Part-I
Place: Bedroom of the Base family
Time: 2:30 am
Mr. Base woke up and realized that a trip to bathroom was inevitable. He got up and put on his slippers. There was not much light in the room but being in the same house for last 30 years had enabled Mr. Base to find his way in any part of the house, even with a blind fold.
Thud!!
Mr. Base got his knee banged badly on something which he didn’t expect to be placed at that certain place in the room.
Mr. Base: “Oh God, my knee! What is this in the middle of the room? I have told so many times not to change anything in the room.” He couldn’t see what he had bumped into as it was quite dark.
Mr. Base: “It looks like a table, and quite a heavy one too. Do we have a table in the bedroom?” He tried to push it aside but it was too heavy for him. He thought he would deal with it later and tried to find his way to the bathroom but with no success. “Where does it end? This is certainly a very long table. Wait...wait a minute. What is this? Is it..is it..what on earth is this?”
He went back to the bed and switched on the reading lamp.
Mr. Base: “Oh dear Lord! DARLING! DARLING! THERE IS A CAR IN OUR BEDROOM. WAKE UP!"
Mrs. Base: “What is it dear? Why are you shouting?” She said while looking for her glasses.
Mr. Base: “Darling, there is a car in our room. And believe me I don’t remember parking it here in the last 30 years.”
Mrs. Base (Still looking for her glasses): “What do you mean there is a car? What’s a car doing in our…OH DEAR! IT’S A CAR!!”
Surely, not many people are accustomed to find a car or bump into a car in their bedrooms right in the middle of the night when they get up to take a leak. But Mr. & Mrs. Base, being quite old fashioned and orthodox in their views about the world, had all the right to overreact at the inexplicable presence of an automobile in their bedroom, at such an odd hour.
Mr. Base: “How did it get in here?”
Mrs. Base: “Certainly not through the door. Dear I am not feeling well. Call police or some one for help?”
Mr. Base (Checking the phone): “It’s not working yet. It’s been dead since evening.” He got up and tried to find his way to the living room to try another line.
Mrs. Base: “What’s the problem with the door? Is it locked, dear?”
Mr. Base: “It’s the car. It has blocked the door.”
Mrs. Base: “Oh dear! I am scared?”
Click! Click!
Mrs. Base: “What’s that sound?”
Mr. Base: “It was the car door. Oh God! There is something inside the car. Get back darling! Get back! There is something inside the car.”
The car door opened and something, well to be precise, a man in his 30s, with a big smile on his face, stepped out of the car and said “Greetings! Have you people seen my cat?”
Mrs. Base: “Oh dear! It is a man…and…and he is wearing a swimming costume!”
Part-II
He was still in the swimming costume. He parked the car and turned off the engine. It was past two hours since he received the first signals. It would not be long before he had it coming. Suddenly there was a sharp stabbing pain behind his right eye, around his temple. This was it. He held his head close to his knees between his elbows. Every second the pain was getting sharper and unbearable. In a few minutes he started to feel nauseous.
Co-existence of headache and nausea had had dramatic effects on people and had made some of them go a long way to address this issue. Today the world was about to witness one such effort.
Just when he thought he could no longer stop the contents of his stomach to reach escape velocity, the nausea was replaced by a severe heart burn, which was soon replaced by a bout of convulsions in stomach, which in turn gave way to a sustainable peristaltic wave, which, for better acoustics, did not result in vibration of the rear sphincter.
***
Detective C.H. Luka, whose ethnicity was as mysterious as a black garbulascaliton (pronounced as ‘jaa-voo-yee-yon’) with magenta stripes sitting on a slope of any mountain on the earth, was indeed a detective. He specialized in two distinct matters worth investigating; one, extremely simple matters of the physical world, and two, extremely complex matters of the gastroenterology. The distinction, according to Luka, was almost non-existent. Today his services were summoned by a not-successful-but-neither-failing perfume making company, Happy Nose, also traded as HaNo, and Luka was on his way to HaNo Research Centre. His appointment to the case was a mystery in itself, quite comparable to his ethnicity, which Mother Nature had, willingly or unwillingly, ignored to reveal to her beings.
“Derec was last seen a week ago throwing up in a swimming pool, close to his office, by a lady who was not at all happy by what she saw, but failed to complain as she herself was considered, a little later, as an accomplice to the act by the pool administrator,” briefed Lobo, the reasonably-slow assistant of detective Luka, on their way to meet the head of the research centre.
After an hour they were in office of the head. “He was no good. I have told them but they don’t listen to me, “said the head without looking at Luka, “Spend money if you want, but don’t waste time.”
