So, what was that noise ?

So what was that noise…?


“It seemed liked an ordinary day in office, things were progressing at their usual speed, and then suddenly….”, he paused there, looked at me, and smiled.. “Suddenly what happened, Achha*?”,I asked. My mother came in just then and said that breakfast is ready. “What are we having for breakfast today?”, asked my Dad. “Its ‘Puttum Kadalayum**’, isn’t it Amma***,”, I screamed joyously. I had seen my Mom mix the rice flour in the morning. This was my all-time favourite, so my Mom prepares it usually on Sundays. My parents smiled seeing me rush to the kitchen to get plates. For a moment I had forgotten the story that my Dad had begun.

As Amma served us  Puttu and Kadala kari**, I asked, “suddenly?” and looked questioningly at my Dad. For a moment he couldn’t understand what I was referring to  and then smiled and said, “oh! You haven’t forgotten it yet? It seems I would have to tell you the incident ,after all”. And so he began afresh.

“It seemed liked an ordinary day in office, things were progressing at their usual speed, and then suddenly the old grandfather clock in the office struck one”, he stopped there and laughed at his own joke. I groaned and made faces at him. “Ok, ok…” said my father, “I will narrate you the real incident.”

“….suddenly there was a loud noise, as though some heavy object had fallen. We all rushed towards the sound still not knowing what had happened. We started looking in all rooms but still could not find the source of the noise. People who were sitting near the “File Archive Room”, where old files are stacked, said the sound was heard from that room.  We searched for the whole day but the loud crashing noise was still a mystery… The room looked just as before. No one could have entered it since it was locked from outside and the room doesn’t have any windows or any kind of ventilation.” Looking at my father wide-eyed, my Puttu long-forgotten, I asked, “So what was that noise…?” “To this day”, he continued, “nobody knows what happened. We couldn’t find any big fallen objects in that room or in any other rooms. Many say it must have been the ghost of one of the employees who died there some one year back. We don’t know the truth, but all of us are sure we heard the noise.”

For a few minutes there was an eerie silence at our breakfast table. Everybody had stopped eating and each was in his own world. Suddenly, a loud crashing noise was heard from the attic. Startled, we all looked at each other. No one uttered a word, for fear had silenced us. After a few minutes, gathering courage, my father went to the attic to see what had happened, and we followed. The room looked exactly the same, nothing amiss. “So what was that noise…?”, I wondered loudly, my stomach in tight knots.

Lakshmi Ananthasubramanian.
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*Accha – Father.
**Puttu and Kadala kari – a breakfast dish popular in Kerala.
***Amma – Mother.