The Strolling experience

I occasionally go out on evening strolls. I wish I could say it always relaxes the mind and gives a fresh perspective. I have often returned home more irritated and tired than how I had left. It’s impatience, the roads are full of it, people hurrying on two wheelers, four wheelers, on foot for some reason only known to them and that they do with a kind of temperament we used to see in the movies once and think ‘there is no way such ill tempered person exists’ only to find years later that the world was full of them.



I was impatient too once, I still am to a certain degree but one good thing about writing is that it helps you understand more, and makes you grow in ways which are honestly quite different from just reading. In the end only we truly know what our words truly want to mean.



So, coming back to my evening strolls. I sometimes took a different route for a change of scene or to avoid the impatient rush and I know all the buildings, the shops, the trees and the roads a bit more closely than many, and they later form the basis of my writings. There is a distinct single white building, with shops on the ground floor and apartments above.



The building wasn’t supposed to be white, the 3d model of building which the builders displayed when the building was being constructed was quite different with gunmetal steel colour mixed with coconut white. Now the white they had painted it with, made it look incomplete. I know the building a little more closely than the others because I had researched it a bit for one of my relatives who had this temporary urge to shift to my city.



I could see the side of the building from far on the route I had taken. Soon the route would pass in front of it and when it did, that is when I noticed the unusual black, which was more on the outside of one apartment and less on the outside of those around it. It was a remnant of a fire. People who were passing by, stopped to look at what had happened and they took their time to look and associate it with whatever imagination it produced in their minds. I have never seen a big fire of such scale, but I have heard and read horrific things about the hunger it possesses.



I noticed Mr Gosain explaining things to a gentleman. Mr Gosain’s house was the one right in front of the building, so he saw it all happen. I decided to move myself a little closer to them to catch a word or two in the wind, but the conversation had ended and I decided to ask Mr Gosain directly.



“What happened?” I asked



“An air conditioner caught fire and the fire spread,” replied Mr Gosain



“Is everyone all right?” I asked



“Yes everyone is fine, the owners of the apartment managed to get out on time and inform everyone. It was a big mess with firefighters trying to control the fire. At one point I thought of leaving the house with my family to be safe, but it was not required,” explained Mr Gosain



I knew what Mr Gosain would say next. He was a broker and talked a bit too much about all the wrongs that could happen in life, I have no clue about his attitude in his profession. The thing about being what we label as a negative person or even a positive person, is that the person is almost always right, to the point where some might even begin saying that it’s the words he/she utters which become true. Whether it is good or bad, both will eventually happen and people on both sides would be right. I think it is wise to be alert of the words of both.



“I knew this would happen one day,” said Mr Gosain, “everyone thinks that because these machines are made for cooling, they would be able to bear the excessive heat due to climate change. But no, everything has its limit.”



“If it was just heat, wouldn’t there be a lot more incidents?” I asked



“There are more incidents, just not enough for newspapers and news channels to think its newsworthy,” said Mr Gosain



He was right, by the end of the month, there were several incidents at different places in the city. It wasn’t just the heat, it was also lack of proper maintenance with some people not having their air conditioners serviced for years.



Since no one was injured in the incident, and the owner of the apartment was a wealthy doctor from a wealthy family, I joked to Mr Gosain when we met again the next day, “You can place some chairs and charge people money for an hour’s time for looking at the burnt apartment while you tell them what happened.” Mr Gosain may have smiled and he does not smile at all.

Written by Anuran Chatterji

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