Kantha

The autumn evening was pleasantly breezy, gently swaying the trees in the neighbourhood.

The sky was beginning to get suffused with patches of indigo, and the street lamps were on, emitting a crepuscular glow.

Kantha was having her second cup of coffee for the evening. A faint haze of smoke from a
mosquito coil filled the room; it made her throat scratchy.

Perched on the sill of the bay window in her living room, she was discreetly watching her street through the chinks in the bamboo blinds. Her street was sparsely populated and was hence vulnerable to crime and other immoral activities. As a responsible citizen, it was her duty to keep a strict watch.

She glanced at the wall clock. It was six-twenty p.m. Any minute, a questionable young man would creep up their street and sneak into the house across her's.

Her neighbours were out, trusting their teenage daughter will use the alone time to revise the day's lessons.

Kantha snorted at their naivety. She patted the digital camera placed beside her on the sill.
Her eyes shone with excitement; She was going to capture the girl's tryst on video; she'd then
give the girl's parents a piece of her mind on how to bring up a respectable, responsible woman.

Her feet and hands tingled with anticipation. She gave the house en face her undivided attention. A while passed. A frown creased her leathery face. She glanced again at the wall clock. It was five past seven. The boyfriend was nowhere in sight. A few minutes later, her neighbours returned home. The girl must have spotted her observing her house and informed her lover.

Kantha's face hardened in frustration. What an unproductive evening it had been! 

But she didn't beat herself much over it because she was positive that the young lover's secret rendezvous would happen quite soon. She resolved to be more discreet when it happened.


                                                         ***********************

When Kantha woke up that night, the T.V was still running. Right after she turned it off, she became aware of noises coming from the dilapidated house next door. At first, she wrote it off to rodents moving about. However, when the sounds persisted, she decided to investigate.

She inched closer to her bedroom window and peered outside. She saw barely visible, inconsistent light on the ground floor and the first floor. She also heard some muffled voices.

Kantha's heart quickened. She was frightened and excited at the same time. There were intruders at night in the abandoned house. She thought of alerting the police but hesitated because she was yet to actually spot people. All she had was just noises and what seemed to be like moving torchlight. That wasn't enough for the police to come all the way.

The more she kept observing the house, the clearer it became that there were intruders.

An idea struck her.

She grabbed her camera and quickly slipped into her backyard. It was difficult to walk without the lights on; The ground was mostly covered in slippery algae, rootlets and thick shrubs.
It was quite challenging to pay attention to both the house next door and her footing.

She found a spot underneath the young jackfruit tree that was close to the compound wall between the two houses. She had an uninterrupted view from there. It was obvious that the trespassers were moving about frantically. Were they searching for something? 
She put her camera on video mode and began shooting.

Mosquitoes buzzed around her. She resisted her impulse to swat at the ones pricking her greedily. She didn't want her camera to shake. She hoped to capture at least one intruder. She was excited when silhouettes appeared on one of the upper window's panes.

She smiled in satisfaction and was about to rush back inside when something scrurried, out of the underbrush nearby, onto her feet. She uttered a yelp and immediately clamped a hand over her mouth. But it was too late.

Her eyes widened in alarm as she noticed the abandoned house go completely dark, instantly. In her panic, she dropped the camera she was holding and bolted towards her house. She slipped thrice on her way and hurt herself badly.

She heaved a huge sigh of relief once she was safely back inside her house. Even as she dashed to her bedroom and hurriedly turned the light off, she knew that it was of no use. They would have noticed the light already.

Her entire body rattled. She got into her bed and wrapped herself tightly inside her blanket.

Moments passed.

Everything seemed still.

Kantha's heart rate came down gradually. They might have left. Even if they didn't, they couldn't harm her now that she was in the refuge of her house. All the doors in her house were made of solid, high-quality wood and were very sturdy. Nobody can get inside past them unless...

She wondered if she'd remembered to lock the back door. With trembling hands, she tried to find her mobile phone to call the police.

By some macabre coincidence, at the exact moment that she found her phone, she heard the doors to her backyard open.

