A Strange Fishing
It was late in the night. Ratan called me and said he just had a bad dream and was not able to sleep. This was Ratan. If he were to pass through a bad phase he would drag me in too and say friends ought to stand by friends in their bad times. Anyway he said that he was felling suffocated in that small clumsy hostel room and wanted to have a walk to the bridge. I too was feeling a bit suffocated and so got up to go.
It was a moonlit night and so everything was clearly visible even at that time in the night. We talked and walked towards the bridge. Ratan said he's feeling very adventurous and said that something fishy was going to happen tonight. I didn't agree with him. It was true that we were feeling really adventurous but there was nothing fishy about it. But I didn't protest.
On reaching the foot of the bridge our first instinct was to climb up and peep over from it. Although we didn't expect any mortal figure to be seen there yet we felt a natural instinct to do so.
We both ran up the stairs of the bridge and peeped and lo! What did we see! A man—although I call him a man now but at that time we didn't had any idea as to who or what it was and the first thing that came to our mind was obviously 'spirits', 'ghosts', and things of that sort. At first we thought of running away but then we realized that the man was doing something very minutely and had not noticed us. So, we decided to hide ourselves behind the pillars and try to find out what he's up to.
After quite sometime, we found that he was doing something that looked somewhat like fishing, but neither he had any fishing rod nor did he catch any fish. We decided to move a bit forward to have a closer view. On doing so we found that he had a line tied to a stick as a fishing rod and and was fishing something that didn't look like a fish but was something far to small and he had a bucket beside him to collect those.
Our curiosity highted with the hope of cracking some mystery and the night really turned out to be a fishy one! Now we were just waiting for the right opportunity to discover all that was going on and the opportunity did knock us very soon. After sometime the man stood up and started walking towards us, probably to get something. We, afraid and excited, concealed ourselves behind the pillars desperately praying not to be caught. But the man didn't take any notice of us, or for that matter, didn't even glance at our direction. He went on his way straight towards the other end of the bridge.
We, relieved, but of-course still curious, ran towards the spot where he laid fishing and what we found there was just a small example of the working of human mind and its intelligence. Tied to the rope that hanged from the stick was a powerful magnet and in the bucket that laid beside was lot of coins that were thrown into Ganga as a offering to the 'Chat Maiya', an Indian Goddess. At this hour of night that man sat there gathering these coins with his powerful magnet!
As we stood there awestruck, wondering about the human intelligence put to use, we heard his returning foot steps. Afraid out of our wits, we jumped into the river and swam back to the other end of the bridge. By the time we reached our hostel it was already morning and we were laid down with a high fever but our excitement hadn't died down still.
[Based on a real incident once narrated to me]