Merchants feared a rest house said to wail at midnight. Tenali booked a room—and presented the ghost with a repair bill.
The rest house crouched at the edge of the road like a tired animal. By dusk, merchants clustered under tamarind trees, whispering of a ghost that wept through walls. The keeper wrung his hands; the village lost trade.
Tenali rented the most ‘haunted’ room, dined on millet cakes, and waited. The first wail rose with the wind—long, breathy, and strangely rhythmic. He lit a lamp, pressed his palm to the frame, and felt a draft like a thief. A window gaped a finger’s width where a hinge had surrendered to monsoon seasons.
He stuffed the seam with rags and lay back. Silence. Then a softer moan from the opposite wall. A second window—same sin, same cure. Tenali slept like a man who had paid for quiet and gotten change back.
At dawn he gathered the villagers and demonstrated: rags out, wind in—weep; rags in—peace. “Your ghost,” he said, “charges rent in negligence.” He paid a carpenter to square the frames and posted a sign: HAUNTING REPAIRED. TWO COPPERS A NIGHT. FREE LULLABIES WHEN IT RAINS.
That evening the gallery filled with snores and satisfied bellies. The keeper counted coins with a grin haunted only by arithmetic. Travelers began telling a new story: of a rest house where even the wind paid extra for comfort.
Tenali left a note on the lintel: “Fear, like wind, loves a crack. Fix the crack.” The road exhaled, and commerce followed.
