“What do I do, without you?

What can you say except a mew?

One day when I meet my Prince Charming,

I want to remember you.

The world is slightly on the edges,

I have to pull a lot of sledges,

Yet, I am happy to find you,

You and me have no grudges.

Now as I have met my charmer,

Yet I find him to be quite distant & calmer,

Checking pulse, recording smells; quite heart warming.

Yet I could not tell him yet about you.

You see it’s a little fuzzy, crazy, dizzy.

I have to love him from far, missy,

I will tell him in my dreams about you,

Tirki, the kids and a hazy, buzzy.

A song I made for her, humming it as it danced with me in the dark stepping on my veil and simmering around. It was February the next year when Tirki first came in, then came her kids in May.

Till then, the man seemed to scare her a bit through his actions and the woman through her words.

At midnight, after she slept off, he would hammer on the wall and not just one day, it was more than one day.

Then, near her wardrobe, there would be heavy breathing wounds. Tirki would scratch the door of the wardrobe like crazy.

She recorded all of it and send it to me. We laughed at the stupid attempts.

One day her neighbor stood looking at her straight with hairs hanging on the front hiding her face in the dark as Shrum prepared dinner.

Tirki was missing a few nights and when in the midnight she would go to the washroom, through the window she would see gloved hands holding her rocking her front and back.

One day she was in such a dangling mode when someone just threw him on the kitchen window.

Initially it was hard to understand the dark gloves but then one day, the last day such an incident occurred she filmed it.

We could not move her so soon, on pretext of what would we do that?

Then there were footsteps on her stairs which went to the terrace.

One day through the curtain she saw a man moving up and down quite a few times but then it was not her owner, neither her neighbors.

On two occasions, she saw a child following her to her room.

There was an extended parapet and one day there was some noise on that, when she went out to check with me on the other side of the phone, she realised the child was hiding all this while there, he jumped onto the railing and directly jumped down. She captured it on her phone and send a pic when the child was looking back.

One day while in office, the owner called her saying,

“Shrum we are hearing some footsteps in your house, some loud thud, are you family in?”

I send a girl and she said there was no one.

She was being followed on bikes and cars. She kept a few numbers but then enquiry was not possible since it would have to be brought into notice of someone as to what was happening. No one helps in the city and specially if the people are rich.

One day the wife asked her, “why don’t you come and sleep with me, here and your uncle sleeps on the other room? Aren’t you scared to sleep alone?

She said, “no.”

“Aren’t you bored of sleeping alone, I mean pretty boring to be left alone by the world?”

She said she was not at all bothered.

One day she asked her to lock her gate every time since lot of chain snatchers were in the city.

On another day, she asked her to walk at eleven thirty at night to the ice cream shop for an ice cream.

She said, “no thanks the ENT gets blocked, I can’t have one.”

She invited her for a breakfast which gave her vomiting and headache.

When I came to the city first I too tolerated shit, but then I began keeping a tap. It cost me but that helped. Shrum was not at all in favour of imitating others so I did whenever I could, I had to keep her safe.

Why did we not flee nor change the house?

Fleeing was not an option. A city is their home and it’s useless. It thrills such psychotic people when they understand people are scared. Frankly speaking nobody was, since it was not something beyond the radar.

Why not protest?

Some storms should just be stood to let the storm pass. So we stood as the storms passed. In fact we sat down, slept over it.