Couple of years go I read in that reliable source of information on the internet, Wikipedia, that in certain parts of Switzerland apartment dwellers are forbidden from flushing their toilets after ten in the night. At first, I sneered. Those repressed, emotionally neutered, cuckoo-clock making, yodelling alpine residents really knew how to take the juice out of life. Like Orson Welles in the Third Man, I wondered if there was a cure for being Swiss. Of course at that time I wasn’t living on the first floor of an apartment building in Bangalore so didn’t understand what it meant to hear the plumbing hold long conversations when everything mammalian that requires a solid eight hours of sleep time was in dreamland.

Now I do and think something along the same lines should be made law in Namma Bengaluru. It would prevent insomnia in those whose personal refuges have windows that open into ducts with pipes running all around and are forced to wonder what sort of music the loud mouth in Flat 303 is preparing for the twelve o’clock show. Having listened to the orchestral outpourings of all my upstairs neighbours, I can safely say that the majority are into hard rock. Some nights the pipes lay on a full System of a Down concert with the only thing missing being Serj Tankian’s impressive vocal stylings. My friend, a SOAD devotee, however convinces me that she thinks the thin, moustachioed, curly-haired systems engineer on the second floor could probably provide that if he put his mind to it.

The musical nights that the plumbing provides are perfectly fine and preferable compared to what goes on during some quiet weeknights. Maybe it is because I am a Guillermo del Toro devotee and have seen The Devil’s Backbone too many times for my own good but I could swear that I hear moans and groans and slow sighs on certain nights.

My mother shushes such ideas as the possibility of a sad (no doubt gruesomely murdered) child roaming round the water tank and apartment plumbing. She suggests it is the agnostic in me trying to fill spiritual holes in my make-up. I hotly contest that theory – as an agnostic and borderline atheist  I am devoted to science and I am well aware that certain noises – the sudden fall of water and gurgling pipes have distinctly scatological origins but really – but a sighing pipe! What is that if not a sign of something trapped for eternity in the GI pipes?

What, my mother sarcastically queries, do you want to do about it? Dismantle the whole system? Send a rat through the pipe to chase the ghoul away?

I put forward my idea of the “No Flushing after Ten PM” law. My mother snorts and shakes her head. I tell her it works in Switzerland. She snorts some more.

Since it would be next to impossible to petition the whole of Bengaluru to sign up in favour of this scheme, I decide to start small and ask the tenants association to try it out. Well, one member of the tenants association – the president (my mother forbids me to propose the lunatic idea, as she calls it, to all the apartment dwellers thus making myself and the family into a laughing stock). The president is kind and attentive and sympathetic. He too understands what it must be like to listen to the rattling pipes all night long when I should be really getting my beauty sleep. He will try and see what the other members think about it. When I report the progress on the possible flushing ban to my mother, she mutters to herself and wonders why on earth she taught me to read. I am however, smugly confident that I shall win the day.

Two days later the front doorbell rang and standing on the front door mat was the president of the tenants association, looking ever so slightly apologetic. The flushing ban, he said, was turned down emphatically – so many people coming home late and so on – they would need to use the sanitation facilities quite late into the night. But on the other hand, they had discovered what might be causing the groans and sighs – the elevator’s pulleys and chain. So the elevator won’t be functioning after ten p.m.

It felt like some sort of victory until a week later when we started hearing the laboured breathing and heavy sighing and constant footfalls of tenants struggling up the staircase through the walls (which like all apartment building walls in Bengaluru seems to be made from the thinnest papier mache). There was also on occasion, some very creepy pattering of feet on the steps. I suggest to my mother that we need to find some kind of sound buffers for the walls or that I would go crazy thinking that something from the other side was trying to contact me. I dig up my long forgotten books on acoustics from my days as a student of architecture and suggest that we get some kind of rubber padding to place on the walls as insulation.

My mother answers this suggestion by selling my precious DVD of The Devil’s Backbone on E-bay. Problem, she says, solved.