Unsafe

10:57 PM. She glared at her wrist watch. Had it been any other day, she would have been snoring by then. It was the penultimate day of the month, implying that she had only a day more to complete the month’s accounts. Her eyes strolled over her visiting cards kept on the table – Aaradhana, Chief Accountant. As a little girl, she hadn’t even thought of getting into accounts in life. Her father had given her the magnanimous opportunity of choosing between engineering and accounts. She had chosen accounts because it ranked first in alphabetical order. She analyzed the bills, drafts, reimbursements. They seemed to keep coming, one after another as if they had no end.

11:30 PM. – Watch Nat Geo. A remainder popped up on her Blackberry. She could do nothing but smile. She had missed her favourite weekly show. She always wished month ends were nowhere near Saturdays, for she hated missing the show. After getting done with her work finally, Aaradhana decided to go home. She climbed down the stairs instead of using the escalator as she believed it kept her physique in shape. The very thought of going home brought to her mind the personal comfort she enjoyed there. She would walk in straight, tell her mother how funny the reimbursement proposals were. Her mother would reciprocate with “Your dad fought for the parking space” or “Our neighbour slapped her husband”. Aaradhana would be snoring when her mother had convincingly reached the climax of the neighbourhood stories.

She reached the parking lot at 11:45 PM and started searching for her bike keys. Her first visit to this place at late hours had been blood curdling. She had mistaken the silhouette of the security personnel for a ghost. After many such funny incidents, even ghosts had become her month end friends. To reach home, she either had to travel inside the city for 12 kilometres or drive through a 7-kilometre-long stretch called Edison Road that was proudly declared “Unsafe for Women” by the city police. She hadn’t even thought of taking the shorter route before. Sensing that she was feeling sleepy like never before, she wanted to get home as soon as possible. She chose Edison Road for the first time. She ignited her engines and started home.

As she reached the start of the road, she sensed herself getting more alert. Her thoughts of getting home soon were overshadowed by her urge for safety. Something about the road felt wrong. Edison Road seemed very dull amidst the city that cheered every person easily by its looks. Partially broken branches hung from the trees giving an eerie look to the already drab environment. Densely packed trees concealed every little inch of land on either side of the road. The road was very rarely in use, making maintenance a non-mandatory phenomenon. Dry leaves covered the road partially, causing dry friction against her tyres, evident from the gentle hiss that originated. Street lights were obviously unnecessary on such a stretch. But the road transport department had made it a point to place streetlights every 100 meter. The low-range streetlights alternated with dull areas making it a perfect location to shoot horror movies. To add to her woes, the penultimate day also turned out to be a full moon day. Spooky! That was the only word that Aaradhana could come up with.

She had covered about 3 kilometres when her eyes suddenly spotted a man standing very close to the centre of the road. He was holding a stick taller than him on his right hand, its bottom end touching the road. She couldn’t tell if he was lean or stout, because he seemed to be covered by a blanket. She wasn’t sure if she should stop near him. Little sweat beads rolled over her fair skin. She felt her grip on the throttle loosen. She wasn’t in complete control of herself. She felt her fear engulf her with all its might. For a split second, she considered taking a U-turn. Gathering courage from every part of her body, she raised the throttle as she whizzed past the man. It was after all, a scare crow. The fact that it wasn’t someone who might have harmed her must have obviously calmed her nerves, but it didn’t. Her fear increased instead. She could feel her blood pressure rise with every meter she crossed.

Aaradhana had crossed the first 5 kilometres when she suddenly felt the vibration from her bike getting reduced. She checked the fuel level indicator. The dial was very much near to the “E” mark. Oh! Not now. She had to get fuel somehow to power her bike on. Though she wasn’t very much familiar with that part of the city, she knew that the nearest fuel station was 500 metres away. She took out her water bottle, drank it empty, locked her bike and started walking to the fuel station with the empty bottle. She reached the fuel station 10 minutes later. She hadn’t met a single human being in the past 30 minutes and the sudden appearance of human beings before her totally stressed her brain. She went straight to the fuel filling lot without even looking at the people there and started retracing her steps towards her bike. As she crossed about 100 metres from the fuel station, she felt as if someone was following her. The intuition totally knocked off her brain’s ability to work normally.

Her anxiety got on top of her. She couldn’t break her fear and turn back to look at who had been following her. Suddenly she heard louder footsteps as if the people were approaching her. She began to realize that she was walking faster. The bottle in her hand almost slipped as she banged her hand against a tree on the way. Though she walked faster, the footsteps grew louder and louder. The people were possibly running behind her by then. She decided with all her courage that she had to run. She started increasing her pace slowly like a train starting on its tracks. Her lean physique gave her the required ability to run faster than an average girl. She started running all of a sudden, as if giving the people behind her an element of surprise.