                                                         ***********************

Janani was up on the terrace revising the previous day's lessons like she did every morning. She hated to stay put in one place and instead preferred to revise while walking.

Every now and then, she glanced at the house across the street. The middle-aged woman living alone in that house was insufferably nosy and had the habit of spying on her.

Although the woman went to some length to do it discreetly, Janani had her own tricks to figure out when she was being watched; like last evening for instance.

Janani was surprised that the woman was nowhere in sight this morning.

During breakfast, she mentioned to her mother, Parimala, that their busybody neighbour was nowhere in sight.

Around ten-thirty a.m., Parimala stepped out to buy vegetables.

After locking her house, she hesitated for a moment; her daughter's words were still lingering in her thoughts.

She decided to check on her neighbour and say a quick hello before going to the market.

She pressed the calling bell a couple of times.

There was no response.

Parimala hoisted her heel above the ground as high as she could. Her face reached just an inch above the compound wall but it was enough for her to spot the day's newspaper still lying on the ground.

It was really unlike Kantha to leave them out there for so long. Something must be wrong.

Parimala called the police and expressed her concern but they asked her to wait for a few more hours.

Parimala called them back again around four p.m.

Half an hour later, a constable turned up, asked her a couple of questions and then went over to Kantha's house. He climbed over the compound wall and disappeared inside.

Parimala waited impatiently outside Kantha's house. To her utter alarm, few more police officials showed up, shortly. They broke open Kantha's main gate and went inside.

People from the other houses on the street gathered in front of Kantha's house, talking agitatedly about what could have happened.

In a few minutes, an ambulance arrived and took Kantha's body away.

Everybody was put through a lot of gruelling questioning until the police caught the killers.

A drug dealer had temporarily stashed away a box in the abandoned house on their street, while he was on the run from the police. His partners had come to retrieve it and had been spotted by Kantha. So, they had killed her.

Initially, her neighbours wanted to know how exactly Kantha was killed but the police remained tight-lipped about it. Soon, they stopped bothering about the truth and came up with their own versions of how the murder happened.

Three months passed.

Janani's parents were out one evening and she promptly invited her boyfriend over.

"So, how did your busybody neighbour die?" he asked her.

Janani shrugged. "There are so many stories out there but nobody knows for sure. What's the matter with you?" She asked.  Her boyfriend had gone suddenly pale.

"I uhhh ffeeel likke someththing's grriipping my throahhtt"

He looked very ill.  Janani's mind went blank. She frantically looked all around her and then rushed to the kitchen. She came back with a glass of water. That was the first thing that came to her mind.

When she neared him, she felt something swish past her hurriedly towards the window.  The curtains swayed backwards and forwards.

Startled, she hurried to the window to look outside. Everything seemed still.

The window was directly in line with the living room window in Kantha's house. Janani swallowed hard before quickly turning away.

To her utter relief, her boyfriend was now okay.


                                                         ***********************


Around midnight, the constable who'd first gone to check on Kantha woke up. He emptied the drinking water in the can down the kitchen sink and went back to sleep.

His wife was wide awake but she didn't interrupt her husband. Their doctor had explained why it was important not to disturb people while they sleepwalked.

Her husband had been doing it ever since Kantha's autopsy report came back; She had died of hyponatremia: a fatal condition that occurs when a person intakes an excessive amount of water within a short span of time.

The poor constable had been deeply disturbed by the fact that a person could be killed with water overdose too, and had begun sleepwalking. He was so averse to water that while he sleepwalked he always emptied the drinking water in their house.

He is now under treatment.

                                                                       The End



Author's note: 

'Too much of anything could kill'

We all know how vital water is for our bodies but how many of us are aware that there is something such as 'drinking too much water'?

When the body holds too much water it dilutes the sodium level in the blood to abnormal levels. When a person suffers from chronic hyponatremia their body shows several symptoms and is often treatable by a medical professional.

But, acute hyponatremia can lead to brain swelling which might result in coma, and even death.