staircase. There was a small wall on either side.
“Do these steps lead to your house?”
“Yes, we are very close now.”
The wall seemed to increase in height, and was now up to my waist. The gap between the walls was getting narrow as we climbed up. The boy who seemed to know his way around quite well, ran up ahead, and turned a corner. The walls as I neared the turning rose over my head and the two sides were now meeting on the top. It was like walking inside a tube, just wide enough to fit my frame.
“It is getting a bit tight in here,” I said.
“You don’t have to walk much now,” the girl said.
I turned the corner and hit my face against a wall. It was a dead-end. There was no way forward. The sides were tight on both sides, and I barely managed to turn my head and look back.
“There is no way ahead it is a….”
There was a wall behind me. I was inside the dark staircase and it was closing in from all sides.
The Mystery of the Disappearing Milk Bottles
Every morning at five, the milk truck would deposit five bottles of milk, outside Mr. Gupta’s front door. The milkman would take the empty bottles from the previous day and replace them with the full ones. The bottles, each consisting of 500 ml of pasteurized buffalo milk was just enough for the Gupta family. The family consisted of Suvarna his wife, his seventeen-year-old daughter Mallika and a son Manish, who had just turned fifteen. Mr. Gupta was in his late forties
The bottles would have to wait there, at the doorstep, for another two hours, before any member of the family would touch them. That anyone would usually be Mr. Gupta. At 7 in the morning, on all days of the week, his alarm clock would go off.
Once awake, the first task of Mr. Gupta’s day would be to trudge half-asleep to the front door, open it, bend down, pick up the bottles - two at a time, and bring them inside. In the third round, he would have only one bottle left, so he would carry it in, along with the morning’s newspapers, which would also have arrived by then. He would place the bottles and the newspaper on the dining table. This was his morning exercise. That done, he would get down to the more tedious task of waking up his wife.It would take a good fifteen minutes of prodding and not so gentle nudging by Mr. Gupta to get Suvarna out of bed. She took her sleep very seriously. It never ceased to amaze her how fast the night had passed by. Suvarna’s first task of the day was to look at the wall clock. Every morning she wished for a miracle. She hoped the clock would somehow show that she still had a few hours of sleep left, but every day the clock would disappoint her. She hated waking up in the morning and she hated Mr. Gupta, especially when he woke her up. She believed he derived some devious pleasure out of the act of waking her up. The problem was that she was not entirely wrong in her assumption.Her husband, Ram Prakash Gupta, Ramu for short and R.P. Gupta officially, was an officer with the Indian Railways. His posting to New Delhi had been ‘a dream comes true’ for the family. It was near his home town of Ambala, where his parents lived. Delhi was also the nation’s capital. The last destination, especially for all government employees. Mr. R.P. Gupta, had to do a lot of wining, and dining of his bosses to get this transfer, but now that he was in Delhi, life was not as smooth as he had expected.
His earlier posting had been at a remote station in the central state of Madhya Pradesh. There they had lived in a mansion. There, a battalion of servants to attended to the housework. In Delhi, the railways had a number of housing complexes for its staff members. The problem was that the senior managers had already occupied all the houses in the better localities. Mr. Gupta got a house on top of a small hill. Buses and rickshaws would stop at the foot of the hill and then one had to climb about fifty steps to reach the house. A road lead up to the house but the steep ascent made it tough for vehicles to climb to the top. Mr. Gupta parked his scooter in a garage, which was the start of the steps.Suvarna hated the house. She could not get any servants there. If was left to her to do all the washing, cleaning and dusting in the house. Within a week of moving in, she had started hating Delhi and everything it stood for. She had hated her previous house , but now compared to this house in Delhi , that was heaven. Most of all she hated the alarm clock, which woke her up every morning.
Even after waking up, Suvarna lay in the bed for another fifteen minutes. Eyes closed, she would rock herself gently enjoying the last few minutes of her sleep. This was her way of preparing herself before jumping into the cauldron of the day’s work. Her first act of the day in the kitchen would be to make a pot of tea, for Mr. Gupta and herself. Mr. Gupta, by then, would have finished scanning the first two pages of the newspaper. He did not read it at this time, and used to carry it to his office, where he would read it from end to end, over endless cups of tea and discussions with his colleagues.