Aaradhana didn’t even think of turning back. She assumed that seeing those people’s faces would terrify her more. She planned to run faster somehow and reach her bike so that she could flee. After she ran for about a minute, she started gasping. Her legs had already begun to give up. Her calf muscles were not strong enough as she had hardly run so much in the past. After tormenting her legs to run at their best, she finally reached her bike. She filled the fuel as fast as she could, wasting more than half of it in the process. She ignited the engines. The engines roared for a second and stopped, probably the effect of sudden refuelling.

Aaradhana ignited the engines again, this time accompanied by a heavy throttle as the bike raced ahead. She could hear men shouting behind her. She had to retrace the first 5 kilometres of Edison Road to reach a place that she presumed wasn’t unsafe. Calling someone would have been sensible at that time. But she didn’t have the mental strength to even think of it. She had to complete one more kilometre to get out of Edison Road when she saw the same silhouette that she had identified as a scare crow earlier. But that had been deeper into the road. She started forcing her mind to believe that the place she was driving then was the place she had seen the scare crow earlier as well. But all of a sudden, the silhouette started to move. It raised the stick in its hand as if waiting to beat the hell out of anyone who crossed the place. Aaradhana was completely petrified when she saw the silhouette approaching her. Suddenly the figure started running towards her at its full pace. Aaradhana was almost a meter away from the figure, when her bike skid. She wanted to see who the figure was, but suddenly the figure disappeared and her world went blank.

Aaradhana gently opened her eyes. The place was totally opposite to Edison Road. It was pleasant. It seemed familiar. A large poster of M.S. Dhoni in his Chennai Super Kings uniform hung right opposite to the bed she was lying in. Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish – another poster portrayed the famous words of Steve Jobs.

“Oh Aaradhana! You are awake,” a familiar voice said.

“Niranjan?” she replied, surprise overflowing in her voice.

“Yeah, it’s me”

Niranjan and Aaradhana had been friends since childhood. Right from mocking each other for wetting the bed when they were 6 years old to covering each others’ backs to their respective parents during their teenage, Aaradhana and Niranjan shared a beautiful bond. Niranjan was someone she could always rely upon. Aaradhana felt a sharp pain in her lower abdomen. Her mind started thinking about the worst. She didn’t want to know but she couldn’t resist herself from asking.

“Was I raped?” she asked, tears welling from her eyes.

“Come on Aaradhana, you are starting to sound too dramatic nowadays.”

“My lower abdomen pains, idiot”

“Probably from the pain killers. You were under antidepressants for almost two days”

“Pain killers? Anti depressants? Two days? What the freak happened to me Niranjan?”

Niranjan typed something on his phone and showed it to Aaradhana. It gave the definition of hallucination. A hallucination is a perception in the absence of external stimulus that has qualities of real perception. Hallucination affects all five senses. Aaradhana was taken aback.

“I ran away from nothing? I turned psychotic?”

“No, not exactly. Your fear was so much that you hallucinated about someone following you and trying to catch hold of you. It’s way too different from turning psychotic.”

“How do you know all this happened to me?”

“Thank the heavens for your new NFC helmet. When you skid, the helmet had hit the road hard. The NFC system sensed the shock and sent a text from your phone. Luckily, I was awake till 1 AM that night. I rushed to the spot.”

“You bought me that helmet which can send messages and you never told me about that?”

“Didn’t feel the need to tell,” Niranjan smiled.

“You are yet to tell me about the hallucination.”

“The local inspector is my friend. He showed the CCTV footages from the newly installed cameras in Edison Road. Though the lighting wasn’t good, I was able to see you running away from nothing,” Niranjan giggled.

“Stop mocking me. You guys should mock yourselves for mentally imposing fright in women. You don’t even have an idea of the number of unnecessary factors a girl has to consider before going out during late hours in India.”

“Oh come on Aaradhana, stop talking to me like am a criminal.”

“Not only criminals, but every man in India should know about what I said. We girls can’t go out in the night, we can’t laugh our stomachs out in public, we can’t wear what we like, we can’t even trust people as friends and you guys enjoy life like it’s meant only for you.”

“True, Aaradhana. The society has given you so much fear that you hallucinated.”

“Not only to me, but to every woman in the country. When women are able to let loose and enjoy life like men, do whatever they want, that will be the day when India gets completely developed.”

Niranjan smiled. He decided to let others know about the state of women in the country. He turned Aaradhana’s hallucination into a short story, added some drama and published it online. He promised himself that he would keep every woman he knew safe. He was sure that his readers would do that too. Someday, no place in India would be unsafe for women.