“Is there a bakery in your office?” asked Luka.
“Apparently there is a stupid HR policy,” continued the head, “which requires the company to hire a detective in case an employee goes missing for ten or more days, calendar days mind you, at the lowest possible cost.” He stopped for a while and continued, “What… what did you ask?”
“I smell chocolate cake here,” asked Luka, getting restless, “Is there a bakery in your office?”
“He was no good is all I know,” said the head, “His office is in the basement. It has been eleven days since he was in the office last time.”
Derek was not an important employee. His office was a small lab full of things one would expect to see in the lab of an unimportant employee of a research centre. Luka and Lobo were going through Derek’s research notes. “I don’t get it,” said Lobo, “He has only written about pain, some pressure in the head, a missing cat and all sort of…disgusting things.”
***
PART-III
It was around half past seven when Luka, along with his assistant, reached Derek’s cottage. Luka unlocked the door and stepped into a small room which he found hard to come to terms with. “What is a refrigerator doing in a garage?” shouted Luka.
“Perhaps this is the bedroom, Sir,” said Lobo after a thought, “Also, there is a queen-sized bed here and I don’t see a car either.”
“If I had a car, I would have parked that right here. What a waste it is! “Luka was going hysterical, “Do we have a car right now that I can park here? How did we come here? Is the cab still waiting outside? Could you please ask him to park his car in this room?” Lobo was saved the effort as the cab had already left. Luka was not overreacting. Most people would agree that the bedroom was more a garage and the garage, so far unexplored by Luka and Lobo, was more a bedroom.
On seeing the actual garage Luka’s reactions were equally violent. But soon they found a small audio tape recorder in the garage and it helped, to some extent, to calm down Luka. Lobo rewound and played the tape. It was a rough voice, Derec’s voice. “Have you seen my cat? (Laughter) I got you (Laughter again)! This is day hundred and seven and I am very close to it. I have failed for last ten times, but this time it will be different and I am ready for it. I am going to end my seven years of sufferings, those unbearable pains. The world will remember me; the world will remember Derec Base for conducting the first controlled dissipation of intracranial pressure though garble garble barble barble and lots of barbles and garbles”. The tape was not clear as if the recorder was, soon after, confused with a biscuit and dipped into a hot cup of tea, more than once.
“Lobo, could you please go and check Derec’s refrigerator and let me know if there is a chocolate cake inside it?” asked Luka excitedly. Lobo retuned after a while and agreed, “Yes Sir, there is indeed a chocolate cake in the refrigerator.” He paused,” There is something odd about that cake though.”
“There are olives in it,” smiled Luka. “Yes. But how did you guess?” Lobo was surprised.
“We don’t have much time, Lobo. Call Derec’s office immediately and find out if there was anything missing from the R&D department! “Said Luka hurriedly while rushing outside the cottage, “Derec was there last night and he was looking for something, something important to his purpose.”
Luka’s suspicion was confirmed when Lobo found out that there was indeed something missing from the HaNo’s R&D department. It was a state-of-the-art industrial suction machine used to neutralize surrounding air to make it free of any pre-existing smell.
****
“Get something to eat, Lobo “Luka said throwing himself on a sofa in Derec’s bedroom, “we are expecting some company very soon.” He paused to look at Lobo’s perplexed, but not unusual, countenance. “We are expecting Mr. Derec Base any time, in the garage of course, “he continued.
“But where did he go?” asked Lobo, “Did he go to the pharmacy? All I know is the guy was dying of headache, as a result of some pressure in his head, and throwing up all over the place. That’s it. And now he is gone. Could he have thrown himself out of his body? Is such a thing possible?”
“He did not go anywhere. As a matter of fact, as will be established soon, he simply tried to dissipate the intracranial pressure, cause of his pains, through a different, rather unusual, channel. You see Lobo, the matters of the gastroenterology are extremely complex and Derec, poor but fortunate, initiated a process which made these complex matters to intermingle with the simplest matters of the world. All this resulted in a wormhole, and Mr. Base, in all probability, has gone forth, or back, in time in his own house greeting his future self, or his forefathers, with an obnoxious smell. ” explained Luka, to Lobo and to himself, “Derec will be here soon. We will only need to wait for his next bout of pain.”
“But what was that channel that created all this fuss?” asked Lobo.
“Flatulence, Lobo. It was flatulence,” said Luka, “Can you also remind me to tell Mr. Base to convert his bedroom in a garage and his garage in a Bedroom?”
The End
