The Torch Game

When Papa switched off the light, Kiaan’s room changed.

The cupboard stayed a cupboard — mostly. But in the corner, where his chair lived in the daytime, there was now a big, hunched, lumpy THING with one crooked arm.

“Papa!” called Kiaan. “It’s there again!”

Papa came in. Now — some papas say there’s nothing there, go to sleep. But Kiaan’s papa looked carefully at the corner, nodded seriously, and said the thing he always said:

“Something in the corner. Right. Sounds like a job for the torch game.”

The torch game had rules. Kiaan held the torch, because it was his room. Papa was the assistant. And the rule of rules was: never guess in the dark — go and shine.

“Ready?” said Papa. “Detective Kiaan, light the corner!”

Click. The warm yellow beam jumped across the room —

— and the big hunched lumpy thing was: the chair. With Papa’s shirt thrown over it, one sleeve hanging down like a crooked arm.

“Aha!” said Papa. “The famous Shirt Monster. Very dangerous. Wrinkles everything it catches.”

Kiaan giggled and shone the beam along the wall. “What’s THAT?” A long shadowy stripe, wobbling.

Shine. The curtain, dancing a little in the fan’s breeze.

“The Curtain Ghost,” said Papa. “Terrifying. Scared of clothes-pegs, luckily.”

They lit up every suspect, one by one. The glowing eyes under the bed? Kiaan’s own marbles, catching the torchlight. The creaky sound? The old cupboard door, which Papa said was just the cupboard snoring, because cupboards work hard all day holding everything up.

Then Papa turned the torch off, and they sat in the dark together — but it was a different dark now. It was a dark with a chair in it, and a curtain, and marbles, and a snoring cupboard. The same room as the daytime, just resting.

“Hear that?” whispered Papa.

The fan went whummm. The fridge in the kitchen went hmmmm. Far away, one auto-rickshaw went put-put-put home to bed.

“That’s the room’s night-song. It plays it every night, whether we listen or not.”

Kiaan lay down with the torch beside his pillow — off, but ready, the way detectives keep things.

“Papa? Is the Shirt Monster still there?”

“It’s there,” said Papa gravely. “Guarding your chair till morning. That’s its real job, you know. Everything scary in the dark is just something ordinary, doing its night shift.”

Whummm, sang the fan. Hmmmm, sang the fridge.

The Shirt Monster stood guard, wrinkly and faithful.

And Detective Kiaan, master of the torch game, closed his eyes in a room where every single shadow had a name — and slept the whole night through, right in the middle of the night-song.