I returned home after a long day at work.
The kind of exhaustion that settles deep into the bones—not the body alone, but the mind. That day, I had stood in front of a room full of evaluators, defending a case presentation that supported my thesis.
My thesis dealt with advanced schizophrenia and its impact on the overall human psyche.
Radha was the reason I had chosen this topic.
That day, I had presented her case study.
Radha was not merely a subject to me. She never had been. She was my best friend.
She lived across the street from my parents’ house in Konkan, in a small, aging home that always seemed to remain in partial shadow, no matter the time of day. She lived there with her widowed mother. We had studied together since childhood—Radha, the shy backbencher, the girl who always sat at the edge of the classroom, half-hidden behind taller students. I tutored her after school.
Radha rarely spoke about herself.
But she listened.
She listened with an intensity that made you forget the rest of the world. She absorbed words the way dry soil absorbs rain.
Radha came from a poor family.
After ninth grade, her mother stopped sending her to school. There was no argument, no explanation. Education simply ended for her one afternoon.
At fifteen, Radha was married.
That was not unusual in our village. Girls got married young. It was spoken of as fate, not choice.
I cried when she left. I cried as though a part of my own childhood had been quietly erased. But my grief did not last long.
Radha returned within a year.
She returned draped in a white saree.
Her husband was dead.
The in-laws said she was responsible. They sent her back.
From that moment onward, Radha was no longer the person I had known.
She startled at the smallest sounds. She sat for hours, eyes fixed on spaces where nothing existed. Her face looked older than her age, as though time had rushed through her without asking permission.
I told myself it was grief.
I told myself grief could hollow a person out.
I was wrong.
One rainy night, my mother sent me to Radha’s house to help her mother with some work. The rain had swallowed the village lanes, turning them into dark, slippery paths. The power was out.
That was when I heard Radha scream.
It wasn’t a cry of pain. It was terror—raw, unfiltered, tearing through the darkness.
Her mother and I ran toward the sound.
We found Radha screaming in the dark, her body trembling violently, as though something stood right in front of her. I wrapped my arms around her and held her tight until her breathing slowed, until the screams broke into sobs.
“What is it?” I asked, feeling her shiver against me. “What are you screaming at?”
Her eyes did not meet mine.
“They are here,” she said.
Her gaze remained fixed on empty space.
“The shadows,” she said. “They move around as if they belong here.”
“You’re dreaming, Radha,” I said quickly. “You’re tired.”
“I am not dreaming,” she said. “They were just here. They will come back once you leave.”
Her words settled heavily in the room.
“They want to take me with them,” she said, her voice barely audible. “They took my husband. Now they are here for me.”
Radha’s husband had been twenty-four. Healthy. Strong.
He had died in his sleep.
The doctors had said it was a ruptured brain aneurysm.
That night, after I finally put Radha to sleep, her mother spoke to me in a low voice. She told me Radha had been talking about the shadows since the day she returned.
As a student of psychology, something stirred within me.
I insisted she take Radha to a psychiatrist.
Radha was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
The words sounded clinical, neat, almost mercifully contained when the psychiatrist said them aloud. Medication followed soon after—small white tablets that promised balance, normalcy, quiet.
Meanwhile, I stayed with her.
I kept her busy with things she once enjoyed—simple routines, familiar rhythms.
I sat with her for hours, talked to her, listened when she chose to speak.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped being just her friend.
I became her therapist.
Months passed.
Slowly, cautiously, Radha began to return.
Her eyes lost their constant edge of fear.
She smiled again—hesitantly at first, then more freely. I told myself she was becoming her old self.
We spent long afternoons beside the stone well in our backyard, under the wide, watchful canopy of the banyan tree. The air there always felt cooler, heavier, as though the place remembered things even when we did not.
I spoke most of the time.
Radha listened.
She never spoke of her husband again.
She never spoke of her in-laws.
Whenever I asked, her expression shut down entirely, like a door closed from the inside. I stopped pressing. I held on to the one thing that mattered—she was getting better.
That was enough.
Then the scholarship came.
A PhD offer from the University of Mumbai.
I was happy—overwhelmingly so. Years of effort had finally shaped themselves into something solid. But the happiness came with a cost.
I had to leave Radha behind.
She reacted badly to the news. She searched desperately for reasons to make me stay.
“Mumbai is a scary city,” she said one evening, her voice unusually firm. “People who go there never come back the same. They turn into work-crazed monsters who want to return as soon as they can.”
I laughed softly.
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “I won’t become a work-crazed monster. I’ll finish my studies and come back.”
My reassurance did nothing.
She suddenly grabbed my hands, her grip cold and tight.
“The shadows,” she said. “They’ll return once you leave. They’re waiting for you to go. They’ll come back—and they’ll take me with them.”
