An incident that refuses to fade from memory.........

Walked into another traffic police tow away yard to claim my vehicle, it’s become almost second nature now. Feel orphaned if those guys don’t pick on me atleast once a week.
The city is so crowded one cant find a parking space in the rush of meeting an appointment deadline and ever so often when you come back for the car you find it missing and some gaping hanger-ons grinning at your discomfiture.

So that’s what had happened yet again.

By now I am pretty well trained to handle this situation and I walked up to the cops cabin to pay the required amount and retrieve my vehicle and then happened the incident that refuses to fade.

As I stood there, a small white car zoomed out of its parking space towards the exit point from which a truck was just moving out. Shouts of stop, rokko went up everywhere and the truck guy stopped moving thereby effectively blocking the passage, the white car came to a screeching halt.

The window on the driver’s side was rolled down and the choicest expletives heard then a hulk of a woman came out of the car hurling abuses at all and sundry for trying to steal her money.

Everyone around was too stunned to react and the dozen odd burly looking men who habitually lift cars and bikes with ease didn’t know how to respond to this shrieking woman. One of the boys finally picked up the courage to get a wheel jammer from the truck and quickly put it on the front wheel of the car before the lady could stop him.

This by her standards apparently amounted to rape and she started beating her head and chest frantically calling out to people to help her as these men were taking advantage of a poor woman. Passer-bys stopped, another young girl heard her and stopping her car on the road cam to investigate and tried to speak to her, when she couldn’t make out anything from what the woman was saying, she looked to me for help, I told her quickly what I had seen and allayed her fears that the woman had been molested in any manner.

Between the two of us we tried to calm down the woman who seemed to fly into a greater rage on seeing us try to calm her down. She tried to start her car and then realized she cant move it because of the jammer.

What she did next is so hard to believe that you will think I dreamt this one up, but actually it’s all true. She jumped into the tow away truck which was parked in front of her car and tried to reverse the vehicle which for some reason she wasn’t able to do possibly because of her unfamiliarity with the gear system. Frustrated she started hitting her head against the steering wheel till blood started pouring out.

In the meantime I went through her purse trying to locate her mobile phone hoping to be able to call up her family or friends. I found her purse crapped with high denomination currency, the car had enough small change lying around to fund me for fifteen days and this was strewn all over the place on the seats, on the floor, in the dashboard. Finally I found her phone which was so high-end that I couldn’t fathom how to work it.

When the woman started hitting her head, me and the other girl tried to pull her down from there and we couldn’t budge her an inch, finally she came down of her own accord.
She continued with her raving and ranting and what little we could make from it was that she has been taken for a ride far too many times by men in uniform and she couldn’t bear it anymore. She lived alone with her son who studies in class ninth and she works for her living. She described herself as a poor woman who had to work hard to make two ends meet.

We tried to calm her down yet again that’s when she thrust some notes in my hand saying I should pay these guys and tell them to let her go. I went over to the cops who were standing huddled together infact they had by now decided amongst themselves that it was better to let the woman just go without pushing for any claims. When I told them she wanted to pay they said in that case they will need her license to process the papers. I went back to ask for the same and thats when she went into another round of screams and abuses. After almost ten minutes of ranting when I still insisted she either take back her money or give her license she finally relented and handed it over and the cop made out the papers.

In the time this took which couldn’t have been more than five minutes the lady got off the car picked up her purse and laptop and started to walk away. She moved out of the compound got into an autorickshaw and drove away. The hundred strong crowd that had gathered heaved an unanimous sigh of relief.

We stood around comparing notes trying to make some sense out of the scene we witnessed for close to an hour and that’s when we learnt from the traffic constable that her license had expired and these guys had been so scared of her that they didn’t press charges allowing her to go her way instead.

Her car was still parked there and we thought that was a good thing since we were all worried how many she would have mowed down even she drove in the hysterical mood she was.

The car was open and things strewn all over, she had apparently been shopping right before this incident since bags containing new purchases were lying inside and one could see that she had shopped at some of the city’s best boutique stores.

Now what do you make of this whole incident? Was she a psychologically imbalanced person? Was she someone who has been treated unfairly by the legal system of the country and this was one time that she lost her cool? Was she a con woman par excellence who could create such a ruckus that she walked away free when anyone else in her position driving around the city without a valid license would have been slapped with a huge penalty?

You decide and let me know.