmhouse, anywhere that wasn't where they'd come from.

Karan turned his head to follow it, mouth still open.

His men were already dragging at his arms.

"Boss, we have to go. Now."

He nodded, fast, his neck shaking with it.

"AAAAHHH—"

"NOOO—"

"HELP—"

— from the men standing furthest back, and those who couldn't see them understood anyway, from the shape of the screaming: dogs, already at the rear of the group. A few men fumbled in the mud for the revolvers they'd dropped, uselessly, in that moonlight; most of the fire that did go off went wide. One tall, heavyset goon caught a dog mid-lunge with the flat of his boot and sent it rolling off into the black, yelping.

The men broke the other way, away from the rear, but they managed only a few steps… before dogs came at them from that side too, one after another, faster than anyone could count. Wherever the goons tried to run, whichever way they turned their heads, dogs were already coming from that direction. The numbers would not stop growing, and within minutes there were hundreds.

"HELPPPP—" one man started to scream, and never finished it. Men who'd been attacking whatever was nearest them a second ago were now streaming past Karan in every direction without even seeing he was there, too far gone into their own panic to register anything but the dark ahead of them.

Two dogs had Bittu — the one man Karan trusted more than any other in that field — by the ankle and the calf, hauling in opposite directions to bring him down. Karan swung his revolver up and fired at one of them, meaning to buy his man a second. The shot went past the dog entirely and found a different goon instead, one who'd been cutting a path around the two animals and straight into its line. He went down with a scream, both hands clutching his hip. Seeing that his shot had hit one of his own men, Karan let the revolver slip from his hand. Bittu had stopped screaming.

The dogs noticed Karan was unarmed before anyone else did. Seven or eight of them broke off from whatever they'd been doing and came toward him together, unhurried — and instead of finishing it, they simply sat, ringing him in.

Scrambling back, he found dogs on every side and sank to his knees, arms locked over his head. "No, no," into the mud, over and over. They only sat there, watching. When he braced one knee to stand, the nearest dog, a rope of drool swinging from its jaw, lunged forward barking, teeth bared, and dropped back exactly where it had been. Karan went straight back down.

Karan's eyes swept what was left of the field. The dogs were still multiplying, not thinning, and his men kept dropping in ones and twos everywhere he looked.

Karan had given many men agonizing deaths for his clients. He had cut men apart with his own hands. But watching dogs tear into living men, several of them pulling one arm and one leg in opposite directions until the bodies split, he knew this was something he could never have imagined doing to anyone.

His breath started coming in short, whistling gasps.

His eyes went, finally, to the treeline where Arjun had gone to ground — and landed instead on the man closest to it, the one who'd twice now suggested a ghost, sitting folded at the base of the very tree Arjun was hiding behind, hands pressed together, begging something that wasn't there for its life.

A hand came out from behind that tree. Blood-soaked to the wrist, it patted the man's cheek with something close to tenderness, rested on top of his head, and turned his face bodily toward the field, toward everything happening in it.

"Keep watching it," the voice said.

The man's eyes went wide enough to show white all the way around, both hands flying up to jam his own fingers into his mouth as the sobbing started.

It took minutes — fewer than it felt like, to the men still standing in it — for the screaming across that field to thin out.

One voice at a time, the terrible noise of it dropped away, until there was nothing left but the wet sounds of teeth working through what remained of the men who'd made it, and the dragging, scraping noise of bodies being pulled a few feet at a time through the mud.

That was when Arjun finally came out from behind the tree, limping badly, one arm slung over the shoulder of the man who'd begged the tree. The man's face was still wet, his eyes not quite focused on anything.

Karan saw him coming and folded his hands.

"F-forgive me, please —" He lifted his joined hands and his face toward the empty dark above. "Please forgive me. I'll never look at your son's direction again. Everything will be exactly how Arjun wants it."

"There's no one here but me who can hear you," Arjun said.

Karan's head snapped toward him, confused — but Arjun didn't wait for it to clear. He looked past him, and said, almost gently, "Boys. Lemme hear this."

The dogs that had held him there in the mud lunged all at once.

The last man still on his feet was close enough to hear all of it and see most of it, and it put him on the ground in a dead faint before Karan had finished screaming.

Arjun bent down, removed a locket from his neck, dipped a finger into what was pooling beneath Karan, and wrote “Karan” on the pendant. Then, he placed the locket around the dog's neck."Take it to Krishan Khurana," he said, and swayed once before the field tilted up to meet him.

Breaking news..."

The anchor's voice filled the room.

"Social worker Arjun Malhotra, who was found half-dead at the 'Screaming Fields' more than a month ago, has regained consciousness. He will be shifted to a general ward soon."

"Meanwhile, the city’s stray dogs will be released tomorrow after four weeks of quarantine. Authorities report zero aggression. Police are still not sure if Arjun’s revival can solve the case—the gun that shot his leg bore only Karan Oberoi’s fingerprints."

"Doctors also confirmed that the only other surviving person, now in the state asylum, suffered a complete neural breakdown from witnessing the horror and screams. His condition is permanent and irreversible."

Click.

Krishan turned off the TV, closed his eyes, and leaned back in his rocking chair.

“The media and public are with us. We’ll defeat Karan legally,” Arjun’s past words echoed in his mind.

“Two lives are already gone, Arjun,” Krishan had argued. “What Gandhi did, only Gandhi could do. You are not Gandhi. What if he comes for the orphans next?”

“Before that, I’ll leave the land, but no brutality,” Arjun had insisted. “Besides, this invention is your hard work.”

“It’s not a new invention, just an upgrade to an existing device,” Krishan had said, slipping the smart super-ultrasonic whistle locket over Arjun’s neck.

“Engineered with a 15km radius. What's the harm in being prepared? You feed these strays—we just train them to respond.”

Arjun had chuckled, shaking his head as if indulging a foolish idea just to reassure his friend.

"You'll see, Krishan," he had murmured, clutching the cold metal against his chest. "We're never gonna need this."