Who Lit The Candle?

Let me introduce myself to all of you. My name is Mainak Biswas, living in a quite surround of kharghar, New Bombay. This is a first time I am writing my experiences here.

My story starts from my school days...

My father recently retired after completing his tenure in ONGC. In his tenure, we used to live in ONGC colony in Panvel (Navi Mumbai). I did my schooling and graduation staying in that colony itself. Before coming to the incident, let me tell everyone, the layout of the colony. The whole colony was constructed on a grave yard and was divided into different blocks. The blocks started from A to D and the allocation was given, depending upon the rank of a person. In these blocks, the occupancy was never 100% and there would be some buildings which were never occupied. We lived in block B and there were few buildings which were left unoccupied. This incident happened in one of these buildings.

There was a building which was near a park. That building was once occupied with a couple of families in it. In the same building there was a bachelor, who was living in the ground floor flat. Within a couple of months after he occupied the flat, he killed himself by hanging from a fan. Nobody knew the reason of his action. According to his close colleagues, he was having the best times of his life. He was indeed getting married and eventually got promoted to a senior engineer. His family back home was also good, never had any financial problems and in fact his parents were supposed to come here to live with him. If everything was so perfect and there were no problems, why did this guy killed himself?

After couple of weeks after his death, people started moving out from that building and soon that building was abundant. The question arises is, whether his is a fallout of his death or this was a reason of his death? People started complaining about some weird things happening in the building like sounds of the footsteps in the building corridor, sounds of doors opening and closing in the same flat. People living in the same building, could also see a candle was lit every night.

Now the question arises, who can light a candle when the flat was locked from inside and even outside? This whole story fascinated me to go there and check it out. People never took that lane in the late evenings and night. The park opposite to that building also turned up into an eerie place, as no one was ready to go there to maintain the park.

Well, it was Diwali night and I had convinced couple of my friends to go there and check that out. We got this advantage that, since it was a festival, all focus will be on completing the nitty gritty of it and entertaining the guests, my parents will never have a time to check where I am going. I told my parents that I was going with my friends to burn crackers and left the house. If I am correctly recollecting the time it was past 10 PM.

While going to that place, I made sure that no one caught me going that place. So I was taking many precautions and was pacing up to see the truth of the story. Once I reached there, I was shocked and surprised to see that the place didn't seem to be a part of the same colony. The whole atmosphere was very different and more over there was no light there also. Some light was indeed coming from couple of buildings nearby but there were limited street lights.

We walked to the park, to see the flat. The flat looked like; no one had ever opened this apartment from ages. Each and everything which could be seen from outside, was covered with multiple layers of dust, totally bad in shape. We were standing opposite the flat, hoping to see something exciting. Actually we went there to see the ghost, as we all heard that the building was possessed by a ghost.

We stood there for almost half an hour, but nothing weird happened. I thought all the stories about this place are just rumours and has no connection with the real thing. We could feel the air around us was getting colder and colder by the minute. We thought of returning back, and then suddenly one of my friends stopped looking shocked, he was still looking at the same flat. I looked behind to call him, and then suddenly my eyes went to the balcony of that flat. From the window glasses, we could see, some light inside. We went near the window to check whether the light was from inside or it was some kind of reflection from other buildings.

When we started getting near, we could feel the discomfort. We stood near to the balcony; we found that the light was coming from inside the flat from some sort of candle light. We could justify the finding because the light was low and was not stable. We ran inside the same building to check if there was some new occupant, but we found that the flat was sealed from outside and the balcony was also locked from inside.

We understood, what was happening and ran from the site.

More than 20 years has passed since this incident and today also when I meet with my friends, the only question we cannot answer that "Who lit the candle?" when the flat was sealed and locked.