Having a house warming puja in an apartment full of boxes and few unpacked utensils in the kitchen was a challenge in itself, not to mention the dust bunnies behind the moved furniture and the corners was an exception for my pernickety personality.
It had just been a couple of days since we had started settling in our apartment in mid-September last year. When we had arrived, the tall buildings were a pinkish-grey blur behind the screen of our rain-washed car. The blocks were tall, almost intimidatingly so; at least to us, after having spent more than three decades in the tea gardens. Cardboard boxes scrawled with the markers lay on trunks and some on the floor. The walls were bare, devoid of usual smiling framed faces. White labels stuck on the trunks roughly mentioning its contents, as if eagerly waiting to be unpacked to turn this apartment into a cosy home.
The wet weather wasn’t making unpacking easy. The sky had been dark throughout the afternoon, even when Cocoa- our pet spaniel, had gone for a walk. After dinner my husband and I sat on the dining table savouring huge mugs of hot milk, putting up our feet. The lightning flashed through the glass window and in about three seconds, a loud boom of thunderstruck. Just then, we were in complete darkness with an unexpected power cut.
I switched on the torch on my cellphone into the gloomy evening but the room remained stubbornly dark. And then we heard a knock at the door. “Who’s it?” I called out but there was no reply. I walked towards the main entrance door with the light cast from my cellphone which lay on the table; I stumbled onto Cocoa shrieking and he whimpered. Exactly at that moment, our bedroom door slammed shut with a bang, likely caught by the gust from the open windows. The loud thud made us jump, more so because of its loudness than fear. As I was about to turn the doorknob, I heard a creak. Was it all my imagination? After all, we were still new to this place. The howling winds from the balcony and the rattling windows made us nervous. I could describe the weather as creepy but eerie was closer. There had been many haunted bungalows and ghost stories in the tea estates but I scolded myself to check my imagination. Surely, they would not have followed us here.
Just then I felt something on my shoulder and I froze in horror. I turned back to see my husband who had tip-toed behind me! Thank God! He advised me to wait for the power supply to be back before opening the door. We waited patiently. The power cut wasn’t bothering Cocoa at all. He was the keenest one to answer the knock. He stood at the door sniffing and wagging his tail. We let it pass for a few minutes, sitting and wondering who it could be. After a few minutes, the power supply was restored and we heaved a sigh of relief. To our surprise though, there was a similar knock on the door again! We wondered why the doorbell wasn’t being used. My husband peeked through the peephole and exclaimed that there was no one at the door! I simply could not shake the feeling that something was not right.
My husband had barely swung the door shut. His face was set like a stone and his mouth a grim line but shrugging his shoulders he thought aloud "it's no time even for children to be playing a prank". Were our ears betraying us? Or was it the weather that didn’t let us reason well? Each one of us swore that the knock was audible loud and clear. We were unable to comprehend what it could be. We deliberated and came to the decision to call it a night. After all, it was an apartment in a city, with neighbours around. It was ironic that the hustle-bustle of the people in their balconies and the light streaming through the windows was a soothing comfort to us despite having spent many nights in the tranquillity and serenity of the tea estates. We calmed ourselves and decided to check the CCTV footage the next day.
After our morning rituals the next day, going through the CCTV footage was a task in itself. Finally, when we narrowed it down to the specific timeframe, we saw nobody! Our faces washed blank with confusion for a split second, our eyes couldn’t follow the glimpse of the black woolly ball. We rewound the video and watched in slow-motion. What met our eyes was unbelievable.
On the doormat of our entrance there lay a black fluffy dog cuddled up. She rested her back against the door and was scratching her droopy ears. After a while, she sniffed under the door pushing the door with her snout and then vanished. So much so for the knock and suspected paranormal activity!