The Winter of Crows

Three years after moving to Canada, Rahman still sorted through the artifacts of his old life in Pakistan. One snowy evening, he found a worn photograph of his cousin, Rukhsana, and her daughters, taken before they came to live with his family. The memory of that winter in 2006 surged back, unbidden.

It began weeks after Rukhsana’s arrival, with the smell of burned cloves that clung to the house’s corners. His father’s work shirts would appear on the laundry line at dawn, stained with rust-colored drips that were not rust. Light bulbs shattered spontaneously, their glass tinkling like glass chimes, and the birds—hens and a myna—died one by one, their feathers stiff and wrong. Then came the meat: a chunk of raw lamb on the doorstep, wrapped in a sacking cloth, with a crow feather stuck in it. His mother called it ‘kala jaadu,’ and whispered that someone wished them harm.

That night, Rahman lay awake, his breath fogging the cold air. The city’s power was unreliable, and the darkness pressed in. A sound from the courtyard caught his attention—a wet dragging, like something heavy being pulled across the flagstones. He crept to the window and saw a figure in white, elongated and hunched, dragging a burlap sack toward the gate. It paused, and even though he couldn’t see its face, he felt a gaze upon him—a cold, silent pressure. The figure dropped the sack and dissolved into the frost.

He did not sleep. At first light, he found the sack open on the threshold, filled with frozen black earth and a single crow’s claw, its talon curled as if in a death grip. His aunt arrived, her eyes hollow, and said, ‘It knows we are here.’ She refused to say more, but that afternoon, his mother found a small glass bottle buried in the garden, corked with black wax, containing a single strand of black hair and three rusted pins.

They moved to a relative’s house in the city, leaving the poultry behind. But the crow followed. It perched on the gate, silent, its head cocked. At night, Rahman heard a woman’s voice singing a lullaby he didn’t recognize, coming from the hallway. Yet every time he opened his door, the hall was empty, except for a faint whiff of cloves. His sister began speaking in her sleep, her words slow and accented, saying, ‘He waits at the threshold.’

One evening, his father collapsed, gasping, clawing at his chest. In the hospital, the doctors found no cause. The night he returned, Rahman forced himself to stay awake. He walked the house, holding a lantern, and in the mirror, he saw a figure behind him—a woman in white, her face obscured by hanging hair, her hand raised in a gesture of warding. He turned, but there was nothing. That was the night he left, he told himself, but truly, he fled to Canada.

Now, standing in his Toronto apartment, he still keeps that photograph, but something is wrong. The print shows his aunt’s face, but her eyes are black voids in the dim light. He flips it over, and in shaky red ink, someone has written: ‘You took my place.’

Outside, a crow lands on the fire escape, its reflection in the window. Rahman drops the photograph, and as he bends to pick it up, he feels a presence behind him. The apartment’s air turns icy; the hallway light bursts. He spins, but the room is empty. Yet on the glass of the window, breath has fogged a single word: ‘Home.’

And for the first time in years, he longs for the cold winter that taught him what fear truly means.