Riding at 9 PM

This is for the first time that I am finding myself staring on a white blank word document without knowing what to write for my web log. I am so sure that, this time I have no college stories, no school time adventures and not even any dreams to display for my blogger friends. Though there may be some travel adventures, like the one in which I found myself on a cycle rickshaw in Amritsar or the train journey that I made with two beautiful girls or meeting with a world famous musician like Dyana Dafova, right now, I have no comedy strips which will make my blogger friends laughing or make them curious at the least.

On a night time, after 9 pm at a rough guess, I was riding my sincere bike with my friend at my back through the royal paths; in the last year. We were heading to his settlement so that I could drop him there and another short stretch would have taken me to my room.

“This shadow trees are the contributions of the pre-independent royal reign”, he said pointing to the huge trees those were standing on both sides of the road.

“I know, I have heard it, and many more of their contributions are still surviving despite of the passing of time,’ I said approvingly.

“But today’s democracy concentrated only on destroying what the previous ruling system had achieved”, he said in a pathetic tone.

“Not only that, but as you know…...” my talk was broken abruptly due to some hard ear-piercing sound and “hey what’s that buddy?” was the only exclamation delivered from my opened mouth.

We saw not less than three racer bikes overtaking us in a typhoon-like speed making our 40 per hour a mere pedestrian walk. I could only see like a lightning a boy with lengthy straightened hair who rode his bike on the back of the row. After darting like aimless arrows from a bow, the racers took a U-turn from a point at a few metres in front of us and we saw the whole herd of these wild beings driving opposite us through the second lane of the road. As I had to pay attention to the road in front of me and the clutch, brakes and the gears were the most important for me while driving; I could not see what these fellows were doing. But my friend was watching them all the time as he was free while sitting on the back and he was preparing to yell an ‘Ayyo’ (Gosh!) at any time by putting both his hands on his head. And it happened, what I heard was a sharp thudding sound in a queue just like some steel plates arranged one by one on top tumbling down at a tap. These all happened within a few seconds.

My friend, who was portrayed in the Mystery Girl in my Lyrics blog, persuaded me to turn back and go to see what happened. I took the same U-turn and reached the accident spot. On reaching there, we saw the bike on the road in a collapsed manner and the boy with long hair lying down on the centre of the road with some blood drops around him. His friend was standing near him as if nothing has happened, who asked him to stand up to check whether any serious injuries are there. With opened and blinkless eyes stared at me, this boy attempted to obey his friend’s command, but in vain. I just stood where I stopped my bike in a helpless way, but my friend hurried towards him and offered his hand along with the other boy. Suddenly a car came, possibly of the racers’ team leader and they asked the other boy to take him into the car. My friend and the other racer boy with the help of a few more racers who had just returned took the victim into the car. The car left aiming the hospital.

On return, my friend said in a sympathetic tone, “it seems that he is stuck internally, even though no external injuries are seen”. I was speechless.

A few weeks later, when I was narrating the whole incident to one of my friends, he informed me that there was the news in the dailies that a boy was killed at this spot a few weeks before during a racing accident.

“What had put the yesterday’s big undivided families into bitter grief hardly lets even a drop of tear in the today’s nuclear family”, was what my friend who witnessed the accident said hearing the news.