The Unwanted Parcel
It was a snowy Saturday morning in the chilly cold month of December somewhere in Dehradun, which was about 241.4 km from Delhi, capital of India. I came here all the way from Lalitpur, Nepal with my parents to travel around Dehradun, a popular tourist destination of India. We also had a plan to visit a Medical College named Dehradun College of Medical Sciences, a renowned college of India, for me to study MBBS in it the following year as I was studying in grade 12 that year. We had rented a small house that belonged to some local rich man. The house was a kilometer away from the college hostel, and we stayed there as we could not find any suitable lodges in the town and those available were quite uncomfortable and dirty. It had been 3 days since we got here. My mother had just ended a phone call with my maternal grandparents, who were in Nepal. They were quite upset that they could not come along with us as the winter in Dehradun was quite unbearable and they were quite sensitive towards cold climate.
We
had spent the previous day travelling around Robber’s Cave. The ceilings and
the floor in our rented house was no different to our house in Lalitpur. So I got
bored staying in the house. I thought of going out for a walk to see the woods,
but my mother insisted to stay indoors as it was colder as compared to the past
few days. But I somehow managed to persuade my parents to come for a walk. We
wore our coats and boots and headed towards a place nearby a temple. We spent
about ten minutes there. We clicked some pictures near the woods. Within those
ten minutes, I realized that the snowy cold weather was only pleasant in the
movies, and I started thinking that after all, my father had always been right
about how it would be difficult to live in a cold place. After few shivers, I
thought of going home, as I catch cold quickly. I was afraid that I would end
up having a runny nose so, we quickly went towards our rented home.
As
we reached our stay, we noticed something delivered on our doorsteps. Before I
could think of something else, I reached near that thing. To our shock, it was
a body of a human being kept on a tray and packed with the plastic. My mother
screamed in fear. All of a sudden, I was sweating. No one was around. It had a
label on it that said “Whole Human”
and something else written which we could not read as we were shocked. Who
would have ordered a whole human anyway? We got into the house. My father quickly
called the Police first and told him the entire situation. Until then, my
mother had also telephoned the house owner. In about half an hour, the doorbell
rang. I saw it was the Police, four of them. But my eyes opened wide when there
was no ‘body’ on our front porch. The Police asked us a few questions about the
appearance of the person in it. We could barely answer anything.
“Maybe
someone joked with you”, they said and left after quickly examining the entire
situation. “Had it been a joke, it was a terrible one”, I said to my parents. We
looked at each other, then we proceeded inside the house. The Police before
leaving had told us that they would contact us if needed. In the meanwhile, we
could contact for any help or if any such misconduct happened. It was almost 11
am then, so we went to a nearby hotel to have a meal.
Suddenly
I remembered that, throughout this chaos the house owner had never showed up. I
came to know from my mother that the house owner never answered the call. The
Police arrived. Fortunately or unfortunately, the body was still there. The
Police opened the plastic wrapping and found that it was dead.
In
the meanwhile, the phone rang. It was from an unknown number saying, “Your
parcel has been delivered”.
“What
Parcel?” I asked. No one answered the phone. I reported this to the Police
Officers. By then, although no one had spoken it but all of us had thought that
the house owner was definitely involved in this and the bodies were delivered
for him. Just before the body was rushed to the hospital for further
investigation. We went to the Police Station to answer few questions. The number
that I had received call from, was a local PCO, so it was useless to get any
clue from it.
In the Police Station, I saw a familiar face.
It was the house owner. We were astonished to see each other. He had come to the
Police Station to file a report of his missing son. They took him to the
hospital to identify the dead body but the body delivered was not of his son. We
were well aware of the fact that India was a country where kidnapping was not
new at all. On top of that, the Policeman registering the report said that
number of kidnapping cases were increasing in the entire country every year.
The house owner got more anxious, however all of us consoled him for a while. All
of a sudden, all the Policemen around us began speaking amongst themselves like
they had found something. They came to know that the victim had been dead for
two days.
3
more days passed. During this time, the Police kept eye on our stay and also
searched for the nearby areas. On the third day while checking for vehicles in
the check post, they caught a vehicle. When they checked it, they found a man
tied, 3 dead people, along with a group of 5 men who were involved in selling human
meat, of the people abducted from populated cities of India, and sold their
flesh within the towns nearby Dehradun. The two people delivered to our door separately
were their two of the many victims, who had been abducted this month. They
first delivered a different body, but they somehow realized that the order was
wrongly placed in terms of weight and other criteria of order of the meat, when they were about to deliver
somewhere else. So they took it back with them and delivered a different body
on our front porch. But still the delivery was done in the wrong address. They
were wrong twice.
It
was because of house owner’s report which made Police search for his son in the
nearby locations. Those 5 people knew that they would be hunted within days, so
they planned to escape. But they were halted on the check post and their
suspicious behavior made the Policemen to check the vehicle. When they were interrogated,
the sloppy criminals spoke out the truth and the case unraveled. The Police
also assured that they would find the buyers, traders and dealers of the human
meat.
On
the other hand, the house owner’s son along with his motorcycle was found by
another team of investigators with the help of Police dogs deep inside the
woods. That man was a drunkard who had crashed his motorcycle into the woods
and lied there unconsciously in the dark. The Police also spotted the cabin
that those men had been using as their hideout which was easily seen from the
place where house owner’s son was lying unconsciously, but luckily he survived
due to what so ever type of alcohol he had consumed before travelling, which
kept his body warm for few days although he got a terrible fever that almost
crossed 103°F. In this case, the alcohol was the life saver on contrary to what
we say i.e. “Drinking Kills”.
So
after living a Suspense Thriller Movie,
we left for home. However it was proved that “Truth and oil always come to the
surface”.
Submitted By:
Name: Sarin Sthapit
Roll No.: 55
Group: Computer Engineering (1st Year / 2nd
Semester) Level: Undergraduate
Subject: ENGT 102
Very beautifully written
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