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I was looking for a gift for my friend to give her on her wedding. I wondered if she needed my greetings for a happy honeymoon.
The girl was literally going to Shimla for her honeymoon.
My mother brought a cute-looking diary. I had been searching online for a similar diary for ages and still couldn’t find one.
“Where did you find it?,” I asked, hiding my over-excitement. My mother didn’t know I wanted one. Maybe all mothers have a super sixth sense when it comes to their children and their needs.
“Ahh! Just found it in the ‘journaling’ section”, my mother said with a triumphant smile on her face.
I bought the diary and the greeting cards. We finished shopping, and it was only afternoon. The train we had to board came in the early morning, so I decided to check in at a hotel.
We got a ground-floor room in Paradise hotel, Patna. It was a beautiful building surrounded by a garden. The walls were low to attract tourists and people. As we entered the room, I saw a woman hiding behind one of the boundary walls. Her sari disappeared behind the walls as soon as I tried to see more of the woman.
“Look! Someone is hiding behind the walls.” I told my mother, who was busy scrolling reels on her phone.
She looked up for a moment, inspected the window and said,” there’s no one behind walls, Pooja.”
She didn’t pay any heed to my voice and continued scrolling. Meanwhile, my gaze lingered behind the boundary walls. That woman had a wrench in her hands- I was sure of my gut feeling.
Once in the hotel room, I started looking at the packed gifts I had bought. The candle holder, the greeting cards, diary…
Diary.
I should write about the day. I started searching for a pen. I always kept one in my purse.
Found it.
What should I write?
I dated the first page and finished writing about today’s experience. After writing, my eyes again strayed towards the window, and I found that the woman was approaching the window. With a wrench in her hand. I saw her face, and my senses left my body for a solid minute.
She had a very badly wrinkled face with bright white teeth and… blood stains. Living in Bihar, I could tell that she was a Dayan. She reached the window and started bolting the rods. I muttered a few curses under my breath and called my mother.
“Ma! There’s a woman on the window!”
My mother looked in the window, and her face didn’t budge.
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“There’s no one on the window, Pooja. You better take a good rest.”
Shit! Now I was the only one in the room who could see her. Okay! I breathed. I needed air to fight the witch or whoever that woman was.
After finishing bolting, she broke the glass, and I immediately grabbed the wrench from her hands. She made a face that looked like it was I who was trying to break into her room, and my stomach curled to painful points just from the view. She was trying to climb up into our room but was not tall enough(fortunately).
I hammered the wrench on her hands, and she screamed- in a man’s voice.
I was muttering Hanuman Chalisa continuously. Then I caught her by both her hands, dragged her into my room, and pulled her out of the room.
My mother wasn’t even noticing the mess we were creating in the room.
I was wondering why my mother wasn’t paying any attention to the havoc I was creating, but I’ll deal with that later. For now, I had to take care of the woman.
I saw a man sitting beside the lift door on a plastic stool.
“Bhaiya! Help me. This woman broke into my room through the window.” I was still holding her.
“Hmmm… I see. Don’t you worry. I’ll take care of her.” he dialed 101, and soon she was handed over to the police.
As I returned to the room, my mother was still scrolling, and the window, through which the woman had come in, was, to my surprise, intact.
The broken pieces of glass had disappeared into nothingness. The bolts, the everything seemed like nothing had happened. Confused, I walked out of the door and towards the lift-bhaiya, but to my shock, there was no lift and no ‘lift-bhaiya’.
Paradise was a single-storey building; it took me a moment to realize.
Defeated, I re-entered my room. My mother hadn’t even felt that something wrong had happened in these twenty minutes.
Maybe she couldn’t see what I could? Heavens knew.
I drew nearer to the window to observe it from close quarters.
Holy shit.
No cracks. Even the rods were bolted tightly. I turned around to see the rest of the room, and I found one thing.
The wrench.
How did this wrench get here without breaking the window?
To be continued…
