Today I am going to relate a strange incident. A year or so after I moved to Mumbai, I changed houses in Bandra and moved from Waroda Road to Chapel Road. It was in this house that the first set of strange events started to happen. The first one to take notice of it was my maid. “There is something strange in this house,” she told me in the first week itself. I did not take her seriously and for the next six months nothing strange happened in the house. Life went on with clockwork precision. I rarely had friends over and I never wondered why, yet one day I found myself inviting an old contact over for a round of drinks. The contact was a former gangster — he has now joined a major political party and is working his way up the ladder — who had often helped me as a valuable source in a number of assignments. Over the years we had developed a mutual fondness for each other that one mostly reserves for close friends.Five minutes into my house, my friend started staring at the walls as if he could see something hidden from me all this while. “Boss, there is something in your house,” he said. I don’t know how to reassure people with such notions so I did not say anything more and quietly made two stiff rums and offered my friend a glass. He took the glass but it slipped from his hands and crashed on the floor. My friend and I looked at each other. “I told you there was something,” he said gently.After I had cleaned the floor, my friend and I discussed his theory over a drink in a plastic glass. He claimed to have sensed something with his intuition. He trusted his intuition because it had helped him avoid death on numerous occasions. His glass broke because the entity in the house wanted to confirm its presence. “I have handled guns since was 15. Do you think I will drop a glass so easily?”I thought of what the maid had said when my friend asked me about the number of broken glasses I have had since I moved in. Glasses were constantly breaking in the house. I would just drop them mindlessly and then later wonder what came over me. I did not care about a ghost but I cared about glasses. If there was something I could do to stop that something from breaking any more glass I was ready to try it. “Every time you drink something from the glass, dip a finger and drop some of it outside the glass. It will show it that you know it is here and you respect it,” my friend said.I followed his advice and for the next three months no glasses broke in my house. I told the story to friends but no one believed me. I did not care as long as the glasses were fine.I moved out of the house before the lease ran out. An American friend was going home and wanted to sub let his apartment for two months. The rent was cheap and the house was well furnished. I took up the offer. “Will you miss this place?” my friend asked me. I told him I would miss the ghost and told him the story. He too did not believe me. Nevertheless, I had had my first relationship with a ghost and I was going to miss it.The author is a writer.

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