Chapter 43: The Feather Effect
It was late afternoon when the car stopped again — this time, not Nishanth’s.
It was an old hatchback, the kind you could hear rattling from a hundred meters away. Its engine wheezed as it came to a dusty halt just outside the southern edge of Marigold Township — or rather, Solace, as it had been silently renamed. The driver, a tired man in his late sixties, stayed inside. But the passenger door opened.
She stepped out slowly, as if unsure the ground beneath her was real.
Revathi Ramachandran hadn’t seen this place since the day her father was taken away in an ambulance ten years ago. The memories hadn’t aged — they’d just stayed frozen. The same trees, now more skeletal. The same broken streetlights. The same silent school building where her mother once taught with chalk and borrowed hope.
But something felt different now. The stillness had changed.
It wasn’t abandonment anymore.It was anticipation.
She walked cautiously into the township, her long cotton kurta brushing against dried weeds. A construction assistant noticed her and approached politely, clipboard in hand.
"Ma’am, this is currently a restricted—"
"I grew up here," she interrupted gently. "My father’s name was Ramachandran. We lived near the old post office."
The man hesitated, tapped a quick note into his tablet, then nodded.
"One moment, ma’am. You’ll want to speak to Mr. Rao."