She grew up in an independent house in North India — a house with one ground floor and a terrace floor. On the ground floor were two rooms, a kitchen, and the essential bathroom. It was a small house, yet it somehow held an entire joint family inside it.
Her father, mother, and she lived there along with her father's two brothers:
the elder brother (her Tau) with his wife and three children,
the younger brother with his wife and one child,
and her grandparents — both grandfather and grandmother.
The house was bought long ago by her grandfather. That was the only reason all of them could somehow fit and survive together despite limited income. The two bedrooms on the ground floor were occupied by the grandmother and the aunt. Her father and mother stayed in the room built on the terrace. The grandparents used to sleep alternately — sometimes in the children's room when winter made the nights colder, and sometimes in the veranda (the entrance passage of the house) during the summer nights.
Despite the space crunch, despite the chaos, the house was alive.
Always.
During her childhood days, she never felt silence. Never felt loneliness. With cousins always around, running between rooms, sharing beds, toys, food, and secrets, the house was always active. Children are happy in a happy environment — they don't measure comfort in money or luxury. They find joy in the smallest things. That was her life. That was her world.
But life shifted.
In her later years, the joint family separated, and her parents moved to South India — to Hyderabad — so her father could earn a bit better, so they could break the suffocating plateau of survival and move towards a slightly better life.
Here, everything changed.
They rented a very small house: just one bedroom, one hall, one kitchen, and one bathroom. It wasn't much, but it was enough for the three of them. They never complained. It was enough for survival. But the feeling of life… that was no longer enough.
Because here, for the first time, she felt lonely.
As they shifted to Hyderabad, she was at the end of her school years, on the edge of entering college. The early 2000s. A confusing, in-between phase. Childhood was slipping away; adulthood hadn't begun fully yet.
She tried making friends.
She tried adjusting.
She tried blending into the crowd.
But city life was different. People were different. Teenagers were different — not as open, not as warm, not as easy to bond with. They were busy, selfish in the way only insecure teenagers can be. She hung out with classmates sometimes, went to the nearby markets, took the same buses… but when they left, she was alone again. More alone than ever.
Her father was working harder than he ever had in the North.
Her mother was learning the new city, its people, the Telugu language, the neighbourhoods, the markets, the culture.
And she… she was finishing her 12th, preparing for college, trying to understand this new world she had been dropped into.
Even her parents felt distant — not by intention, but by the weight of survival.
For the first time in her life, she had no one to call when she needed someone.
No cousins.
No lifelong neighbours.
No familiar faces.
Just a small rented house, a new city, and the echo of the silence she never knew before.
And she didn't realize then…
that this silence was the beginning.
The crack through which something supernatural would soon enter her life.