I smiled, though something inside me flinched.
“They won’t,” I said gently, holding her hands between my palms. “I’ll take them with me to Mumbai. You’ll be safe.”
That seemed to calm her.
For the first time in a long while, she looked relieved.
---
Rain tapped insistently against my window as I sank into the sofa after a long day at work. It was raining wildly that evening—the kind of rain that blurred the city into grey streaks.
Mumbai monsoons are harsh, people say.
The rains back home are harsher.
I picked up my phone and began scrolling through Instagram. Faces, achievements, milestones flowed endlessly—friends studying abroad, friends climbing corporate ladders, others getting married, having children.
Then I saw it.
A cute animated version of a photograph with a school friend from Kelshi. Everything in it had been cartoonized—the school building, the coconut trees surrounding it. We looked like characters from the Japanese cartoons we grew up watching.
I read the caption. AI-generated, using a prompt.
Curious, I opened my gallery.
The first photograph I found was one of me and Radha, taken in our backyard right after the HSC results were announced. She had come to congratulate me. She wore a white salwar kurta—she had insisted on wearing only white since her husband’s death. I wore my school uniform, on my way to the twelfth-standard success award ceremony.
I had topped the school.
We stood beside the stone well, under the banyan tree.
I uploaded the photograph and gave the app a prompt to animate it.
The processing took less than a minute.
Magical.
Cartoonized coconut trees.
The banyan tree.
The stone well.
Me, in my school uniform.
But Radha—
She was not there.
It was strange. I frowned at the screen.
A glitch, I told myself.
I tried another photograph—this time with my college friends from Kankavli. Everyone appeared. Perfectly animated. The app worked.
I tried the photograph with Radha again.
She was still missing.
This time, I typed a more specific prompt.
Show both the girls in the photo.
Radha appeared.
She floated in the clouds, while I stood below. She looked down at me.
I shut the app.
“This app is good for nothing,” I muttered.
The rain grew heavier. The power went out.
I was tired.
I went to sleep.
---
When I woke up, my body felt impossibly heavy—like it carried the weight of a thousand stones. I tried to get up. Pain exploded in my head.
It was dark.
Had I woken up too early? I had a lecture at eight in the morning.
I reached under my pillow for my phone.
6:29 p.m.
The number made no sense.
Had I slept through the night—and the day?
My call log was full. Missed calls from my supervisor. From Daniel. From my students.
How does someone sleep for that long?
Outside, the rain had stopped. The sky was thick with grey clouds, like a heavy cloak pulled low. An occasional raindrop tapped against the window shade, breaking the eerie stillness.
The world felt paused.
Unnaturally quiet.
And strangely familiar.
Like déjà vu.
I stood up to switch on the lights.
That was when I felt it.
Movement behind me.
I turned sharply.
Nothing.
My heart raced. Maybe my mind was playing tricks.
I switched the lights on.
Something ran through my peripheral vision. Fast. Human-shaped.
A man.
I didn’t see his face.
I stepped outside. I was scared—but I followed.
There were two figures now.
A man.
And a woman.
They had no face. No limbs. No body.
Only outlines. Darkness pooled inside them.
Shadows.
Terror surged through my spine. I froze, unable to move, waiting for them to kill me.
Maybe this was a dream. Maybe death would wake me.
They didn’t touch me. They didn’t need to.
They moved around casually—like the room belonged to them and I was the intrusion.
Radha’s voice echoed in my mind.
The shadows.
She had described them exactly like this.
I had told her I would take them with me to Mumbai.
Had they followed me?
I pushed the thought away.
Maybe my mind was reacting to exhaustion. Maybe the presentation about Radha, the strange AI incident—too much Radha in one day.
Maybe my brain was hiding a pathology.
The shadows moved closer.
Slowly.
Indifferently.
No matter where I stood, they drifted nearer.
Fear crushed logic.
I dialed Daniel.
Daniel was my only friend here in Mumbai. We had bonded over coffee and missing our hometowns.
“Thank God you’re alive,” he said. “I was on my way to check on you.”
“I need help,” I whispered. “Please come over.”
“I’ll be there right away,” he said.
The moment Daniel entered, the shadows vanished.
Dan smelled faintly of rain and instant coffee—the way he always did after long days.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he asked, staring at me. “You look like a witch from a horror story.”
He was right. My hair hung loose. Kohl smeared beneath my eyes. I looked unrecognizable.
“I need to tell you something, Dan.”
“Yes. What is it?”
“I see shadows. A man and a woman. They were here. They came closer. They disappeared when you arrived.”
“You mean hallucinations?” he asked carefully. “Like the subject from yesterday’s presentation?”
“It was Radha,” I said. “My childhood friend.”
