Life on a Divider

(Short Story)

It is a half kilometer walk for her from her office to the bus stop. She wanted to reach home early but she deliberately slowed down so that the well dressed gentleman who was staring at her buttocks while walking behind her was forced to walk past her. The road side tea-vendor was disappointed to death when she adjusted her sari just in time to prevent him from catching a side view of her pointed breasts. There were no zebra crossing or pedestrian lights. So she joined a group of people who braved the speeding traffic to cross the road halfway. All of them stood on the narrow road-divider hoping for a pause in the flow of the vehicles on the other side. The people standing on the median in a straight line appeared like a cross section of the Indian society: executives in formal suits, labourers, college students, a foreign tourist(he looked baffled), a person carrying a bicycle in his hands, a few smelly street kids in torn clothes carrying begging plates, a dog and our lady protagonist. For apparently no reason at all, she walked a few paces on the divider towards the right away from the waiting group, lost her balance all of a sudden and fell on to the half side of the road which she had just crossed. The vehicles did not stop, but the motorists took great pains to ensure that they did not hurt her as they whisked past her at 100 kmph. The street children who were standing on the divider waiting to cross the road jumped down to protect her and to pull her up to the safety of the divider. Some of the others on the divider were eager to help too, but unfortunately it was at the precise moment of her fall that they had sensed a momentary slowing down of the traffic on the other side of the road; and they had been programmed like robots to do nothing but cross the road whenever such an opportunity arose. But the street children were neither in a hurry, nor were their lives precious. It is not sure if their act was propelled by a selfish expectation of something in return for saving her life. She did not, in fact, give anything more than a sincere 'Thank you' to those children, not because she did not want to give them money, but because it would have been embarrassing. She was shaking all over and her eyes were moist with gratitude. As she narrated the incident to me the next day, she confessed that it was to avoid standing near those half naked children who "smelled like shit" that she had walked on the divider and moved away.