Sarah, the new tenant upstairs is now already an ex-tenant. She didn’t even last a month. The circumstances of her eviction were very dramatic. One afternoon, I heard heavy footsteps overhead, walking back and forth across the meagre width of the apartment. Evidently the large, scruffy man, who was living upstairs while posing as Sarah’s brother, was pacing the floors and snarling into his cell phone.

I heard the hall door open downstairs and more heavy footsteps, going up the stairs. These sounds had become commonplace ever since Sarah moved in, because there was always a parade of visitors in and out of her flat. But this was the middle of the afternoon. Not typical party-time.

Then I heard the upstairs door being thumped loudly. “Police! Open up!”

The next instant there was a loud scraping sound overhead followed immediately by a crash right outside my back window. The so-called brother had jumped out of the flat. He landed on the narrow strip of grass behind the building and scrambled over the neighbour’s fence. Shouts! Yells! Police thundering down the stairs and out of the building! Thudding footsteps faded into the distance, even as police sirens began to wail down the main street.

The rest of the story came back to us in fragments. The fake-brother was on the run from the police for dealing drugs, but he’d been on a watch list for months. “They tried to taser him,” said Pete, later. “They missed but they caught him, anyway.” Pete and I were the only two residents who were in the house at the time. Everything happened so fast neither of us saw any action. Pete got his information from buddies on the street.

Well! That was the end of Sarah. I had really only seen her once, sitting on the front doorstep. Waiting for her sister, she said. She seemed nice enough, with her latte-brown skin, her hair straightened and lightly streaked. She had a wide-mouthed smile and a warm, friendly expression. For all the noise and fanfare of her arrival, her departure was quick and silent. None of us was home at the time. She removed her name from the mailbox in the hall and that was the last we saw of her.

“She was a nice girl,” said Rebecca, when we talked about it over a cup of coffee. “Kept bad company, is all. Can you believe it, that guy wasn't even her brother? She told the police he was her boyfriend!” Whereupon I revealed what I knew about their nocturnal activities. “Really?!” exclaimed Rebecca. “You could hear them?” I said it was so loud and clear I could have sold tickets to the show. We both giggled.

The ultimate beneficiary of the whole incident was Pete. “She abandoned all her furniture,” he said. “So when the movers were taking the bed I asked if I could have it. Completely new — and I got it free! It’s great! The mattress is made of some new material — really soft, you know?” He stopped short of inviting me to try it out. That would have been indelicate.

“Lucky you!” I said, smiling. “Happy dreams.”

Manjula Padmanabhan , author and artist, tells us tales of her parallel life in Elsewhere,USA, in this fortnightly series.

>marginalien.blogspot.in

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