16. What the fuck was that?
I woke up the next day sometime during afternoon, somewhere between 2 and 3pm.
Decided to run, and went to the ground, and I ran, stopping after every other lap.Imagine milk boiling in a vessel. Every time I ran to exhaustion the boiling milk reached to the brim of the vessel, and when I stopped, it was as if someone switched off the stove as the milk was about to overflow.
When I ran to exhaustion, I felt the pain, and the mind raced to ‘ I cannot’, ‘I cannot’; and when I stopped, the chorus changed to ‘I can’, ‘I can’, ‘just need a break..but I can’. Then, I ran again to ‘I cannot’..then stopped again to ‘ I can’. A ‘cannot’ cannot exist without a ‘can’. Just flip that coin, and everything becomes impossible, because we at one time thought it was possible.
When I walked back home, I was full of joy. The confidence returned. Felt refreshed. The body began to recuperate, and so was my mind. Everything looked beautiful.
When I went back home, I laid down on the floor, feeling relaxed.
My mind is a beautiful thing. The world is beautiful. The spider web is beautiful.
Confidence is the by product of happiness. Yes, it is.
Everything is a thought. There is no escaping the thought. Where the thought comes from? Where does the idea in the brain germinate? I don’t know. But, what I know is that, only a thought can cure a thought. Only a thought can cure the emotion. Only a thought can fight with a thought.
A thought can free me from a thought.
If fear arises from a thought, I can cure it with another thought.
What remained to be answered though was, “What kind of thoughts I need to look for to cure that fear”.
That night, I went upstairs; this time armed with odomos for mosquitoes, and watched the stars for hours. I felt ecstatic looking at the sky. I noticed some moist in my eyes as I zoomed in and out of the galaxies.
It was 12 in the night when I finally came down to my room, when the moon aged the stars, making them invisible. I consciously pushed away all the questions that arose from the last night incident. I got that strength to push away the engulfing black cloud… from the chemicals that got released from my run. I needed that time-out. The ‘run’ gave me the confidence to postpone my investigations.
I looked for my dad. His room was empty. I switched on the TV and watched some shit on the TV.
Time 1 am.
Felt thirsty. Went to the kitchen. Opened the fridge.
The light inside the fridge illuminated my face. I stood there looking inside the fridge.
Then it hit me – a feeling… as I said to myself, ‘Deja vu’.
But, it was not Deja vu, I remembered that the exact situation happened last night.
Then my old friend ‘fear’ said Hi, and I looked for a thought to back stab him, but found none.
I quickly turned my head to find someone near the window watching me. No one was there; Only shadows of the trees, from the moon-light, forming some peculiar patterns. They danced with the breeze. I felt as if they were giggling and dancing to make fun of me and saying , “ Look at this idiot. How scared he is. All his philosophies and analysis, which he thinks on the comforts of the bed comes to nothing when the shit hits the fan”. The shadows danced faster and faster, and then they swung to and fro wildly as if they were some reincarnated devils.
I quickly turned my head to right. No one. Then again to the left. No one.
I turned around, completing 360 Degrees. No one. It would have been chaplinesque if not for the fact – the fact that I felt that someone was watching me. Out of no where I heard a thunderbolt, and in a matter of seconds the clouds ate away the moon, and it started raining.
The rain, the wind, and me; alone in that moment.
Making sure that no one was watching me, I picked up the bottle from the fridge. As I opened the cap, and about to drink; I smelled something. I stopped right there. Freeze frame. The bottle in the mid-air.
The smell – with a tinge of sweet and sour quality to it. Yes, the same smell I smelled few days back. The same smell my mother smelled a decade back. Yes, that peculiar smell.
I put the bottle on the fridge, walked all over the kitchen and the hall to find the source of that smell. The smell was very faint, and it became comparatively stronger as I walked to the ataka room.
Power-cut.
The whole house was enveloped in darkness. The wind might have knocked off some electric poles.
Damn! Please, not now.
I slowly walked to my room, found the torch light, and switched it on. The elongated shadows of the familiar objects gave an unfamiliar, eerie look to the room. I walked to the kitchen. Found a candle and lit it.
Then, I heard a small noise, a sound of whoosh, as If someone passed by. I focused the torch light all around the hall. All clear.
Just my imagination. Just my fucking imagination.
There was certainly some fear in me, but it didn’t stop me, it didn’t debilitate me. My situation was like that of a horror movie buff who watched hundreds of horror movies only to find that no new horror movie was scaring him enough, and finally declaring all of them as crap.
The fear became familiar, and that relativity of fear pushed me to action. I did not wait for the power to come. Some impulse pushed me.
I placed the candle on the floor of the Ataka room, climbed the Ataka, switching the torch light from left to right as I climbed. I focused the torch light all over the Ataka, and found nothing out of place, except the smell.
I noticed that the floor was a bit damp, and as I moved towards the corner, the floor became wetter. The corner was full of suitcases placed on top of each other. Holding the torch light in my mouth, I began rearranging the suitcases one by one, and as I lifted the last suitcase, uncovering the corner, I found a small hole in the wall …a 0.5 x 0.5 foot hole. Water was dripping, drop by drop from that hole. That was the source of wet dampness in the Ataka. Rain water was leaking through that hole.
I got down on my knees, focusing the torch light into that hole. It was a foot deep empty hole. But the smell was strongest there. I sat on my knees for sometime trying to make sense of that unusual hole. Nothing made sense. Nothing.
I uncovered all the corners of the Ataka to find any holes. And, as I reached the edge of the ataka, and looked down at the room, I noticed a small figure on the floor, standing beside the candle.
I instinctively focused the torch light towards the figure.
Then….
I saw it.
It saw me.
It was already observing me as I climbed that Ataka. It observed me as I uncovered the hole in the wall.It observed the whole thing.
Our eyes met. The shock that resulted from that rendezvous froze me into a statue.
And, I didn’t move.Not an inch. It didn’t either.
Continued here..
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