Hullabaloo in Mulund

This is an interesting story, inspired by a real-life incident, which I was narrating to a few friends yesterday. The incident occurred in a place where yours truly has roosted all his life - Mulund, a suburb in north-east Mumbai, and which abuts the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, a place pullulating with wildlife - including leopards (panthera pardus). 

Many summers ago, a leopard, bored with his quotidian life, blithely sauntered into the main bazaar area of Mulund and took up residence inside a shop in the dead of night - managing to steal in to the premises through a gap in the roofing. Next morning when the shopkeeper arrived, he saw that the jumble of cotton sheets he had placed in a corner the previous day was alive and heaving. Thinking that the thing alive underneath was a domestic cat, that regular trespasser on his premises, he pulled the sheets and screamed 'Ho!' at the denuded animal. In two shakes of a lamb's tail the hapless fellow was out on the street, all of a doodah - his breathing stertorous, eyes about to fall off their sockets, and limbs flailing like a semaphore to catch the public's attention. Shortly the leopard presented himself before the public, looking amused as he tried to ascertain the reason for the commotion. Being an intelligent animal, he surmised that, perhaps, the public was expecting him to perform some acrobatic feats. Always eager to oblige discerning viewers, he started leaping from roof to roof, pausing only to snarl and display the immaculate dental architecture inside his mouth. A pandemonium ensued in the bazaar, some people clutched at their throats like stage actors and screamed, others simply ran for their lives. One chappie, however, demonstrating admirable presence of mind, rang for the forest officials. The party of forest guards & officials arrived half an hour later, and it took them another five hours to trap the leopard.

The shopkeeper, I am told, was never the same man again. After a few weeks of the incident, he folded his tent and retired to his ancestral village to ponder over the meaning of life.