Now then, mind me for sounding arrogant or proud or whatever conclusions you might jump to nowadays, but my house is pretty big by Mumbai standards. So, it takes me about 20 steps from the study to the kitchen. And 20 Shridhar Steps (TM) are pretty sizeable. It would probably take an ant-on-steroids a week to get that far, half a year without them. Okay, now that you know how supposedly-huge my house is, you can imagine how it would be in the house when darkness falls.
Moving on, the adjectives used above for my house apply to my maternal family too. So the good ol’ home resembles a pavement with cleaner dwellers during family events. Now, you know what it is with so many people in the house, there always is a lot of junk strewn about. Similar circs. forced me to reconsider watching even promos of horror movies. I have become infamous in my family because of a certain incident related to Jurassic Park during which I had sought humble refuge below the sofa in the pleasant exchanges between a man and a T-Rex. Now, the man waved happily at the T-Rex, and the T-Rex happily waved back with a “What-ho”, didn’t it? So amiable.
During such family visits, we have a provision for spreading loads of mattresses on the floor. After a tiring day of some-or-the-other-event, we returned home, happy but tired. As the cliche goes, most of my cousins were fast asleep before they hit the bed. Now me, I have this compulsion to wash my feet before I go to bed and also the customary pee. So, I was in two minds whether to force myself to sleep and then wet my bed or to lift my lazy arse and drag myself to the toilet.
Of course, I doubt whether you ever considered that I’d choose the first option, but I didn’t, surprisingly. I got up, arms aching and bones creaking. Now, if you’ve ever watched a horror movie or acted in one, every sound the protagonist makes is amplified a hundred times. So I looked around, petrified. And to my horror, something grabbed my leg!
The cold and clammy hand seemed pretty limp and I watched its progress from my legs to its own body. Noticing that the now-lifeless limb belonged to my cousin, I wiped the sweat off my forehead and proceeded to the loo. With trembling knees, I sat down on the toilet seat and hummed Cliffs of Dover while my excretory system got down to doing its job.
For Representational purposes only.
After a while, when I left the toilet, something seemed amiss. There were voices and snorts coming from the second bedroom. As the amplified-by-a-factor-of-2 voice droned on, I wondered if there was a witches’ orgy going on. By now, my fragile nervous system had given way to an unshakeable fear of my house being haunted. As in the usual movies, I went about to investigate. Listening to the voice for a while, I wondered if even witches invested in the stock market. The scary voice was cursing the day’s fall in the Sensex. That was when I realized that the imaginary witch was my uncle talking in his sleep. I nearly laughed out loud at the discovery, when something, or somebody, put a hand on my shoulder.
I nearly jumped out of my pants, but managed to calm myself enough to see that it was my dad. He’d woken up to get a glass of water. After my dad went back to bed, I wondered at the night’s events as I trudged back to the safe refuge of my bed. Even as I was a few feet away from my bed, I saw a figure loom up in front of me and I tripped and fell hard. With a curse, I scurried back to my bed and buried my head under the pillow, and vowed never to go for a pee in the middle of the night again.
After an uneasy sleep in which I dreamt of female vampires a la Beckinsale, I got up in the morning, shaken by the previous night’s events. And can you imagine my surprise when last night’s “figure looming up” was actually a cousin’s shirt draped on the chair? 
P.S :- T-Rex probably bit the guy’s head off.
