Delhi Spooks

My personal vampire-in-the-coffin, inspired from Art Attack

Many moons ago, there was this delightful show called Art Attack. It had one super enthusiastic host who would present complex craft tricks like they were the easiest thing in the world and his table would fill up with haunted houses, dainty cottages and stone age dinosaurs in no time.

A scan through my old, old cupboard revealed a few err, attacks, I had tried at home. This vampire in the coffin held my attention. Dear bloodsuckers. They are so much in the limelight lately. Twilight movies show vampires shining like rainbows and holding the Bellas of the world in ‘irrevocable’ lovelorn states, a desi version of the movie airs with some Indian-ized twists and turns in the form of a primetime daily soap, umpteen other novels and novellas are written on the subject each day. But I hold that my little red and blue vampire is the cutest of them all. He rises when the coffin door is opened and sleeps when it is shut. A well-mannered, receptive, welcoming dead man.

I wonder if the capital has any of these legendary corpses. Coming back home yesterday in rush hour traffic, I got a stroke of paranoia. A rickshaw wala seemed very interested in the polka-dotted clothes of his passenger and stared on and off at her through the security of the overhead mirror. A man who had just got down from a packed-to-capacity bus suddenly took to his heels. I had a vision of him having boarded the bus only a few stops ago, a red briefcase in hand. To make matters worse, the red-signal halt seemed to have transformed into a traffic-jam deadlock and showed no signs of easing.

Indeed, there aren’t any vampires in Delhi. We have to learn to live with scarier creatures like bloodthirsty criminals, shifty servants, lusty eve-teasers and monsters of the road.