KNOCK ON THE DOOR

In the dead of the night
some one was knocking at the door. . . KNOCK . . .KNOCK . . .KNOCK . . . I froze with panic and
fully covered myself with the quilt. With baited breath I waited.

The knocks came again . . Knock . . .knock . . .Knock !

Some fool in the room got up and opened the door. We had decided in the evening that the door will not be opened at night under any circumstances.

A moment later there was a dull thud. Something hitting the floor. Then
silence returned. Inside the quilt I shivered and covered my ears with
my hands. There was now a DEAD BODY outside for sure, with a tiny deep
hole just above one of the
ears. And the door must be lying open now, for a dead man cannot shut the door. The remaining seven
of us were now 'sitting ducks' .

That was a cold december night in Kanpur India- many decades back. I was a student and was in kanpur for a cricket
test match. The house was of a friend of my father and the drawing room was virtually a dormatory now
with eight boys occupying
it. All for the test match !

A serial killer had been on a rampage for sometime now, bringing the cities
of kanpur and lucknow to a state of dread and a sort of curfew. Already there were many many killings. No blood, no strangulation. Very neat job by a highly skilled killer.

The psychopathic killer was an ex- dentist-gone- mad and his modus-
operandi was usually this: dead in the night he would knock on the door three times. If someone did not open the door after the knocks he would repeat the knocks and then loudly call  T E L E G R A M.
When the door opened he swiftly struck the victim with a sharp quick strong blow of a surgical needle above one of the ears, killing him instantly. As a doctor he knew the exact vital spot above the ear. He was a terror called
'Kanpattimaar', the scourge of the two
cities.

There was a killing every week and he kept his movement between the two cities unpredictable. There were no clues left behind- no fingerprints no footprints,no witnesses. Like the 'Maneating leopard of Rudraprayag' (googlesearch JIM
CORBETT) who remained elusive for a long time, he
had become an terrible enigma, a WILL O' THE WISP, driving the
authorities into desperate frenzy.

When I had boarded the
train at Lucknow for
Kanpur I had a sense of
relief. The killings had just
started again in Lucknow
and everyone was more or less certain that the killer was not in Kanpur at the moment.

At kanpur railway station I got into a rikshaw asking the man to take me to
Gwaltoli colony where my father's friend lived. He looked positively reluctant.

" what is the matter?" I
asked the rikshaw driver.

" saab aaj yoh gwaltoli
ilaake main hi hai" he said in hindi ( sir he is lurking in Gwaltoli area itself today).

The reference was to the
serial killer.

I offered him one and a
half times the normal fare. He accepted. A poor man, afterall, sets more value on money than his own
life.

But now it was my turn to worry. I could well have confined myself to the safety of my house in
lucknow. How I regretted
my decision of coming to
kanpur risking my life.
Cricket match my foot !

Arriving at the house at
Gwaltoli I was quickly
introduced to the other
boys occupying the
spacious living room. In
those days the "drawing-
cum-dining room" concept was not in vogue and houses had large separate drawing rooms.

Over dinner I came to learn that the serial killer's latest victim had lived two houses down the road. No wonder the rikshaw driver was reluctant to come!

"if somebody knocks on the door at night don't open the door under any circumstances" said our host. "we have a killer in the city." We used to
affectionately call our host 'Bhagwat uncle'.

When I woke up in the
morning I recalled that
there was a dead body
outside. I made a
headcount to see which
one of us was missing.
One . .two . . three . . All
were there except Umesh! I felt sorry for him. He was such a warm hearted
character. But why did he open the door !

Next moment someone came out of the bathroom, wiping his face with a towel. He turned out to be Umesh ! who got killed then !

It came to pass that
the one who opened the
door was Bhagwat uncle himself and, thank heavens, he was very much alive!

It turned out  that it was the old milkman who knocked early in the morning. He used to deliver milk in the colony, carrying his huge 'milk-can' . The sound of something hitting the ground came from his huge milk can !!

As an epilogue to this TRUE story I may add that the 'kanpattimaar' was
eventually caught shortly afterwards. He was not in news after his arrest and we lost track of him.

Whenever I pass by the
parivartan chowk area in
Lucknow I always recall the 'kanpattimaar'. He had made his first 'kill' here.

And whenever I hire a
rikshaw outside the Kanpur railway station I recall the fear in the eyes of that rikshaw driver.

And I canot avoid recalling the killer whenever there are three loud knocks on a door at a measured
interval : 

KNOCK . . .KNOCK . . . KNOCK . . . !!!