Back In Time

This story I am about to tell you that happened to me over 13 years back. I was in Qatar for my industrial degree and I never had anyone there as a friend or a family to look after me.

I was living in a small room, I even had to use a common toilet until I made some friends after about three weeks attending my classes and we all moved in to one Villa. Seven guys; two from Nepal, two from Philippines, one India and myself and another from Sri Lanka.

It was a two story house and newly built and situated in Matar Qadeem Area, it's a residential area with shops and shopping malls.

What's common in those houses are the rooftops, there were no roof top except decorated with chairs and tables to chill in the evenings which is what exactly we did when we came home after lectures.

I have to tell you, we all of us were smokers, we smoke cigarettes often at home specially after coming home on the roof top chatting and drinking energy drinks, eating junk.

Behind to our house these was a road, width of four vehicles and next to the road (Left Side) a huge empty land, this land was under construction and it was all covered by a wall. We could see inside of that land from our roof top but not from the road.

One day as usual we were on the rooftop at around 6.15PM and having red bull and smoking and talking about movies and just spending time.

We were looking at the surroundings while we talk. But something was unusual, the land which was under constructions were missing, missing in a sense the wall was not there and no construction vehicles were there. The sun was almost gone and we could only make very little vision of the place. But the only available light sources are the yellow street lamps but that is also on the right side of the road.

Strange stories started coming in from every one of us, like maybe the owner stopped the construction or they have changed the plan... But still within one day all this change could not happened. That day morning when we were going we did not notice about this land until now.

So we decided to have a walk and see what has happened since the wall also not there.

As we walk close to the place we could see trees without leaves were planted, and they were tall trees, about eight to ten feet tall. They were not many but three trees with dry bushes and the worse is some gravestones. But the writing we could not recognize since it was all curved in to the stone in Arabic (I think) and it was dark already.

We were getting into more and more into the land passing gravestones and then all of a sudden we heard a voice, rather an angry tone with Arabic as if a person is shouting. We stopped and looked at him and by his body language we could see he was not happy and showing us to go outside.

We asked him what happened here and why the land was changed as if it's a horror movie site.

But the man kept on shouting at us saying the same thing. One guy said let's ignore him and walk around the place and as we did this man came running at us with a stick!

We ran and thought we were trespassing some private property and that's the reason why he do not want us in there.

And it's very dangerous get caught by police in Qatar for any reason.

We ran to the other end of this land which is a normal dust and stones filled area that had nothing unusual.

I turned around to see if the man is chasing us but no. He was standing firmly right at the edge of the graveyard holding his stick.

This man, his skin color is dark like an African. Tall but slim wearing a big head scarf and brownish robe with another scarf around his heck which was dancing to the evening wind and a long stick but we could not make up his face it was all blurry.

I told the others that he must be a hired local guard for the movie site. (Why I come up with a movie idea it's because those days Transformers were done in Qatar so we thought there were more movies coming up)

For us to get back to the main road either we have to pass across the graveyard movie site again, or walk around so by default we took the around walk. Panting and coughing, smiling we walked home.

We came home had another round of red bull and cigarettes, I had a bath and head to bed.

Following day morning (Friday - Holiday) when I woke up there was a big fuss with my colleagues, some are on the rooftop shouting and some are in the ground floor shouting.

First I went up to the roof top to find out that the construction site is back again. It's all there as it was on the night before. I felt like my mouth fell to floor with confusion.

I ran to the ground floor to see others are arguing over a video on a phone.

The Philippine guy accidentally had videoed the whole thing when he tried to turn on the flashlight.

On the video we were inside the construction site and everything looks not like a graveyard but a construction site. We were running and there were no grave stones but JCB's, tractors piles of dirt and even pits but we were running avoiding them.

The video was not that clear, over 13 years back there were no night mode and this guy's phone was a Sony Ericsson P990 PDA with a 2MP camera but since his flash light was on we could see bits and pieces.

The whole Friday we spent looking at the construction site, no one was at work there as I said Friday was officially a holiday in Qatar.

Next day morning we woke up and was waiting for our van to the university, driven by a Sudani person, very calm, good with English and educated though.

We started talking about that matter again and this person Mr. Siddque overheard what we were talking and decided to cut in.

He said, that land supposed to be an old graveyard but it was long LONG time back which he also have heard stories about that place.

But we... Were actually there for several minutes!