Stop or my Dad 'll Shoot!

At one point of time, the sleepy little town we stayed in for a few years was infested with stray incidents of sinhalese migration or rather infiltration . I had no ethnic primordial political leanings to ever feel the need for a gun. Still something that happened then made me feel a dire need for a gun.
A nice(when you are seven everything is nice) moonless middle of a night. You even offer a nice smile at a stranger looking with odd eyes through the window.The lights are out,the whirry indian fan is still and I wake up to see my dad stand at the doorway silently watching my brother, my cousin snore away and me sitting up smiling. I am happy to see my friend up at that time of night and hopefully look forward to a night coffee and a story. But he quickly cautions me as I am about to greet in glee. "Sssh! Mol" he says and sits on the bedside looking a second at a no care for the world sleep of the son. I smile first at that secretive tone but then I see his drawn forehead the way it does when he is really worried. He looks to the open window at the far end of the room and asks in a curiously quiet voice," Who opened that window?" I look at it and say, "not Mol", and seeing his stern face, I don't tell him I smiled at a  stranger who looked through it.
He moves across swiftly and yet quietly closes the open window.
He speaks in such a quiet, firm tone,"I want you to stay real quiet now. There is a bad man outside our door who has switched off the power supply."
I begin to understand this is no game, no coffee story midnight and I offer a solemn nod.
My brother snores away and in the next room our mother too.  Dad wakes up my 15 year old  cousin and instructs her to lock the door from the inside. She drowsily nods but before she can pull me inside, I sneak out and follow him. I hear her shut lock the door and my dad gives me an exasperated glance at having followed him and not his instruction.He holds my hand and we are out of the room unto the passage leading to the living room.
I remember it was deadly silent inside the house and outside the house. He instructs me outside the room he shares with his wife," I want you to go inside my room and shut lock the door and till you hear from me neither you nor mother should  come out"
I nod but I do not follow his instructions for once. I do step into the room, I see my mother sleeping peacefully but then I get this image in my head of a bad man taking my dad away in a sack. Don't know but then my idea of bad people was they tie up people in sacks and carry them away.
So I am just a few feet away as I watch my dad move quietly stand before the front door. He stands unaware of my disobedience; so still that I begin to feel my little heart beat fast and  it bangs inside my ears. And then he does what I least expect and perhaps what the outsiders too did not. In a flicker of a moment, he opens the door,steps out, and  just as he switches on the power switch, I lose sense and shout,"Accha come back" and he is beside me within a second and locks the door. I hold his legs tight as I feel mine giving way in fear. I don't know what made me shout but I just had this sudden feeling my most precious companion was almost inside a sack. He stands there still, holding me against him and neither of us speak. The only time I try to say something, he just makes a "sssh" gesture. It is deadly silent outside then we hear the shuffle of feet, then the roar of a car engine and then he and I settle on the sofa for the rest of the night and I try to sleep as he pats me to sleep. 
The bad news arrives fresh next morning. A four men gang in a red car with a gun, have gunned a man (obviously ethnically wanted) the next street exactly an hour after they visited us. What shocks me is they didn't carry him away in a sack, they gunned him down.I hear my dad's friends tell him,"It was a foolish risk. They had a gun and four men"  Dad smiles and nods away and winks at my terrified expression. I am as much worried that they had a gun as much as about the possibility of my dad being foolish. When I ask him if it was foolish, he says,"Maybe yes. I did not expect the possibility of  a gun and more men. but sometimes the unexpected can confuse an opponent" My next question,"but why didn't they gun us" makes him almost laugh but he replies," Well maybe  they heard your talk and understood it a mistaken identity." My seven year old self concentrates on  every new word and it dawns to me that sometimes in life not following instructions can save than following them.
The next day I narrate the incident to Alan, my most trusted friend then. He casts a patronizing glance at my fear and suggests,"Get a gun and then say Stop or my dad will shoot, then nobody will dare take your dad away."
I present my second doubt,"Is it right to gun a man I smiled at?"
Pat comes his explanation,"As long as he didn't smile back ,he is still the enemy"
I decide it right to get a gun and what happens to my quest will perhaps find its way in another post. 

picture courtesy:smurphy216