By Krishnam Raju
I. The Paper on the Windshield
Judge Saumya Rao believed in structure. Clean lines. Predictable rhythms. Her courtroom, like her life, followed ritual: files in place, emotions in check, judgments sealed like folded corners in a law book.
But on Thursday morning, that rhythm cracked.
It was the drizzle first—an indecisive rain that fogged her windshield without fully falling. Then came the shadow: a crumpled, unmarked paper tucked beneath her wiper blade.
She glanced around. The car park was quiet, except for a chai vendor dragging his cart and two interns huddled over a phone. She peeled the damp sheet loose.
Torn notebook paper. No envelope. No signature. The ink had bled, but the words were still legible.
“Ma, I didn’t kill Rinku. I pulled the knife out. I tried to stop the blood, but he was already gone. They saw me holding it. That was enough.”
“Block C has no sun. They say birds don’t belong here. I drew them anyway. Blue. Like that one that got into our kitchen once. Remember how you screamed and laughed at the same time?”
“They painted over them yesterday. Said birds are noise. I’m trying not to be noisy, Ma. But silence is heavy too.”
“If you get this... tell them I was scared, not angry. That I missed your burnt kheer. That I still talk to Rinku sometimes, even if he doesn’t answer.”
She froze. The drizzle turned solid.
Her first instinct was suspicion. A prank. A protest. But something about the raw, unadorned tone reached past logic. This wasn’t a trick. It was a wound, leaking through paper.
And somehow, impossibly, it had found her.
II. No File Exists
Inside her chambers, the air smelled of leather and old verdicts. She spread the letter beside her keyboard. Her docket was packed—three corporate appeals, one aggravated juvenile assault, and a civil compensation matter.
She ignored them all.
The registrar’s database yielded nothing under “Rinku.” No juvenile charged with homicide in the last 90 days. She called a contact at the child welfare board.
“Nothing with that name,” he said. “Sure it’s not a metaphor?”
The system didn’t deal well with metaphors.
She read the letter again. One line stood out: Block C. They say birds don’t belong here.
Block C.
Tihar had a Block C. So did three Delhi observation homes.
By noon, she was calling administrative numbers, framing her questions as curiosity. “Do you keep logs of confiscated drawings? Any recent repaintings?”
At the third place—Govindpur Juvenile Facility—a duty officer paused. “Why?”
“There’s a boy who may be at risk,” she replied.
“Boys here come and go. Which name?”
“I don’t have one.”
He snorted. “Then good luck, Ma’am.”
She ended the call.
Only then did she notice the timestamp on the message she’d received when unlocking her car that morning: 11:58 AM.
Something sharp twisted in her.
III. 11:58
That evening, she returned home to her silent apartment, clutching a question she couldn’t name. She barely touched her dinner. Instead, she accessed the facility’s incident logs through a private judicial portal.
Buried deep—beneath hygiene violations and attendance sheets—was a contractor’s note:
“05.07.25 | Block C repainting | unauthorized sketches removed (birds, stars, poem lines on east wall).”
She called her intern. “Find me anything on an intake logged around 11:58 AM over the last sixty days. No name. Possibly no charge sheet.”
The intern hesitated. “That would fall under non-documented entries.”
“Exactly.”
IV. The Boy Who Drew Birds
The next morning, she arrived unannounced at Govindpur under an internal audit credential. The staff scrambled. Nobody questioned her authority.
Block C was smaller than she expected. Concrete. Dull. A corridor of forgotten futures.
He sat alone.
Bony. Seventeen, at most. One cheek swollen, a healing scab across his knuckles.
He glanced at her, then back to the wall. No expression.
She stepped in slowly.
“I’m not staff,” she said.
He didn’t react.
She pulled the letter from her pocket. “I read this. It landed on my windshield.”
Now he looked at her. Straight through her.
“I wrote four,” he said. “Slid one under the canteen door. One in a laundry batch. One inside a food tray. But the fourth… I gave it to someone.”
“To who?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t talk.”
She knelt beside him.
“Your name?”
“I was Eleven-Fifty-Eight,” he said, flatly. “That’s what they called me.”
“Before that.”
His throat moved. “Ansh.”
She whispered it to herself like a spell: Ansh. A piece. A part.
V. The System Doesn’t Forget. It Ignores.
Over the next 48 hours, she pulled every thread.
Ansh had been picked up near Azad Nagar after police responded to a “neighborhood altercation.” One minor stabbed. One dead. Ansh was found crouching beside the body, holding the blade.
The arrest was logged. But no FIR followed. No parental notification. His case was never processed—shuffled beneath administrative silence.
When she confronted the officer in charge, he laughed.
“He confessed.”
“No,” she replied, “he surrendered.”
VI. One Drawing Survives
She visited Block C again. This time with a mandate. She scanned the walls—bare, except for a small smudge in the corner.
Faint blue chalk.
One wing.
“Missed a spot,” the warden said.
She knelt. Touched it. The chalk crumbled like ash.
VII. Letter Sent, Case Reopened
On Monday, she submitted a motion to reopen Ansh’s intake. The judiciary flinched. Internal emails flew. A “lost case” wasn’t good press.
But the letter had circulated. Quietly. One secretary leaked it. It reached a columnist. Then an NGO.
Ansh was no longer a ghost.
He became a question no one wanted to answer.
Three weeks later, he was released. Not acquitted. Just… let go.
No one apologized.
VIII. Home
His mother fainted when she saw him.
When she awoke, she slapped him gently. “You should have run.”
“I did,” he said. “That letter was me running.”
Later that week, he drew a bird on their kitchen wall. It looked just like the one they’d chased out with a ladle, years ago.
He smiled. “This one stays.”
IX. The Wind Remembers
Judge Saumya Rao never found out how the letter reached her.
Maybe it was dropped by accident. Maybe the boy in the hall with the tray slipped it onto her windshield, hoping a higher power would intervene.
But every time she left court, she glanced at her wipers.
And sometimes—when the wind picked up just right—she swore she saw chalk dust on the glass.
- The End -
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