At first, it all sounded like some distant dream, something happening very far away. But the whispering intensified, so did the shuffling of feet. The whisperer now seemed to be

 standing over me, beside the floor where I lay, mumbling and spitting indiscriminately.   I awoke. The dream  seemed familiar, but I couldn't remember the first occurrence of its 

incidents. I thought hard,  my face buried in my palms as I sat on bedsheets spread on the tiled floor. In the rush of cold night winds into the room, I sensed the presence 

of something evil. I rose to shut the windows I had forgotten to close, and to turn off the lights, inadvertently locking eyes with a dark figure behind the window that suddenly 

darted away. I could hear footsteps fading. "Who could that be?" I wondered, too scared to hurry to the window to catch a glimpse. Earlier in the day, a crow had been sitting on 

our rooftop all day, with a critical eye, as if taking stock of everything happening in the house. I tried warding it off with stones. It left but returned. And I kept chasing it with

 stones each time it came back till I  slipped in the process, a terrible fall that left me lymping. The crow arrived in the house as soon as  my roommate JP left the house. 


I was convinced that JP was some Lucifer incarnate. I awaited his return, eager to confront him. He retuned in the morning, and started packing. "I'm done with my 

exams," he told me, "I am going home. You can have these."  A bag of provisions and some money. He had seen. He had noticed. That I had become silent these past few days.

 I was broke. And all the calls I made for help fruitless. Here was a savior, a Samaritan     I had tagged evil. I accepted the offer, too ashamed to utter a proper Thank you. 

I went to sit in a corner of the room, thinking, trying to reconcile the JP of my dreams with the one that extended a hand to get me out of a financial pit.