As Daniel sits in his room, in the ground floor of his college’s hostel, he reminisces about the past three and a half years. It seemed like he had arrived here just yesterday. As a student he used to long to be in this Final Year. But now it seemed like he wanted to stop this moment and stay here for more days.
Daniel took his mind off from these thoughts. Now he thought about the time. He reckoned that it was moving faster than usual, compared to the past years. He was afraid to even think about how it would feel on the final day of the College, when he would have to bid his friends goodbye.
The room looks messy; with two of the three steel cots joint. No matter how much he advised his roommates to keep the rooms clean, he was always scorned off. Now however, he had stopped complaining about this ignorance. Of course, these were the last few days in the hostel, and he wanted to make these handful days more adjustable.
As these thoughts go past him, he suddenly gets struck by the latest happening in the hostel. For the past one week, an interesting practice was going on in the Hostel. Many believed it. He believed it when he saw the girls doing it, but then gave it a thought and ignored it.
He had done this before, when he was at School, may be, in the eighth or ninth standard. The style, though, was a bit different. The bottle caps were replaced by steel cups now. This craze was given a start by Christopher, who seemed to totally (blindly according to Daniel), believe in it.
Christopher used to draw an Oval Boundary, big enough to accommodate the alphabets (from A to Z) written in a circular fashion. The numbers (from 0 to 9) would also be written, continuing after the alphabet Z. The centermost point was marked with a Dot. Equal distances from the dot were marked towards the Left and Right (without crossing the Oval Boundary) and, YES and NO were written, respectively with a Chalk.
In practice, the Cup was placed, with the open side at the Bottom (i.e.: upside down), over the center point. There were three people usually, who would keep the index finger, of each one’s right hand, on the Steel cup’s flat Bottom. Then one of them would start chanting to call the spirit.
Daniel had wanted to do this alone, though he did not believe in souls. But he still wanted to find out the reason for the Cup’s movement. There would have been no better time for this experimentation. With the whole hostel crowd in the First floor TV room and his Roommates back at their homes(this being the Study Holidays), he was sure no one would disturb his concentration by interrupting
to be continued...
