As the day turned into late evening and the sun had almost set, it started raining. Soon it was quite dark as my working day came to a close and I sent my training batch back to their homes. A few colleagues and I made our way in the rain, across the railway tracks and to the bus stop. The rain ceased and we were talking and laughing while waiting for a bus to take us to our residences. We didn’t see the car actually hit the bike but we rather heard the collision and when I turned I saw the sparks fly as the bike skidded on the road. A guy in a maruti car had hit a fellow who was riding his bike.
We saw the biker stumble a bit and then walk to the side of the road as he tried to avoid being hit by the car. He was ok. The car driver took a look at the surroundings, reversed his car a bit and headed for the turning and tried to make a break for it. He was fleeing the scene of the crime, an illegal hit & run case! And the sparks did really fly as several bystanders chased him and they hit his car windows with umbrellas and a helmet. He almost made it to safety but there were way too many people around and they were able to make him stop. As I got into a bus, I could see the crowd dragging the car driver out of his car. I couldn’t see anything else and can only imagine the thrashing that the wretched sonofabitch must have received at their hands.
When I think of my childhood, I ofcourse think about the 11 years I spent in the city of my birth – Kuwait City. The capital city of the tiny country of Kuwait, currently has a city population of 32,500 and a metro population of well over 2 million. One of those 2 million used to be me, living with my parents & my sister in a tiny apartment in an area called Darwahza. The times I spent there will forever be embedded in my mind as some of the happiest & innocent moments of my life. Among one of the images & memories that I hold deeply in my heart, are the Kuwait Towers – the most famous landmark of the city & the country. Completed in 1979 (a few months before I turned 3) the three towers were built for multi-purpose operations.