One year before
Morning 10 AM. Near Mitra's office, Bangalore
Mitra was walking from the bus stop towards the SEZ that housed her office. Traffic was congested as usual along the road owing to the peak time of office goers arriving at the SEZ in the morning.
The usually composed Mitra always found the walk along the pavement from the bus stop to her office irritating during the peak traffic times. No, not because of the density of people walking towards SEZ on the sidewalk, but because of the people who drove their two-wheeler vehicles like bikes and scooters onto the pavement illegally to bypass the traffic on the road and reach the SEZ gates.
If there's one common feature across Indian roads, it is the knack of people not following traffic rules. Riders on two-wheelers often drive onto the pavements to bypass the traffic congestion on roads. They don't care about rules, or the possibility of harming physically the pedestrians while driving through them on the pavement.
Mitra's route to office was no different. Anarchy happened every day. People would be walking on the footpath, and some senseless, impatient, rule-bending people would drive onto the footpath on their bikes and scooters. They would keep honking their horns to make the pedestrians "steer away and clear up the footpath" so they can drive through. Most of the times, they would dangerously zoom past the people walking on foot, and no matter how many times the pedestrians complained that it was illegal and fatally dangerous for vehicles to get onto the footpath, the shameless ones never listened.
Mitra herself lost her temper on multiple occasions when the illegal drivers blew their horns to make the walkers get off the footpath, and had stopped a few vehicles on the way. There were times when she piled up rocks at the starting and ending points of the pavement to stop the vehicles from getting on. Yet, somehow, there would be at least one bully who would kick away at the rocks to clear up the path and drive onto the pavement, all in an attempt to bypass the traffic on the road.
That morning, the bikers were exceedingly more in number and one of them had accidentally hit a pedestrian with his bike while trying to overtake her on the pavement. The woman had hit her elbow and grazed her knee, and Mitra, who had been walking a couple of feet behind her, got enraged by the mishap.
Reaching out to the biker, Mitra pulled him off his vehicle and demanded he take responsibility.
"Are you even educated?" she asked him furiously. "Don't you even have a basic sense and decency not to ride a vehicle onto a footpath? What were you planning to do? Kill the pedestrians on your way so you can reach your office five minutes early?"
More pedestrians stopped along the way, joining the protest against the accident's perpetrator. They stopped the others who had likewise driven their vehicles onto the pavement and gave them an earful to have some traffic sense and get off the footpath. One of the pedestrians called up the traffic police while the others said they were fed up with the continuous rule-breaking and wouldn't leave the place unless the authorities did something to stop the two-wheelers from getting onto the sidewalks.
Mitra went a step ahead and pulled out her phone. She started recording everything, giving details of how the accident happened, how bikers were driving onto the pavement illegally everyday thereby harming the pedestrians, how the traffic management department has been doing nothing to rectify the situation. She filmed the registration plates of the bikes that were stopped on the footpath and the bikers themselves.
Unbeknown to her, Sashi was present there. He had been driving a bike he had borrowed from his acquaintance along that road when he spotted Mitra getting off a bus.
He had stopped driving abruptly, his heart thumping against his chest, unable to believe that he was finally seeing her after almost eleven years. Till that day he hadn't gone back to their hometown and he had had no information on where Mitra was. He didn't know her social media handles either for him to track her whereabouts. At some point, he began believing that he would run into her if it was really written down in his destiny.
Sure enough, there she was, looking a little frail and serious, but still herself. He took a u-turn and tried to drive along the road to reach her. The traffic, however, was completely jammed and Mitra was walking away on the sidewalk really fast, slipping in and out of his vision as she weaved through the throng of other pedestrians walking there.
Sashi had felt so impatient and scared of losing sight of her that he steered his bike to the side of the road and drove onto the pavement to reach Mitra. Before he could reach her, however, some other biker driving ahead of him hit a woman and the accident triggered a protest on the pavement.
Sashi too stopped at the commotion, with the pedestrians there asking him to get off his bike and seizing the keys. Sashi wasn't bothered by the clamour. He got off his bike and tried to get a little closer to where Mitra was standing and arguing with the perpetrator of the accident.
She looked furious, bright and unrelenting. Sashi was quite taken up by her enthusiasm and turned blind to her flare-up. As he inched a little closer to her, Mitra held up her phone, filming the entire ordeal of the agitation and the outlaws on the pavement.
She turned to Sashi, with no hint of recognition on her face, simply beaming with ire, and captured him on the video saying as a narrative, "There's another of the rogue. These people simply don't have any sense of responsibility. They wouldn't mind driving over living people just because they think they are royalty enough to wait in the traffic on the road."
She turned away filming the others, and Sashi was left standing there feeling an unspeakable amount of disappointment and rage at being given the cold shoulder when he had rushed over for her. She didn't even look at him again while he stood there with his full attention on her.
Within minutes traffic police came over and started seizing the two-wheeler vehicles on the footpath along with writing up Traffic Violation Notices for the lawbreakers. Sashi was sized up by a Traffic Inspector, who took a very serious offense when Sashi ignored him and looked past him at a busy Mitra who was helping the police write up the violation report.
Sashi's bike was towed away and he was forced to follow the police. All the while as he was led away, he kept looking back to study Mitra, realizing that she didn't even know who he was, and wasn't even showing any hint of interest in the man whose eyes held no one but her in their vision.
He left the place and Mitra with resentment.