A Bowl of Elusive

Disclaimer - This is a work of fiction and can get pretty graphic and explicit at times. Read it with an open mind.  It was a humid evening in Kolkata. I could see the puddles created by the rain from this morning. Somehow I had managed to get off early from work. I was visiting the city for a meeting with the team. I wasn’t very fond of Kolkata as a city. It was crowded and loud and unorganized but it had Rashmita. I knew her from my brief stint at the Oberoi Hotel, Mumbai. She had been an Industrial Trainee then and I was a manager-on-training. Being an employee, we considered all interns “kids”. She was still in college after all. It didn’t matter that she was actually older than I was, by a year or so on account of having started the vocation a few years later than I had. So, I was a little stand-offish when she’d asked me if I was single. It had seemed unethical to get involved with a “junior”. But her internship ended after a few months and she left. I did notice her...

The other night, I traveled from Bangalore to Hyderabad on an Orange Travels Bus. It was an A/C Sleeper (1+1). That means it had cabins with berths similar to those on a train. I got on the bus at around 11;30 pm. And by that time, two out of four berths in my cabin were already occupied. I settled down on my berth. About a half an hour later, while I was busy over a call with my girlfriend, the last passenger of my cabin boarded the bus from another stop. It was a girl. And that's all I can tell you.  She entered the cabin with a handbag and surveyed her surroundings. Three guys. And I bet that's all she saw. I happened to glance at her face at this moment. And I caught an expression of doubt, suspicion, terror, panic. Discomfort, I could have rationalized. But panic?  You see this is what the world has come to. A girl finds out that she has to spend another 7 hours around three men, each of whom looks educated and civilized, and her first reaction is terr...