Haunted Lies part 1

INCIDENT 7

Mermaid

15 April 1993                                                                         Thursday

Daman                                                                                    11:00 pm IST

Dear diary,

Sometimes it becomes difficult to understand Mother Nature and her miracles.  This situation dominates on you when you are a forest officer.  Seven years I have been working in the dense forests of Daman and have been researching on the forest property.  The moist forests are a shield to the massive Arabian Sea to the west and then the beach, which looks lovely under the sunlight, Beautiful sand glittering.   The only thing which disturbed this silence was few haunted incidents.  On first of April a carcass was found on the beach.  On clear examination it turned out to be of crocodile.  We presumed that the mighty sea must have brought it.  It was very badly eaten and whole blood was sucked.  The next day dead fishes, crabs were found on the beach almost everywhere.  The water was chemically tested but no poison was detected.   Just near a rock where maximum remains were found we found a big placoid scale, beautifully decorated with blue and white and strokes of green.  I took it to the wildlife museum and gave an appropriate place to it.  Initially I presumed it to be the scale of a Gobi fish and named it so.   But my companion officer Dhananjay found something wrong.  He repeatedly muttered something and examined the sand carefully, making sketches of the patterns and photographing them.  I asked him what he was doing but he just said-“later, later…” and continued with his work.  The very next day we found a dead dog.   The question troubling us was who was the animal killer after all?  And finally after few such incidents we put a watchman named Khasiram.  But…the next day he was found brutally murdered.  No clue to his mother. Police was also confused after such incidents on beach.  His full blood was sucked and meat was eaten like a cannibal.  Finally Dhananjay called me and showed me few patterns on the ground.  They looked like those of an anaconda or python but the animal had wagged its tail a lot.  But the problem was anaconda and python don’t brutally murder their victims but rather swallow them or suffocate them.  They don`t suck bloods like bats and mosquitoes.  Based on the pattern we assumed that we have discovered a new species.  That night we decided to photograph that animal and capture it.  For convenience we had a torch light and a stick along with us, we decided to keep our helpers at every check point within a distance of 10 meters and having a torch light we decided our signals and had ropes and rods ready.  The area where most of incidents occurred was surrounded by 13 people.  And a goat was tied in late evening.  Dhananjay had his camera ready and we waited patiently.  As the night grew dark, we kept our ears vigilant. Poor scapegoat was laming badly.  And then around 1:00 am the goat started yelling very badly and all of us put light on the goat.  Luckily my torch did not work as all the light put on the organism reflected back by straight angles.  And I could preferably see who the organism was? There was a beautiful lady…no half the body was that of a lady and rest half was of that of a fish.  It was a mermaid.  Her golden hair shone brightly and her watery mouth gave an expression of confusion.  After 2 second of the incident she looked at me and gave a crooked smile and then went into the sea.  All of us ran there, similar patterns were formed but none except me saw her.  I told Dhananjay about the incident but he barged off them.   We could not prove ourselves.  But her smile said-“I will return soon…” And I am waiting for her return….

Forest officer

Kunal Sharma.                       Kunal Sharma