Rohit woke up after a marathon sleep of sixteen hours. He needed to smoke. He got up from the bed, pulled out a sweat shirt, put it on, had a quick splash of water on his rugged face and moved out of his apartment, into the street.
The panwala shop, which was the destination, was about two hundred metres and one red light away. He started walking. He had nothing to think about, or that was what he preferred to do while walking. Only the things that formed the present, provided by his eyes and ears, were allowed to have a place in his brain RAM. So what was there now? The clumsy yellow coloured house on his left, a blue van on the road to his right, a black coloured motorcycle on the same road, a couple of kids in school uniform and with heavy school bags walking in his front and a distant traffic policemen on the red light. That was quite a long list of characters. Although the road had loads of other vehicles honking and moving but there is so much that two eyes can see and shortlist, and about the honking vehicles, in the fight of eyes and ears, the usual winner is the pair of eyes only.
He started thinking as he was walking with these characters to play with. ‘What if these kids turn around, face me and start dancing on Beedi Jalaai Le in perfect Bipasha Basu style? And the traffic policeman comes running from the red light, watches the dance, pulls out a ten rupee note, waves it over the kids’ heads and gives it to them. And the car pulls on the reverse gear and crashes into the bike, the biker is jumped out of his seat and falls on the roof of the car and starts clapping for the kids’ performance.’
The scene looked brilliant but there was not the usual smile on Rohit’s face which used to come after the complete picture in mind. Something was missing. Was he able to find out the missing link? ‘Villain! There is no villain in the story at the moment.’ But he could not think of one. He kept walking. He almost reached the redlight to cross the road behind the school kids. They were still dancing in his head.
The kids turned around. The car stopped, so did the bike. The carwala came out, the biker put the bike on a side stand. All of them pulled out something from their bags or their pockets.
They had pistols in their hands. They all frowned simultaneously and shot 2 bullets each.
Someone from the clumsy house put a bucket of water on Rohit’s body.
The End.