Last year I was coming back home after work
It’s a normal routine for any working female (at least that is what I think). But for a few its god send opportunity for an alternative employment or maybe side business for entrepreneurial bend of mind. Two guys riding a scooter first tried to come near me. In basketball they teach you how to stick out your elbows. I was preparing my elbows for the impending action. But alas there was no need. They simply tried to snatch my handbag. O no! What about my ATM? The keys of my sister’s flat? The money? The keys of my own apartment? I kept a tight hold on the strings of my purse.
Wow! In Kanpur they still make the best and authentic leather purses! The strings did not snap! My countless thanks to the creator of the purse The tussle went on between the guy in the back seat ( the other one was driving. Good example of team work. I wonder which management school he went to!). My countless laps of free style and butterfly swimming must have done something to my arms or was it the punishment doled out by our Taek-wan-Do coach to keep doing push-up on merely two or three fingers (O! the revered coach. While writing all this I am bowing to him. Ok at least mentally. But that time he looked like the incarnation of emotionless devil ).
Suddenly I remember my brother whispering to me, when something untoward happens, scream with all your might. That was what I did. Yes, the scooter was in the mound of a sand and the two chum bum were totally panicking by now. Taking the cue my rickshawallah too started shouting. Though he abandoned his Rickshaw along with me sitting on the same. Well I never thought too intensely why Gandhiji never liked the idea of being in Rickshaw). In a flash of a second, I found both knees in the sand mound but my hands still holding the strings of my purse.
By now, both the fellows had bowed down to external factors present in their little entrepreneurship, and left their project. I just remember I was clutching someone’s hand in the crowd for support and asking him,
“Please call the Ricksawallh, I still have not paid him.”
Poor fellow! He never intended to be a party to this little endeavor. I paid him whatever came out from my……. (No! No! This was my sister’s purse. But things inside it were MINE. Very generously she lends out her things to me. But what is the big deal. God precisely made sisters for this purpose.)
I don’t remember how I reached home. For the first time in my life I understood the meaning of why people say the best place in the world — MY ROOM. But then the panic and fear struck with its full force. I could not restrain myself. I was crying like anything and my hands were shivering so much they were simply incapable of holding a glass!!!!!
Today when I remember this incident I am filled with two regrets, first not registering the case in the nearest police station and second I failed my emotionless devils known as our Taek-wan-Do coaches. I could not use a simple side kick. I console myself that my ankle was swollen and I was barely able to walk at that time and I hurt the same ankle again along with my knees (the reason for me landing up in a rickshaw). But you always know when you cook up excuses.
