The Late Night
Show is a short story covered in the book Secrets by Ruskin Bond. As the story
opens, the author puts forward various reasons for murdering people. Among all,
insanity is also one of the reasons. However, greed is the topmost reason. The
narrator is a schoolboy, after having finished his school, he is staying with
his mother in the Green Hotel, and she is a manager there. In Dehradun, Odeon
cinema hall is popular for American and British movies in the 1940s. The boy
develops a good rapport with the cinema hall’s usher cum ticket checker. For
this reason, the usher lets him slip in every night for the movie without a
ticket. To return the favour, the boy brings a bottle of beer for him, because
at the hotel he has a good rapport with the bartender, Melaram.
Since he goes
to Odeon every night, he develops a good sense of its interiors and the kind of
public that comes there. One person intrigues him. He comes there quite often
wearing suit and coat and a hat on head. He watches the entire movie without
removing the hat. The boy refers him as a Hat man. One night he is murdered by
a man who has slit eyes and a hook nose. The boy sees that man when he was
exiting the hall. Post murder, his mother stops him going to that cinema hall
for movies and his free entry comes to an end.
Next, he begins
going to Hindi cinema hall with his friend, Sitaram. The man whom he saw on the
night of murder crosses him several times. But he remains hush about the
situation. One evening, the man comes to the hotel and recognizes the boy as
the only witness to the murder he committed. So, in the night he taps on his
door and then on the window of the room. The boy horrified runs out of his
room shouting for help but no one comes. Through the back verandah, the boy runs
away in the jungle and the man chasing him with a knife in his hand runs after
him. The boy hides in the bushes beside a windowless abandoned cowshed. The man
thinks that the boy is inside, thus he goes inside it, and then the boy from
the bushes comes out and bolts the door from outside. The cowshed is a
windowless dark place with a heavy wood door. The man shouts from inside and knocks
on the door but to no avail.
The boy comes down
to Bareilly for a month to spend some time with his aunty. He returns to
Dehradun and meets Sitaram, from him he hears that Melaram has left the job for
a big offer from a good hotel. And there is a new, inexperienced bartender in
the hotel. Sitaram takes him for a beer
party in the same hotel. The boy is not only astonished to see the man but also
faints down. The man was none other than the murderer. Ironically, the man does not
recognize the boy. Then, Sitaram narrates that this man was found inside the abandoned
cowshed after having spent several days there without food and water and he had
hurt his head in an attempt to come out. It is strange that the man does not
remember even his own name. The boy’s mother showed some mercy to him by
appointing him as a bartender in the hotel. The boy is relaxed to find about
his loss of memory.
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