Story Brunch
Despite being in an urban area, my house gives me a feeling of living in a natural setting because of the thick vegetation, both across the road and in the backyard. My colony used to be one of the least crowded ones just a few years back, despite being in the heart of the city. Now the population has almost trebled, but still, it’s comparatively less densely populated.
River Ganga is just half a km away from my house, in the northern direction, so we get a comparatively fresh cooler breeze, which we can feel on the terrace in the evening. The main natural attraction lies in a small patch of land between my northern wall and a huge old Lord Jagannath temple complex. It’s a small narrow land in which no human enters, occupied by very dense vegetation consisting of innumerable herbs, and a lot of small animals. Many birds, small ones, green, and blue Budgerigars, parrots, sparrows, etc have made that land their habitat. They are safe, and undisturbed there. Squirrels, mongoose, snakes, and generally Krait also live in that patch.
Mongeese can be seen roaming around on my terrace in packs of five, with two large ones and three small kids, probably a family. Sometimes they take the way down the stairs up to the kitchen area. We love it when they come down and run aimlessly in our verandahs. Twice they entered my room. Squirrels are plenty. Once I spotted a small monitor lizard too, it was a frightening site, though they are generally found in the plains of Ganga in and around the Patna-Hajipur belt.
There are two ‘huts’ at the back of my terrace,tin-roof small rooms. One used to be my study room during my college days. Now both rooms are sort of library and storeroom. If the gates of the ‘huts’ remain open, one can find mongoose roaming or cats with small kittens sleeping in that room. Once I spotted a snake hanging from the ceiling too, just above my head at around 12 in the night. After a lot of struggle, we managed to kill it. Tens of monkeys, black-faced, visit the terrace in the evening, a nearby large Peepal tree is the largest habitat of these monkeys in the whole city.
One of my friends who used to visit earlier often used to say-
‘ You have a personal small biodiversity hotspot -referring to the small patch of land.
And I would jokingly reply to him that there was not a single exotic species in my hotspot.
But, it wasn’t true.
One evening, a few years ago, while I was sitting and studying in the hut I sensed small heavy movement on the tin roof of the room. I assumed it to be some big heavy cat. I didn’t give it much thought and got back to studying. Only I used to be on my first floor, everyone else used to live on the ground floor those days, and hardly anyone used to visit the terrace without work, it was sort of my personal territory. So, no one else could notice the movement of that ‘cat’.
The same day, a few hours later, I could hear the sound on my roof again. I brushed away the thought once again assuming it to be that of a cat. The same sequence of events repeated for a few more days, and it was always in my mind that it might be the cat.
One fine day, with a thought to scare the cat out of my terrace, because the sounds used to be a frightening experience at midnight, I decided to chase it when it would come.
As soon as I heard the sound of the cat that evening,I rushed out of the hut with a rod in my hand, only to be pushed back by the slap of a large tail of a heavy slow moving animal, which seemed to me like Popeye version of mongoose, as if some sort of genetic mutation had enlarged a small mongoose.
I couldn’t see the front of the animal in the dark, only its rear bulky tail which was more than a meter long. Frightened to the core, I rushed inside the hut and bolted the door from inside. Once I was sure that the mysterious animal had crossed the boundary wall, and moved to the adjoining small patch of forested land, I came out of my room to narrate the incident to others in my house. We all came back to the terrace but couldn’t find the animal. But I knew the animal used to visit twice.
I went to the second floor with a torch in my hand and stayed awake to see what animal it was.
It was going to be a very long dark wait, with fear gripping my soul as the night progressed. I was all alone.
Suddenly, the bushes beside my terrace boundary made some sound, and I knew it was returning. I was on alert mode with my thumb pressed against the button of the torch. I wanted to watch it properly, so decided to turn on the torch light only when it reached the mid part of the terrace, and wouldn’t run away from the boundary itself. It finally appeared.
It was a humongous, low height, heavy, small-bear-faced, long-tailed, a gigantic version of a mongoose-type animal, seeming to be a remnant of some reptile from the Dinosaurs age.
I had never ever seen, heard, or read about any such animal. I didn’t return to my hut out of fear and retired to the street-facing room on the first floor. As I said earlier, my first floor used to be empty. I didn’t sleep but opened my laptop to search for the animal, based on the description of what I had seen.I couldn’t find anything.
My parents asked me to not visit the hut on the terrace as it was unsafe. A few days later, I left for college in Bengaluru, but that animal kept haunting me every day.
When I went back to my hometown in doab belt of Patna during the winter holidays, I used to wait on the terrace till late to look for that weird beast, but could never spot it again.
I do not know where did it disappear. It might have shifted its habitat, or might have died, or been killed by someone. Some people claimed it to be a manifestation of some ghost that might have been wandering in the nearby wild, but I do not believe such stories.
The mystery about the animal remains! And I still wonder if it was really an animal or a ghost. Had it been an animal, there should have been some information about it on the internet, books,or in the knowledge of people.