“You’re thinking too much,” he said. “Too much paranoid schizophrenia for one day. You’re tired.”
“I slept for twenty-four hours,” I said. “I’m not tired. Maybe I’m just crazy.”
Maybe I was.
But it felt real.
“Please stay,” I said. “I can’t be alone.”
“I will,” he said. “But I need to hand my keys to my roommate. I left in a hurry.”
“No,” I said urgently. “They’ll come back if you leave.”
“I’ll turn the lights off,” he said. “You won’t see them in the dark. Stay here. I’ll be back.”
I hated him for leaving.
The darkness felt heavier now.
The rain returned—violent, thunderous, tearing through the night.
Lightning flashed.
I shut my eyes tight.
I knew the room would light up for a second each time the lightening flashed—and I would see them.
So I kept my eyes closed.
---
When I opened my eyes, I was home.
Kelshi.
The smell of wet soil filled the air—raw, metallic, alive. Rain lashed the ground in angry sheets. Thunder cracked open the sky, followed by blinding flashes of lightning. A crowd had gathered outside Radha’s house.
It felt familiar.
Uncomfortably so.
Like a scene I had already lived through, or perhaps one my mind had rehearsed many times without my consent.
I pushed my way through the crowd. Faces blurred past me, their murmurs dissolving into the sound of rain.
Inside the house, Radha’s mother sat motionless, staring at something that lay on the floor, covered in white.
I followed her gaze.
It was Radha.
Her body was wrapped in white cloth. Flower garlands lay heavy across her chest. Only her face was visible—unnaturally still. Balls of cotton were placed in both her nostrils. A basil leaf rested on her lips.
Radha.
Lifeless.
Radha.
Dead.
My body refused to move.
The image burned itself into me.
Somewhere, uninvited, another memory surfaced—the stupid app, the animated photograph where Radha had vanished completely.
Was that a warning?
A premonition?
Is this real?
Is this a dream?
If it was a dream, my body did not know how to wake itself.
I walked out of the house.
I needed air.
The rain drenched me instantly, but I did not care. I walked aimlessly, letting the water soak through my clothes, through my skin, as though it might wash something away. After a while, I turned back.
The house was empty.
Radha was gone.
The crowd had disappeared.
Where had they taken her?
“I am here,” a voice said behind me.
I turned.
It was Radha.
Cotton still in her nostrils. The basil leaf still on her lips. Her body draped in white, marigold flowers clinging to her like they belonged there. Her face had turned pale blue.
But she stood upright.
She moved.
“Sayli,” she called my name. “I am here.”
Tears burned my eyes and spilled freely.
This had to be a dream. People did not return from the dead.
Then why couldn’t I wake up?
“You came back?” I asked, my voice breaking.
“I did,” she said, smiling the way she always used to. “I came back to tell you to let me go.”
The words echoed.
Let me go.
Something inside me cracked open.
The memories rushed in without warning.
Three years ago.
I had turned my back on her for a moment.
She jumped.
She jumped into the same stone well under the banyan tree. I screamed and ran back, diving in after her. As I hit the water, I saw blood spreading around us.
Was it mine?
Or hers?
I grabbed her limp body. Blood poured from a wound on her head. Someone lowered a rope. Hands pulled us out.
I remembered how her body felt—heavy, unresponsive.
The same.
Exactly the same.
Water spilled from her mouth as she coughed weakly. Her lips moved. I leaned in closer, desperate to hear.
She whispered, “Let me go.”
“Let me go,” Radha’s disfigured corpse screamed as my eyes flew open.
I was back in my apartment.
I understood now.
I had never let her go.
I spoke to her long after she was gone. I assumed she needed me even when she didn’t exist anymore. I remembered the numbing medicines, the psychiatrist my parents had taken me to. I remembered sleeping for days.
The routine helped.
But what truly remained was this—I never let Radha go.
And when it finally came time to leave her behind, I promised to take her demons with me.
The shadows.
Lightning flashed.
They were there.
They moved toward me, the way they had moved toward Radha.
Radha had told me they were there to take her. They had taken Radha with them. Now they were here for me.
I grabbed the scissors from the counter beside the sofa, holding them up uselessly. They did not hesitate.
They kept coming.
Something broke inside me. I felt unbearably powerless. Powerless enough that death felt easier than living.
I drove the scissors into my neck, straight for the jugular.
Blood gushed out, warm and unstoppable.
The shadows vanished.
The door burst open. Someone rushed toward me.
Dan.
He pressed hard against the wound, trying to save me.
Every time he applied pressure, the shadows returned.
No.
Let me die, Dan.
The words never came out.
He bent close, begging me to stay alive until help arrived.
I gathered what little strength I had left and whispered into his ear—
“Let me go.”
- Aditee Joshi
