The Co-passenger

 

It was a lazy, foggy morning and I was running behind the time. A quick dry-fruit-Laddu breakfast and a little yoghurt was enough for me to make a hasty start. I murmured a fast track gratitude line to God, curled up my hair,  clutched it up and stepped down the staircase as I fixed my shoes on my way. A loud bye to mommy as I bang the ‘C’ shaped lock on the gate. The sound distressed my neighbouring aunty as she slided her window glass to watch me disappear. I walked briskly, crossed the road and stuffed myself inside the autorickshaw, like a smashed potato inside a bun. The rickshaw stopped at a few locations where initially a teen got down, then the senior citizen couple got down and that’s when a lady got in. The rickshaw headed towards the college that I work in as a professor. The rickshaw driver looked at me through the front mirror until I gave him a stern glare. I pulled on my mask with the threat of catching flue virus in air. Through the puddles and pits on the road, rickshaw managed to go further, sometimes avoiding them and at times bouncing back. There were signals where we stopped and I happen to realise that people especially men of all the ages were peeping and staring inside the rickshaw. I stopped my thought process and a revision of my ‘things to do’ list, and looked at the front mirror if all was well on my face. I shrugged off my observation and got back on my thinking track. Soon due to traffic we slowed down and repeatedly I found men including the traffic police looking inside the rickshaw without a blink of an eye. I became super conscious and uncomfortable about this and it started bothering me now. As all the masculine looks pooled inside our rickshaw, I managed to look at the co-passenger sitting next to me. She was a girl in teens, wearing red salwar kurta with a beige dupatta having a jari border. She had a milky fair tone and flawless skin. Her big golden jhumkas had shining stones studded and hair were bleached golden. She had worn laakh bangles with flashy mirror work. Her eyes were lined thickly with a black kajal and she pressed her lips to signify the urgency of her own. She wore a very flashy make up and her lipstick was super dark maroon with a brown outline. She looked overdone in her appearance in the daylight. Her body language was extraordinarily familiar to men and by now my 6th sense had learnt that she was none other than a sex worker. She was in hurry to catch for her schedule aligned by her for a basic livelihood. As the multidirectional incidental glares fell on her, her vibes refracted them back with a shield of ignorance and indifference. As I was solving this jigsaw of observations, she asked the driver to stop the rickshaw, while getting down hurriedly, she placed a roll of currency on his palm and walked into a direction hurriedly. Me, the driver, the autorickshaw and the strong lingering rosé fragrance of my co-passenger headed further on the road ‘not-so-busy’. Every rising day comes with a haste, a plan to accomplish and a timeline which places every single human on a common, unbiased platform. Every co-passenger has a storyline, a deadline, a timeline and a lifeline, which is unmatched.