The night went absolutely petrifying all of a sudden, when all three of us were locked inside our bedroom. We were left with just one mobile phone of mine, which was about to run out of juice in a minute or two and nothing else.
What on earth just happened?! It’s something worse at 11 30 pm, when we were all set for the night’s sleep after checking for the main doors. Our little boy, my wife and I were in the bedroom and then this was happening.
The boy must have playfully tied a piece of string to the outside latch of our bedroom door sometime ago, but little did we know that this would do the terrifying trick. Thanks to him, who had just pulled it off (literally) from inside, underneath the closed door, latching it accidentally!
Oh No! We just realized that we were trapped.
There’s nothing more we could have done at that moment. My wife was desperately trying to unlatch from inside, pulling the string in the opposite direction. But no way would the stubborn latch get off the hook.
I kept telling her that it wouldn’t help unless we sit down and look at the possibilities to bail us out. She ran out of breath soon and then took the turn to listen.
‘’Let’s try two things first”, I said, in response to her ‘Now what?’ grin. The first step was to list down all the resources around and the next was to think on what we could do with them. What all did we have! A cupboard loaded with clothes, a cot with pillows and a dying mobile phone. All I could reckon was that I could only make couple of calls. Then I just knew, I need to alert people of our pathetic state before the phone could die. But, Hang on!
Somewhere from the cupboard’s top peeped out the curved handle of an umbrella, which struck an idea. I made a call to the neighbour knowing then what would I want him to do. Why can’t i ask him to suspend a bag of tools using a rope from the terrace so that I can grab through the Window of the room. What for? To try unscrewing the latch which had the simple nut and bolt construction at the back of the door? I called at his mobile and briefed him. But he had no tools with him then. I asked him to hold on and made another call to my parents in law, who were close by couple of blocks to carry some tools with them, explaining again the scenario, in brief.
They arrived in a jiffy and handed over a tool kit to my neighbour, who then went on to do as I advised already.
I clenched the suspended rope with the umbrella’s curved handle and pulled in the tool kit bag. Bingo! Found the fitting spanner and I went on to unscrew the latch from inside and pulled open the door, dismantling the latch. Upon opening the main door, I found my neighbour, my parents-in-law and their neighbours who were all set to break open the main door if we hadn’t opened the doors in a little while.
Phew!!How lucky and memorable to call it a day!
