A Night in the Company of a Skeleton

By the time this appears on the blog I would have returned from election duty, hopefully, in one piece

Not that I’m unhappy with my height and my weight but there are occasions when I wish I had been a bit taller, a bit heavier and a bit resolute, almost like a cop. One such occasion looms ahead- polling day. When I got the election orders from Jubilee Hills Constituency I was happy I would be doing polling work in a posh area. But I was so terribly wrong, like in a lot of things. It turns out I am being sent to a place that every one I talked to says is one of the toughest places to do election duty- the Old City!. I have been posted to Yakutpura!

There’s nothing to be worried about the Old City, just that come election time it takes on an entirely different hue. There’s a lot of tension in the air. This time, there’s so much tension in the air one can actually see it. So, it is in such a tense time, in a tense area I am going to conduct the elections. God help me.

The last time I was on election duty was exactly ten years ago. I was working in a place on the outskirts of Hyderabad and got posted to another place hardly twenty kilometers from the city for election duty. I had the sort of experience not many on election duty would have had. I was the Presiding Officer for a polling booth located in a government school in a small village called Aliabad. We reached there by evening and got busy arranging our material. I did not notice the hall where the polling station was situated as I was busy signing the ballot papers and arranging things. The others with me said they’d sleep in another room and went away giving me strange looks when I said I’d sleep in the polling station itself. Since I was responsible for the ballot boxes and other material I decided to sleep in the polling station.

Sometime in the middle of the night I woke up and got the fright of my life. I almost jumped out of my skin at finding a skeleton, a big, white one, hanging in a corner. I closed my eyes tightly and tried not to open them. Hoping I was in a bad dream I opened my eyes a fraction. But I saw the skeleton at the same place, the skull pointed in my direction. There was no way I could get out of the room so I decided to stay put and face whatever the skeleton had in mind for me. I joked telling myself that the skeleton must have been one of the election observers.

In the morning I was relieved to find that the room I had slept in was the school’s science laboratory. Among other laboratory equipment was the skeleton I had seen in the night. It was hanging by a hook from the ceiling hence the reason why it appeared to float in the air. That was how I spent a night in the company of a skeleton.