It was a rainy weekday morning. As clumsy as it can get, the city was enmeshed in the incoherent bawling of its people on the roads. As someone opined about the city once with a sigh, everyone rushes past the others and no one makes it in time.
There was a clear, tacit hierarchy & its associated condescension within the city's traffic. A luxury car driver looked down upon a mere hatchback's owner with contempt that was bred due to the former's repudiation of the latter's possession of a car. Same was more or less application to the duos of car-bike, bike-cycle commuters.
Small puddles of water came into being on the roads; sometimes concealing hungry & dreadful manholes beneath them, but most of the times the puddles had deeper throats than one anticipated and created problems for vehicles and their owners.
This guy in question was already later of office. Let's call him Giq - going by Guy In Question. An auto rickshaw sped past Giq like most auto rickshaws do in India; conveniently throwing fellow commuters' safety for a toss. Wile speeding past Giq, one of the rickshaw's tyres landed in a puddle and that splashed water onto Giq's bike. His trousers also received some painting.
Giq cursed the rickshaw driver explicitly by making obscene gestures too; but his shouts only acquired a sense of disjointedness and incoherence - losing their meaning to the cacophony of the traffic around.
The spattering only made Giq's rest of the journey a bitter experience; until he was just a U-turn and 100 metres away from his office. He stunted a jerky U-turn with another water puddle waiting for his rear tyre to be dunked into it like a basketball.
With that dunking arose a spatter of water that landed on another guy who was making a rather controlled U-turn. His right side of the bike looked like it was artfully smeared with wet chocolate while his face looked like that of a soldier's who crawled on a wet marshland in Indonesia dodging bullets.
Giq thought it wasn't going to be just bitter but would instead turn to be resentful with a possible altercation with the Indonesian soldier.
The other guy gave an amiable smile to Giq which reflected the reassurance of empathy saying, "It could happen with anyone on a bad day" and drove on.
The auto rickshaw driver found his way to bring his auto to a halt right beside a stupefied Giq, looked squarely into his eyes and sped off nonchalantly, avoiding another big water puddle with a dexterity only seen in Indian auto drivers.
There was a clear, tacit hierarchy & its associated condescension within the city's traffic. A luxury car driver looked down upon a mere hatchback's owner with contempt that was bred due to the former's repudiation of the latter's possession of a car. Same was more or less application to the duos of car-bike, bike-cycle commuters.
Small puddles of water came into being on the roads; sometimes concealing hungry & dreadful manholes beneath them, but most of the times the puddles had deeper throats than one anticipated and created problems for vehicles and their owners.
This guy in question was already later of office. Let's call him Giq - going by Guy In Question. An auto rickshaw sped past Giq like most auto rickshaws do in India; conveniently throwing fellow commuters' safety for a toss. Wile speeding past Giq, one of the rickshaw's tyres landed in a puddle and that splashed water onto Giq's bike. His trousers also received some painting.
Giq cursed the rickshaw driver explicitly by making obscene gestures too; but his shouts only acquired a sense of disjointedness and incoherence - losing their meaning to the cacophony of the traffic around.
The spattering only made Giq's rest of the journey a bitter experience; until he was just a U-turn and 100 metres away from his office. He stunted a jerky U-turn with another water puddle waiting for his rear tyre to be dunked into it like a basketball.
With that dunking arose a spatter of water that landed on another guy who was making a rather controlled U-turn. His right side of the bike looked like it was artfully smeared with wet chocolate while his face looked like that of a soldier's who crawled on a wet marshland in Indonesia dodging bullets.
Giq thought it wasn't going to be just bitter but would instead turn to be resentful with a possible altercation with the Indonesian soldier.
The other guy gave an amiable smile to Giq which reflected the reassurance of empathy saying, "It could happen with anyone on a bad day" and drove on.
The auto rickshaw driver found his way to bring his auto to a halt right beside a stupefied Giq, looked squarely into his eyes and sped off nonchalantly, avoiding another big water puddle with a dexterity only seen in Indian auto drivers.
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