Ghosts in Sainik School Goalpara 2

The campus of Sainik School Goalpara is a huge area consisting of thousands of acres of land, mostly unoccupied. Shrubs, animals, darkness and legends came to occupy those unused mass of lands. If gossips were to be considered true, the present campus was built upon an old burial site. Such gossips never mattered to me, until one day…

I had heard several stories about ‘ghost sightings’ in Udaygiri house, which happened to be our neighbours. Of the several such stories, the story about this particular cat was probably the most circulated one - A cat that appeared at a particular time of the night and went into a particular bathroom and then vanish. (I will wait to hear this story from someone from Udaygiri House).

I was in my IXth standard, and a day of hard labour put me off to sleep in the early hours of the night, at around 10pm. The sounds from my neighbours in the room finally subsided and the lights went out within sometime, probably half an hour. It was summer and most of us preferred to wear shorts over our sleeping night dresses, flouting the prescribed rules. With no exams in the next few weeks, the lights went out in quick succession across all the rooms, putting the entire house into a silent sleep.

It was strange how the dew drops used to fall even in the warmest of summers, finely putting dotted lines on the grass below the tin roofs. The night was filled with the lethargic moaning of the ceiling fans, in the room, amplified by the hollowness of the asbestos ceiling. The heat of the night gave way to slight chillness during the late night and early morning hours. I felt an urge to take a leak and woke up as I had to walk to the other side of the hostel, where the pungent smelling bathrooms were located.

Bathrooms in Sainik School Goalpara consisted of rows of Lavatories, a water tank, rows of bathing rooms, with doors at various stages of decay, some open and some closed and some missing, and then came the high walled urinals and then finally ending in an open bathroom. The open bathroom was a bare space, surrounded by high walls, with a steel pipe dangling from the top. It was meant to have wash basins, which probably existed for a few years, when the school was established. Nonetheless, it was a space meant exclusively for the seniors to bathe and shout sing.

So I slipped into my pair of slippers and opened the door. A gust of moist air rushed in, leaving me cold and numb. The stairs were moist and gleaming with the dew. It was dark all around as I walked towards the bathrooms and my footsteps echoed in the silence. I looked away from the doors of the lavatories, as I hurried towards the urinal. I hurriedly released myself and paced towards my room. I kept turning my eye balls to inspect if I was being followed. As I stepped on the corridor, I saw someone in shorts going to my room. My half sleepy eyes couldn’t recognize who it was. He was walking slowly, in fact very slowly. He entered the room, as I reached the door, and as I went inside, I saw him walking to the end of the room, to the window in the end and then pass through it. I walked up to the window and looked outside. There stood a cat staring at me! The curled body suggesting that it just landed.
A later enquiry revealed, no one else had woken up on that night, other than me.