The house in the Kumaon hills seemed to breathe with the slow and heavy rhythm of the mountains themselves, holding within its walls the scent of old cedar-wood and the faint trace of monsoon rain. In the evenings, when the light slanted low through the curtains, the younger of the two brothers would recline on the faded armchair, watching the motes of dust pirouette endlessly, as if time itself hesitated to pass. His elder brother, more self-contained, sat staring at the ceramic figurine with two swans that had graced their mother’s table for as long as either could remember. There was a delicate stillness between them, the kind that only siblings share – a silence thick with childhood’s ghosts and the soft echoes of footfalls long since faded from the corridors.
It was on one such evening, as the sky darkened, that the fan unfolded itself from the bureau, not with any ordinary rustle, but with the soft murmur of feline breaths. The brothers did not speak of it, though their eyes flicked toward the apparition and then away. The cats’ faces, furred and precise, gazed serenely from the paper folds, watching, perhaps, the black heels suspended from the ceiling like exiled memories of their mother’s youth. The rabbit pin cushion, always perched at the edge of the table, seemed to shift in its own quiet vigil, the faint pricks of forgotten needles marring its velvet fur. And so the uncles remained, caught between memory and the strange, whispering presences that shared the house, unsure if these visitations were woven from their own remembering or if the house itself, tenderly and insistently, remembered for them.
