‘The baby should be here any minute now. Grandma told me two hours back it was on its way. I am going to bring her right here as soon as they come.’

‘What if it’s a boy?’

‘It’s a girl,’ she said in a defiant manner.

Just then, little cousin pointed, making a face, ‘Pigeon shit! Your little sister will run away!’ She giggled. Upasana turned to see the offending mark on her pristine white wall. She liked to keep the windows open. Perhaps the pigeons came in through the widows, and hid behind the curtains.

‘But I wish the birds visited my room,’ squealed the little girl in delight.

Something dark and beastly boiled inside. She asked her cousin to leave the room. She sat there all by herself, wondering where the nest was. She remembered two summers back her grandmother had got the curtain rods cleaned and one nest was hiding behind the curtain rod as an open ventilator sat right next to it.

She howled. The servants came in running. She pointed towards the curtain beam. ‘There is a nest…’

Hurriedly, one servant climbed a chair and reached out. The fluttering of wings, some disturbance – and there it was, the startled pigeon. With tired eyes, hefty and bulky, it refused to fly away. The servant clapped and shooed and forced her to fly out of the window and settle on the mango tree right outside the window, as she was reluctant to fly futher away.

The servant dug out three eggs from the corner, holding them carefully in his hands. Upasana marvelled at the shape, the texture, and the delicate shade of the eggs, the colour of pearls her mother wore.

The pigeon watched her with a stillness like it was frozen. It watched the little girl walk towards the window and climb to the windowsill. She dangled her delicate arm in the air, her palm carrying her precious eggs. It forgot to blink, move or twitch.

In that stillness she dropped the first warm and perfect egg to the ground and it cracked. She felt the bird looking at her, pleadingly. Her little heart fluttered with pity but she was taught better. The pigeon moved a bit closer to her, hoping that the little girl would have mercy and spare the rest of the eggs.

She let go of the second egg, watching it fall two floors down and shatter on the same spot as the earlier one. And then she dropped the third one.

The only thing she heard was the silence and the gentle rustling of leaves.

The gardener limped towards the broken eggs and looked up at her. Upasana screamed, ‘Don’t clean it!’

As expected, the pigeon flew down, to where the broken eggs lay. Splattered on the floor in a mess, a colour of yellow liquid on red baked bricks. The pigeon hobbled around, walked around, flapped the wings. She could feel its pain.