Naini Tal, Uttarakhand, India. 1930. Sorry I can't be more precise about the date; my mother told me she was ten years old at the time.
My mother's family lived in Allahabad on the banks of the Ganges and would go up into the foothills of the Himalayas in the summertime to escape the heat. This particular year, they went up early as my mother's older sister Phyllis was sick and they thought the cooler climate might help control her fever.
The nights were still warm though, and the two sisters slept out on the verandah in truckle beds under mosquito nets. My mother woke in the pre-dawn and saw a huge wolf sitting by the foot of her sister's bed. She was terrified and did not dare move, just stayed very still and watched.
As the sun rose and the light crept across the verandah, the wolf just faded out into nothingness. The Indian servants, when they found out, were panic-stricken, declaring it was either the goddess Kali or a Raksha, a demon. The only good news, they said, was that it was sitting at the girl's feet. It was a sign that she would recover. If it had been sitting at her head, the girl would sicken further and die.
That day, Phyllis' fever broke and she recovered completely. The full story can be found in the book Rakshasa by Max Overton.