Their daughter, Mallika or Malli had inherited some of her good looks from Suvarana. Those were the good looks of a Suvarna from twenty years back. Malli’s days were full of dreams of handsome boys and face creams. She collected posters of all the top movie stars. Very active on Facebook, she was the local queen of selfies. Her status got updated every hour. She had dreams of becoming a fashion model. Her grades were slightly above average.
Manish, her brother, was a die-hard WWE fan. He could rattle out all the statistics on the wrestling arena superstars and had once scored the highest points in an impromptu quiz his friends had set up on WWE. He never missed a single telecast of the championships and his philosophy in life was that exams came every year but title matches were once in a lifetime deal. Whenever he found any free time he loved reading comics and sci-fiction novels. His marks as could be expected were bad, but then he did not have to worry about that. Luckily, for him, Mr.Gupta came from a part of the country, where the male child meant everything in a family. He was the pet of his parents and they never questioned him even when his marks dipped way below the equator.
For the children the day started after seven. They went to school by bus. Their bus used to come up right up the road at the base of the steps. School started at 8.30 and the bus came at 8.10, this meant they had to wake up by 7.30, get ready, and have their breakfast – all within forty minutes. Somehow, they managed this every day.
Once everyone had left, Suvarna’s day would start. For her the routine never changed. First, she would wash the utensils lying in the kitchen sink, next the dirty clothes went into the washing machine, and then finally she would fill up the water tanks. Once the tanks were full, she would shut the inlet valves, and let out a sigh. This signaled the end of her morning chores. Next she would read the mornings newspapers.
They used to get two newspapers in the house. One which Mr.Gupta took with him to office. The other was one which had all the spicy movie gossip and was Suvarna’s way of remaining connected with the outside world. It also had details on all the latest health scares, which circulated the globe. H1N1, HIV, Ebola, she would read up all that was available about them. Then she would read up on the symptoms carefully, self-diagnose, and get worried if she did not have any. There was a reason behind all this.
Years ago as a child of three, TB had struck her. Her parents had taken her to a doctor because of the persistent cough. One look at the wasting child and the doctor had realized that detailed tests would be required. The diagnosis had shocked her parents. They had kept it a secret from even their closest family members. They stopped sending her to school and informed everyone that they were going on a pilgrimage. They had stayed for a month at a cheap hotel in Shimla, a hill station. The climate change along with an improved diet and medicines cured Suvarna.
‘Drink lots of milk,’ the doctor had told the child and the adult Suvarna had never forgotten the lesson. She drank two full glasses a day and forced it down her children’s throats as well. Both Mallika and Manish hated drinking milk but there was no getting around Suvarna on this. She would stand blocking the door and not let them out unless they had finished of their glass. Coming to this house, the first thing she had ch
ecked on was the availability of milk. Mr. Gupta had never understood the reason his wife drank so much milk, for her parents had kept the childhood infliction a secret.
‘I want the children to drink a minimum of two glasses a day,’ She had argued.
‘ Who will come up this mountain, every morning I would have to get down and go to the market to get it,’ Gupta said.
‘ Do whatever you can, but the two glasses a day rule stands.’
The solution to the problem was simpler than they had imagined. There was a big dairy farm nearby and their van did make its rounds every day. The difficult part was to convince the van to bring the milk to the doorstep. Finally, the promise of an extra two hundred rupees convinced the milkman to climb the steps and do a delivery at the doorstep.
Life went on its normal course when one fine morning after the milk supply had started, one of the bottles was missing. Mr. Gupta had opened the door as usual but instead of the five, he found only four bottles standing in a row.
‘Maybe the milkman made a mistake,’ thought Mr. Gupta and took the bottles in.
The next day again it was the same story.
‘Talk to the milk man,’ she said.
‘I am not getting up at five in