Ms. Snore-box Mercury Chloroformed!

Here’s another story with our snore-factory Mercury playing the lead. It’s a story from the days when Mercury was little. How she was “little” and how “little” she was is still a moot point. She doesn’t have a lot of proofs to support her assertion. Photographs are 2-dimensional evidence that wouldn’t hold in any canine court of law. Her spoken word can hardly be taken as evidence, as she loves to weave stories out of nothing. The fact of the matter remains that neither Cameo nor I have ever seen her “little.”

But for the sake of this story, let us accept her assertion as truth. Once, when our Mercury was little, she had gone visiting her maternal grandma, along with her mom and her “littler” brother. (Again, we have only Mercury’s word on the littleness of her brother. I’ve known her brother all my life but I’ve never seen him little.)

Now in those days, houses in India didn’t look like shoeboxes stacked one over the other. They looked like those storybook houses. In those days people seldom locked their doors, and this was especially true for Mercury’s grandma’s house, which stood at one corner of a sprawling garden.

In those days, another curious thing used to be the number of siblings that a person had. Now you’d find only one or two kids in a family – then double digit human litters were in fashion. Our Mercury had four maternal aunts and two surviving maternal uncles (as her grandparents weren’t that fashionable.) And her eldest maternal uncle was the karta (officer-in-charge) of the household.

Without going into the arithmetical details, let me tell you that in Summers (when it was vacation time for the kids,) the household would have no less than about 25 members, which was fine because the house was big, and it had a huge courtyard and a huger garden!

Summers here are hot. Mercury (the silvery ethereal looking substance…not this pneumatic power house I live with,) touches 47 in Centigrade and about 116 in Fahrenheit.  As the story has about a quarter-century worth of dust on it, we are talking about the time when this lovely contraption called the air-conditioner wasn’t there (at least not in Mercury’s grandma’s house.) So, to beat the heat, people slept in their courtyards, gardens, and terraces. Only the very old and the very young slept inside.

Had Mercury slept outside that night, this wouldn’t have been a story to tell, but she didn’t, and so we have…what she calls a story, and I call a yarn.

The night began as usual.  Everyone had dinner then there was a quick round of a simple game called “naam (Name), khana (Food), shahar (City) , picture (Movie).” Everyone played, some won, some lost; and then everybody went off to sleep. About 7 to 8 people slept inside, others slept in the garden.

“Little” Mercury slept on a bed that was set against a window that had iron bars for protection (as the window opened towards another estate – remember the house was at the corner of their piece of land.)

Mercury still remembers… (ah! She remembers all that doesn’t matter, but never things that matter. She puts up the chicken to boil and forgets about it – who suffers then? I ask you, my furry friends!) Yeah… she still remembers that it was a moonlit night and she had fallen asleep trying to read a Phantom comic in that light!

The point to note here is that Mercury went to sleep. Now when Ms. “Snorebox” Mercury goes to sleep, not even an earthquake can wake her up (she disagrees – she says that the Tehri Earthquake had indeed woken her up…hmmph!) So I wasn’t surprised to discover that she didn’t hear them cutting five of those iron bars in the window that was just about a foot from “little” Mercury’s head!

To cut this self-stretching story short, the next morning everyone except the shrieker was woken up by a loud shriek! Out there in the courtyard lay about 20 boxes, 15 attaché-cases, and all the travel-bags. All open…ripped apart at their seams. They were dragged out of the house, into the courtyard! All the cupboards in the house were ransacked, and…as if it matters, Mercury insists – the worst of it all was that the thieves were cheap enough to take away the lovely imitation jewelry too, that Mercury’s mom had bought for her.

When the family, aided by the police tried to discover how the thief had entered the house, they realized that it was through the window. The police was quick to point out that the person who slept in that bed near the window had to be an accomplice – and that the thieves couldn’t have chloroformed that person without getting in first. However, when they saw “little” Mercury, they dropped the charges and wondered how she could’ve slept through the din caused by the saw.

I ask you…what was there to wonder? When she sleeps she migrates to another parallel world. She just isn’t in there. Not-so-little-now Mercury maintains that she too was chloroformed like all the others in the family. If that thought assuages her conscience, let it. It just makes me wonder, does she chloroform herself every night!