Life goes on

   Noon. Twelve fifteen. The office bus is late. Nothing unusual. The driver smiled when he stopped at my bus stand, he knew the bus will not reach office on time. I sat on the aisle seat just behind the driver. A clear view of the road lay ahead of me. I adjusted the seat, relaxed and looked out to the crawling motorcycles and ant shaped auto rickshaws. Clever quotes on the autos made an interesting time pass during the long journey.

  A girl in a pink and white dress was sitting next to me. An expensive mobile in her hand, she spoke discreetly into her mouthpiece. She covered her sweet nothings with her dupatta, I could hardly hear her. I sat there gazing into the big windshield in front of me, occasionally trying to eavesdrop into what she spoke. Only hearing aids can help amplify her voice.

  The bus snailed through the thick traffic, everything moved at a slow pace. The driver turned onto Cenatoph road. A few bicycles raced past our bus. A motley crowd had gathered outside the Biometric center of the American Embassy. The driver whistled an old Tamil song and took the road below the flyover on a Centoph road. Red signal. A hundred more seconds to go. Why didn’t he take the flyover? I wouldn’t ask him. I’m just an observer.

  Forty seconds more. At that junction where eight lanes converged, a white Honda city turned to its right. Big noise, a man leaped into the sky, fell on the road, tumbled and went out of view. A crowd gathered, the man was out of sight immediately. The driver of the car, a white haired old man, came out of the car. Huge dent. A disfigured bonnet. A few feet away lay the scraps of a motorbike, turned upside down.

  The wreckage still stood in the middle of the road. Vehicles honked loudly. The signal went down. No more timers. Police arrived, drew outlines around the bike and the car with a white chalk piece.  The old man, completely taken back by the turn of the events stood near his car. He looked anxious, but calm enough to stand there amidst all the clamor. He must have faced tougher things in his long life.

   The crowd dispersed, the girl next to me shifted from her accident commentary to the low voice, an auto passed by with a message written in bold, “Thambi helmet a podu, illannae unna sutthi poduvanga kodu.*” Our bus moved forward slowly. Life goes on.