Last Wednesday evening, as I sat resting on a pavement at Mohakhali, there was a nice breeze, quite chilly. Maybe it had rained somewhere near. It was more wintry than the usual springtime breeze of these days of Falgun. The traffic in the Mohakhali-Gulshan area was atrocious, not so bad within Banani though, but the mosquitoes have been the rulers of this city of late.
It was in the afternoon of the leap year’s extra day (Monday) that I last came out of my house till I did again on Wednesday. Around noon on that Monday, I was headed for Gulshan 1; it was bright and sunny and I walked some of the way before I took a rickshaw for the remaining distance. I planned on walking all the way back to Banani. A couple of hours later, when I was ready to head home, the sun was still brilliantly resplendent but scorching as well.
I thought better of walking in the heat considering the pressure it might put on my heart, and hence the rickshaw. The traffic was remarkably thin, and in almost no time I was on Road 11 of Banani. Made me realise once again how short distances are between two points in this city, but how it takes ages to cover them!
My rickshaw-wallah was a young man in his mid-20s, still full of vigour and quite alert: Many of them waste away so young. The traffic at Road 11, usually found clogged with various types of vehicles and people at this time of day, was so thin that it almost felt eerie. I guess all the “excavation” going on in the area had deterred people from coming to this area in droves of cars as is the case regularly. As is a rickshaw-wallah’s wont, my one just extended his right hand for a split second and was about to turn into one of the golis that would take me to my destination even faster.
Through sheer luck I was not totally relaxed sitting on the rickshaw, and was still keeping an eye on the traffic. I could easily have been looking elsewhere, but I was not, and I noticed an SUV rushing madly from the opposite side, and I screamed. My rickshaw-wallah, alert in spite of the heat and his profuse sweating, noticed it too: He braked with all his might, and turned his handle to avoid coming in the way of the marauding SUV.
The driver of the SUV braked too, and stopped very near me. However, as I could see, if my rickshaw hadn’t taken such abrupt manoeuvers at my scream, the monster car would have hit me. With knees already weakened, I looked at the thick bumpers of the car. The driver, as he rolled down his tinted window, was hardly 16 or 17, with wisps of the first beard of a teenager on his face. He looked disgusted and angry because this rickshaw carrying this “old man” had made him lose his breakneck speed.
I wondered if he had a license, I wondered also what kind of an idiot drives like that on a Dhaka afternoon street, even when the traffic is thin. Then I thought, why should he have cared? He would have gotten away with the murder(s) anyway! It was not difficult to imagine the mangled bodies of my rickshaw-wallah and me, our gray matter mixed and spread on his shiny bumper, to be washed off with a hose pipe. A case filed with the police for reckless driving and then with time, the file gathering dust, till one day it was incinerated with other such “garbage” or, in Digital Bangladesh, going to the icon of a bin on the monitor. Well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles, I guess.
I have driven fast in Dhaka, I used to make it to BUET from Gulshan 2 in less than 15 minutes in a 1000cc Toyota Starlet, but that was the 80s; traffic was always very thin in the newer part of town. It was possible to drive at 70 or even 80 miles an hour on the road that led to the airport. But those days are long gone, and driving in Dhaka city has become a totally different affair in the last two decades or more. The city has filled up to the brim with cars and people and whatnot!
It took a few seconds for him to start peddling, and I was in a state of shock, still, when I realised he was going past my place, and I had forgotten to tell him to stop. I told him, he stopped. I felt I was in a state of inertia, but managed to get off and took out the fare and extended it to the young man. He received it in a daze. He was staring blankly at the street, having just seen death like his passenger, but having escaped its clutches.
I offered to bring him some water, but there was no response; I told him to stand still awhile before he looked for his next passenger; I didn’t have a clue if he heard anything that I had said.
I came home and looked for some “short-term” cheer to a long-term problem of living in this city, and only ended up feeling even more bitter. I was shaken to the core, as I kept replaying the incident and felt angrier and angrier, depressed, and maybe, helpless.
As I sat yesterday evening thinking things over, I realised what huge roles coincidences and chance play in our lives. If only I had been looking in any other direction on that fateful afternoon at that almost fateful moment, I would have become a grim statistic along with the young rickshaw-wallah. Was he a married man, I wondered.