DEATH STALKS THE COOK

That year in the winters there was a sharp increase in the number of monkeys in the town. They would appear anywhere. They moved in hordes- the male the female and the kids. And they attacked at the slightest provocation.

Electricity poles on the roof of the houses were their first target! The leader- the fattest of the daddy monkeys - would climb up the eight feet high eiectric pole on the roof, shake it so thorouhly that the wires touched and shortcircuited, blowing out the fuse. Then, satisfied with the damage done, they would come down and create havoc elsewhere. They devastated the kitchen garden, uprooting the plants.

Two features which were common in the bunglows of the old british days were : 1) There was a walled big courtyard on the opposite side of the front lawn for the ladies of the house. The kitchen was far at the back of this courtyard, away from the main building. 2) The doors had wooden square grills on their upper half portion with big glass panes. So you could see what was going outside with the door firmly shut. It also provided ample light to the rooms.

That fateful day in the winter Katwaroo, our young and tough cook, came out of the kitchen, which was at the far end of the big courtyard. It was two o'clock in the afternoon. He locked the kitchen door and turned round to proceed to his quarters outside the walled courtyard.

He spotted a small monkey in the kitchen garden, in the tomato beds, damaging plants. Katwaroo picked up big stone and tossed it at the monkey only to scare it away. It hit the monkey so squarely on the face that he fell down, screaming hoarsely. Within seconds dozens of ferocious red-faced big monkeys materialised from nowhere and raced to attack Katwaroo. It was total WAR. An army of monkeys against one defenceless man!

The door of the Kitchen had already been locked by Katwaroo and there was no time now for him to rush back to open it for shelter. So he desparately turned towards the house for safety, with countless monkeys on his trail !

There were two rooms with doors opening into that verandah to which katwaroo was now desparately racing. In the morning the glass-pane door of father's room had been latched from inside by katwaru himself when father left for office (he had put the latch at the top of the door). The other room's door was also bolted from inside, at the top and the bottom. This other room was full of children from the neighbourhood. We were busy playing indoor games.

I rushed to this glass paned door when I heard the howling of the monkeys. As I peeped out through the glass panes, I saw katwaroo racing for his life into the verandah. He was now very close to the door of father's room. A ferocious huge monkey had caught up with him and had torn away the bottom of one of the pyjama legs, drawing blood.

With the door shut from inside, katwaroo's life was now in grave danger as it was a race against time, race against killer monkeys. Several fat ferocious monkeys were now closing in. Katwaroo was trapped !!

What happened next was sheer magic. In one fluid moment that is forever etched in my memory, Katwaroo thrust his powerful right fist through uppermost glass pane, shattering it and injuring the hand. In that split second he opened the inside latch,moved in and slammed the door shut. The door hit the face of the first big daddy monkey that was trying to follow him into the room. The monkey recoiled in pain and withdrew.

The verandah was now filling with howling monkeys.They were rapidly filling it and pushing at the closed door.

Suddenly two powerful gunshots rent the air, shaking the doors and rattling the glass panes. Our neighbour Singh saheb had fired two shots in the air from his double barrel gun. I saw him on the roof of his house with the smoking gun in his hands.

Within seconds not a single monkey was anywhere in the entire colony ! They panicked and disappeared .

Katwaroo came out. I gave him some antiseptic and a wad of cotton-wool to treat his bruises and cuts.

With a matchstick he set the cottonwool wad on fire and pressed it hard on his bleeding leg and hand.

"This works best" he said returning the antiseptic to me, and walked towards his quarter, loudly whistling.The race had ended !!

I looked at the receding figure of Katwaroo . . . and I recalled a famous quote : "When the going gets tough, tough get going." YES INDEED... !!

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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 vo admi 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 paraded through the city of kanpur and Lucknow in a cage to assure the panic stricken citizenz that all was well now.

 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 . . . !!!