Paranormal activity in the inbox

I must have been a famous person in Africa in my previous life. If you believe the world will end on 21 December, you’d believe that, too! If not, you will, after this!

This week, I received my 43rd e-mail since the advent of the internet, all from Africa, all well-heeled women, proclaiming my divinely-guided selection to share a cumbrous inheritance. Shouldn’t I feel special? It’s like winning a five billion-ticket lottery, not once but 43 freaking times.

Who’s the nincompoop who said fortune never comes in pairs, unlike misfortune? Yeah, go ahead; take a look at all the newly-rich islanders. Somebody rightly said that there’s many a slip between the cup and the lip; right now in my case, the slip is bigger than the sink holes sprouting up on our roads. I just hope all those poor women would have found a suitable replacement for me.

There was another unusual e-mail in the past few days. It was an invitation to meet the President. A second mail from the same source reiterated that I have been invited ‘in person’ to meet the man who everyone wants to meet.

Fame and fortune come calling, all via e-mail, and even though this one looked legitimate, all the paranormal activity buzzing around me has turned me into a sceptic. You have been told your whole life to look for footsteps in the sand; not hear them from the apartment above you, at the dead of night, especially when it happens to be unoccupied. But that’s exactly what I have been hearing.

The incessant clatter never seems to abate so I decided to get to the bottom of it, despite it being on top. It was past the graveyard shift and as soon as I heard the steps I borrowed all the Dutch courage I could from my wife. You see she is Burgher and I am not. I bolted to the seventh floor apartment and banged on the door, not quite sure if I should expect the door of an untenanted chamber to open. And it did!

A new paragraph in an instant like this is always a ploy to swell the suspense but doesn’t exigently mean the door actually opened. Besides, do you really think I would have seen the funny side of it if in actuality it opened?

Neil Armstrong speaks of experiencing paranormal activity when he took that triumphant small step on the moon. He wanted to write down his spectral lunar rendezvous on the shuttle back to earth but NASA hadn’t invented a pen which could write in zero gravity. Yes, ballpoint pens don’t do that well. So it spent a decade and US$ 12 billion in developing a unique pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, under water, almost on any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to 300°.

The Russians used a pencil.

A call came from a gracious lady Director of the Finance Ministry as I was just about winding up the column to say that the invite was genuine and that our President is keen on listening to his subjects. Her forthright comments pointed to a duty-bound effort of a Ministry keen to buoy up the unheralded foot soldiers of the local economy.

So folks, off to the Temple Trees, it has been a long while since I was last there. Perhaps, I’ll take my gravity-defying pen with me.



(Dinesh Watawana is a former foreign correspondent and military analyst. He is a brand consultant and heads The 7th Frontier, an integrated communications agency which masterminded the globally-acclaimed eco tourism hotspot KumbukRiver. Email him at [email protected].)