In my
wildest dreams I could not have imagined such an end to the holiday
we had begun on May 13. Thirteen may be an unlucky number. But I had
never associated it with anything untoward happening on this jaunt of
ours. But the hair-raising events that followed after we had booked
a large, spacious room -which happened to be number 13 — on the second
floor of this hotel in Ooty for our group of thirteen people were enough
to make me superstitious, in addition to bleaching my hair.
We had
gone through the city with a fine-tooth comb but had not succeeded in
finding a room or a couple of rooms to suit our budget except
at this hotel - an eerie, old- world structure. By 8 pm the room being
booked, my son and his family and close relatives were ready for a
sight-seeing expedition around Ooty. I preferred to stay back.
At 9.30
pm I stepped out of the room and sat down on an old wooden stool at
the window, looking out at the gate of the drive way, waiting
for my companions. I sat thus for nearly two hours, watching an occasional
autorickshaw or a cyclist passing by. It was well past eleven o’clock
now, and I was beginning to get worried. At this time there came the
tap-tap of somebody coming up the stairs. It was a phantom-Ike figure
in white carrying a small white suitcase.
“What do you make the time?” I asked him,
for he was wearing a watch and I wasn’t. He looked over his shoulder
at me, fixing me with glowing eyes. Then, he turned his back on me and
kicked open the door of his room and darted in. The door was banged
shut. Demoniac laughter from the room filled the corridor.
On the
contrary, the driveway of the hotel across the street had cars coming
in at regular intervals. One of the pillars holding the gate had fallen
off half-way and on the other pillar was a lamp shaped like a panama
hat. This hat was now moving! And that was when I commended my soul
to God and ran down the stairs and walked straight into the arms of
my son.
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