With Apologies to the not-so-bad Cops

About 6 years back, I and G, who is a mother of two boys and is far fitter than me, used to go for a walk in our upcoming locality in our then mall-less, multiplex-less city. I call my colony upcoming because the civic amenities of a planned city were still far from it - people still had septic tanks instead of the regular sewage; in the name of water supply we had our own motor pumps and water tanks on rooftops; and the roads were maintained not by the government but by the elected governing body comprising of the colony elders. The apologies of roads would be in perpetual repair. On the days it was not raining, it would be dusty all over, and on rainy days one would have to jump over puddles with extreme dexterity. But city it nevertheless was. After all our postal addresses proudly carried the name “….city.”

Adjacent to our colony was a village. Yes, a proper village with its buffaloes tied outside. Complete with a hand pump that blessed itself for not being in Pakistan and thus having been spared its life simply due to its invisibility in the times of Sunny (Deol) Bhaaji’s Gadar-rage, dung cakes neatly pasted on the house-walls, open drains running adjacent to houses, carefree people sitting on home-woven single beds (manjies) out on the roads and enjoying the dust rained by vehicles passing them by. However, this village had hopes of being converted into a city sub-urb. Since our colony had congested roads, I and G used to walk in the open spaces (read broken roads) offered by a newer colony ‘cut’ between the village and our colony. Still we were happy because we could walk for those wonderful 55 minutes in complete absence of heavy traffic.

Now in a small area, you get immediately noticed if you are a pair of fast walking females in your walking shoes - moving fast enough to look like you are rushing to outdo the fire engines to put out a fire somewhere. Also if one of the pair (not me :D) is in tight jeans- considered totally out of sync with the dress code of the area that inhabits women in kameez salwars and their heads demurely covered with dupattas. We knew that we were arousing uncalled for curiosity. It was their problem, so we would ignore them in the hope that they would get used to us walking past them every evening, and with time, things would be okay. However, as they say in the vernacular proverb, the cat can nevertheless see the pigeon even if the latter covers its eyes.

There were some chits of boys, about 12-14 years, who would hang around some recording shops, cheap salons (I mean naii di dukaan), or even by the wall of the gurdwara that fell on the way. Every time we passed, they would pass some unkind comment which we couldn’t hear because we used to be engrossed in our own chat. They would also, on their part, try to pass it in such a low voice as to give them a perverse satisfaction of having passed a comment to two ‘females’, and at the same time the pleasure of not having been heard and thus saving them the reprimand from us. One of them went on to declare rather boldly, "go on walking, you wont slim down.” (ਜਿੰਨਾ ਮਰਜੀ ਤੁਰ ਲਓ, ਪਤਲੀਆਂ ਨਹੀਂ ਹੋਣਾ) I felt like turning back to give him a nice heavy slap on the face. Did it matter to them if we were almost their mothers’ age? However, we thought that we could not stop walking if their attitudes were different, and even with our Amazonian looks, actions and spirits, we could not go on fighting every offender on the road and thus waste our precious walk-time and much needed energy.

However, you cannot go on pretending everyday that you are not bothered. And we were bothered big time! One day, we saw two Punjab Police cops armed with wireless devices, perched on a white bullet patrolling our area. Those were the days when the PCR (Police Control Room) bikes had just started to do rounds of the cities in Punjab. I think my eyes must have had that shine of hope when I looked at G, and suggested, “Girl we can go to these PCR cops and report about those boys; at least they can warn them.”

G is the older and wiser of us two. She cut me down with, “Yeah sure, they will take care of those comment passing boys, who will take care of them?”

By 'them' she meant PCR Cops.

(ਆਹੋ, ਇਹ ਉਨ੍ਹਾਂ ਨੂੰ ਰੋਕ ਲੈਣਗੇ, ਫੇਰ ਇਹਨਾਂ ਨੂੰ ਕੌਣ ਰੋਕੂ?)

:(