Midnight misadventures

Unable to bear the sweltering heat inside the house, a boy all of sixteen, I preferred sleeping on a folding canvas cot in the portico of our spacious house during summers, while my parents and two sisters, both older, slept in the hall with the door bolted. Every day before hitting the sack, I would stash a bamboo stick (lathi) under my thick bedspread and a torchlight underneath my pillow, both quite handy in night.

In the mornings, waking up a tad before the crack of dawn, I would roll up my bedding, keep the cot folded, and knock at the entrance door for someone from inside to open it for me. Our house was in a residential locality in Madras (now Chennai), with its owner occupying the upstairs and letting out three-fourths of the ground floor to us, with the remaining quarter portion separated by a long wooden screen to a widow living alone.

On a pitch-dark night, when I slept a little later than usual, the dead-of-night sound of someone running on the street outside ruffled me up from slumber. Alarmed, I sprang up from my kip, shoved my feet into the slip-on shoes kept beside the cot, took the torchlight from under the pillow, and ran out of the house armed with the lathi. In the flash of my light, I spotted a man in dhoti running ahead of me and turning into the street, branching off leftward from the crossroad a few steps away from our house.

Noticing me running close behind him, even up to the end of the road, he melted away into the undergrowth of trees and thickets in a vast vacant land on the farther side of the road in front, not to be spotted. Swizzed with utter disappointment, I began tracing my way back home.

About halfway back, two dusky, middle-aged men clad in dhoti confronted me, asking me who I was. I stood tightlipped since I could recognise them as our neighbours in a house adjacent to ours. At the instance of one of them, I moved close to a streetlight within an inch of us for them to see me. One of them quickly recognised me and told the other I was the son of Harihara Sastri (my father), who had been a resident of the locality for a long time. Regretting their fault, they returned home with me in tow.

The whack a thief had made on the previous night to enter a house in our street was foiled by the residents of the house was the talk of the town the next day.

What I found the funniest part of my chase of the inconnu was the bloomer of the duo mistaking me for the stranger rather than running forth and catching him.