**Chapter I — The Window That Waited**
The house had three doors and only one of them opened.
Everyone in the lane knew this, though no one could say exactly when they had learned it. The building leaned toward the street as if listening to gossip. Its shutters stayed closed even in the wet heat, and a thin, permanent smell of damp paper drifted from the cracks. At night, when the tram bells rang in the distance and rain tapped like fingernails on the tin awnings, a pale rectangle of light would appear in the upper window—steady, patient, waiting.
Arun noticed it on a night when sleep refused to come. The monsoon had pressed the air into a heavy, breathing thing. His ceiling fan chopped at it uselessly. Around midnight he went to the balcony for relief and saw the house across the narrow lane, its facade slick with rain, its single lit window staring back.
He had grown up hearing stories about it. A widow had once lived there with her son, a boy who collected old notebooks from the roadside and stacked them in careful towers. One day, the boy vanished. The widow claimed he had gone out to buy ink and never returned. The neighbors said the house had swallowed him whole.
Arun did not believe in swallowed boys. But he believed in insomnia, and insomnia makes company where it can.
The next evening, he crossed the lane.
---