An Indian man's dream of owning a literal genie to serve at his beck and call turned into quite the nightmare this past week.
It all began when Tapas Roy Choudhury got a call from a friend with the exciting news that someone in the city of Burdwan possessed a bottle containing a ghost which could grant wishes.
As 'luck' would have it, this person was interested in selling the magical ghost and was willing to make a deal with Choudhury.
The question of why someone who owned a wish-granting ghost would want to sell it when they could just conjure money at will apparently never dawned on him as he set out for the city planning to purchase the magical spirit.
When he and a friend met up with the seller, who had three friends of his own with him, the group made their way up to a hotel room for the supernatural transaction.
Unfortunately for Choudhury, whatever visions he may have had of a ornate golden lamp containing a centuries-old spirit wise vanished like a puff of smoke when he saw the item for sale.
The sellers presented him with an empty soda bottle containing a coin and, allegedly, the genie which had brought them all together that day.
Choudhury's disappointment with what he was seeing was no doubt compounded when he was told that the asking price for the genie was around $15,000 dollars.
As one can imagine, he balked at buying the ghost and, at that point, the true nature of the 'business meeting' was revealed when the four men robbed Choudhury and his friend.
The duo were subsequently locked in the hotel room for reasons unknown, but were able to contact outside help to save them and police later caught the culprits behind the strange scheme.
What became of the bottle goes unanswered, but we're kind of hoping that, in his moment of desperation after being robbed and kidnapped, Choudhury wished he'd never gotten into such a mess and was stunned to discover that the genie was real all along.
Source: OutlookIndia