“Your baba was the best person I knew. The best person I will ever know. And you were the best thing in his life. And in mine too. You were my first baby girl. You never have to be afraid. I will always protect you and take care of you.”

Something about the way he said those words made her tell him, even though she wasn’t sure he’d believe her. “I can’t stop hearing voices. And feeling everything about everyone. I don’t want it.”

He had listened. His eyes, so much like Baba Saheb’s, took in her words without a single doubt. “We’ll figure out what to do. We’ll find a way to make it stop.”

J-Auntie came into the room. “Ma Saheb sent some juice,” she said.

Colors crashed inside Esha’s head. Red and blue and black. A high wailing sound burst from her. She felt herself fall back, through her mattress, through air. Her lungs filled, liquid closing around her. Then she saw him. J-Auntie’s husband, Baba Saheb’s estate manager, under a tractor outside the groundskeeper’s cottage. His body crushed beyond recognition.

When she came back into herself, a shaking mess, her uncle was still there, sitting in a chair next to the bed. J-Auntie was gone. Shree Kaka asked Esha what had happened and she told him.

They found the body exactly where she’d told them they would. It had taken Shree Kaka and Mina Kaki three days after that to get Esha on a plane and bring her to Woodside.

From the first moment Esha arrived, something about the Anchorage had felt more contained than the palace. She had felt tightly wrapped up here. People didn’t walk the halls all the time. Even so, it had taken Esha a few weeks to step out onto the balcony outside her room. Her first time being out in the open air. Garuda had been waiting for her.

Sometimes he just sat there and they spent time in silence, and sometimes she talked to him and he listened, white feathery head taking in the sky as though a threat might fall from it.

Today, Esha had been telling Garuda about Yash’s speech at his victory party, which Esha had heard from her room.

Garuda listened from his perch on the marble railing, his stillness absorbing her words. That’s when Esha heard the sound.

She spun around.

There was a man standing in front of her. A man she’d never before seen. A man with hair too long and unkempt, and skin sunburned and craggy. A man so regal and stormy the Sagar Mahal seemed to rise up around them.

“Was that a Brahminy kite?” he said, his voice gravelly. A voice that seemed used to long silences. He was standing on the outside ledge of her balcony. The very, very narrow ledge.