Thief of the Night

There are thieves at large in the locality, I’m told. There was some incident where an old lady in the bathroom felt some movement behind her, and was shocked when she turned around and saw a total stranger who’d broken into her house. Of course, the way this was narrated to me emphasized on the fact that she simply saw a ‘hand’ reaching out from behind her shoulder, then she turned around, and the story ends there. It makes me picture some kind of chilling horror movie tableau: disembodied hands harassing old ladies in bathrooms.

Every night at 1:00 am the lights go off. The reason for this is the ‘load shedding’ that the MeSEB believes will relieve the state of its power woes. Now this hour is too early for me to think of sleeping, generally. But here when it strikes one, the lights left on in the house will go off, the fridge will stop purring. It is pitch dark. All is quiet and still. Earlier, at twelve, it had started raining. Now only the rain pattering on the roof is heard. Ideally, this would have a lulling effect. But it doesn’t help when I’m wide awake, when the book I’d just had to put away is still playing its words in my head, when my eyes that won’t shut, straining to see something in the darkness, see only the dense blackness.

And then I hear sounds. The wind beating outside finds its way somehow into the house and a door moves on its hinges, creaks. Faint rustling sounds from nowhere. A floorboard groans. And the rain pouring outside lacks a rhythm that would be reassuring. It is disrupted by the vagaries of its own intensity- sometimes a mad drumbeat, sometimes a lilting strain. The faculties of my imagination, wide-awake, are wild at work.

Then I hear something like gentle steps on the roof. There is no mistaking it. Something or someone on the roof. Not like the pattering of rain, but soft thuds, clearly moving around, as I can sense from the direction of the sounds right above me. I strain my ears to listen harder, and think it must be the distorting effect of nighttime fancies, but no, there it is again. The sound. Against my will I imagine disembodied feet moving about.

All of a sudden: a loud creak, a big crash, things falling down. The quiet night is jolted by the jarring disruption. My mother curses. I spring to my feet and feel my way around the bed and out of the door into the passage, hit my shins against unidentified objects in the process. I see a faint light moving somewhere, they’ve all heard it. And then I find the emergency lamp and we scout around, moving here and there, the white light of the lamp making stranger shadows out of things. Nonetheless, Pa goes and checks outside. All is still there. My mother mutters something about some dream she had and yells at me asking if I’d checked if all the doors had been locked before sleeping. Then perplexingly, she checks under each bed. I gather that the recesses of the bed could be a hiding-place. I go and do the same, half expecting disembodied hands to drag me inside each time. Nothing. The whole house is scoured. There is no thief. The bolts are secure. The crash is a mystery.

I go into the kitchen for some water, waving my torch around the room before advancing towards the water filter. I fill my glass, gulp the water down and move to the basin to keep the glass. Then there, silhouetted against the gleaming white tiles, is Salem, black as the night itself, his fur slicked down with rainwater. He is gingerly prowling about, stops with paw mid-air when he sees me, glares at me with glassy green eyes that I am sure see much more than I can at the moment, and then stretches his long self and begins licking his wet coat. It was him.

In the morning the secret of the mysterious crash is revealed. Salem had somehow managed to pry a skylight window open, jumped and landed on the top of an almirah, and upset a whole lot of stuff, which fell to the ground. His agility and hardiness amaze me. I remember now how he once jumped some fifteen feet down from that same skylight without hurting a hair. He’s made it his entry point into the house, convenient after nights of skulking about. And this morning, he sharpens his claws on the chair-covers in the dining room, picking at the fabric with his forelimbs stretched up, enjoying the resistance the cloth offers his trained claws. The covers have long been reduced to shreds, but his haughty stare is intact, and his coat is glossier than ever.