MONI 3

The whole shed smelt of urine and goat faeces. She wanted to puke but controlled herself. It had only been few hours since she realized that she hadn’t been dreaming and had been held captive by a mad woman. She also discovered that the “mattress” she had been sitting comfortably on in a shed with moth infested walls were nothing but a stack of bamboo leaves piled on top of a huge foam that looked more like a big and swollen decayed bread rather than a foam. Ever since the cold water hit her face, she had remained in the same position without uttering a word. She had learnt a lot in life but no one had ever told her how to be around a mad person. Every idea of escape kept bouncing back as soon as moni realized she was locked up in the same room with a mad woman. What if she was attacked? What if she was killed? The if’s kept ringing in her head each time she thought of how to escape.

As minutes turned to hours, the crazy lady kept going in and coming out of the abandoned shed with various items in her hands like broken glass, rags, banana leaves and sand and each time she came in she was either crying or laughing or smiling or frowning. Moni glanced at her wristwatch, it was 7pm.  She planned that the next time the mad woman stepped out of the shed, she was going to run for her dear life and not look back. Even if she was going to perish, it wouldn’t be in the hands of an insane person.

It took another thirty minutes for crazy lady to leave the shed with a rechargeable lamp in her hand. As soon as she was gone, Moni got up and tried to make her way in the dark. She could hardly see but was determined to keep going. She kept on tapping the face of her digital wristwatch to enable it illuminate the little blue light that shone in the dark and was almost out of the shed when she stepped on a piece of broken glass with her bare foot. Moni cursed beneath her breath, she could immediately feel blood trickling down her right feet but she was determined to keep moving till she found her way to her car.

She hadn’t walked far when she saw the mad woman returning with her lamp, a knife and bread in her hands. “Are you mad? Where do you think you’re going this night” the woman said to Moni. Without being told, a visibly shaken Moni turned and headed back to the shed which had now become her home.