I exit the by lane and enter the main road. I give it a look one more time before I drive away. It must have been a fleeting feeling. I decide to drive at a normal speed.

I reach the Ayurveda college junction and come to halt. A couple of roads bifurcate towards my right. I look at them thoroughly, looking for any movement or anything out of the ordinary. One road is narrow and vanishes away downhill. The other one is wider and can be seen for quite some distance. There aren’t any vehicles lying on the two roads. I resume my drive.

I will be reaching Overbridge junction. It got its name from the overbridge across the railway lines. If you take a city bus, it takes this route that I have taken. The long-distance buses usually take the left turn from PMG junction and take the parallel road passing through Bakery junction to the bus stand in Thambanoor. They drop you right in front of the railway station or inside the bus stand. The city buses have a different bus stand in East Fort. In order to reach the railway station or the bus stand, you will have to get down at this junction and walk the distance. It takes five minutes.

These buses connect the various parts of the city. They are white with a blue streak. They are operated by the state road transport authority. Apart from these, there are privately owned buses. They are green in color. The long-distance state buses that connect the two corners of the state and all the underlying districts have an orchestrated color shade of red and mellow yellow. They are classified into different categories depending on their service. A seasoned traveler can distinguish them by looking at the pattern of the two colors.

We used to take these local buses to come into our city from college. They would be instantly filled after four in the evening. It takes forty minutes to reach Overbridge junction. We got down and rushed to take the train tickets from the crowded counter. As the years passed our homeward journeys became less. We used to bunk the last class in order to get an earlier empty train. The enthusiasm of going home even if we had to stand the whole distance had faded away. We learned to make use of the weekends and holidays with our friends.

This stretch of road has a couple of big shopping arcades on the opposite side. People come here for their clothing needs. Women come here to buy sarees and churidars. They are also a one-stop destination for your wedding needs. My wife comes here to do saree shopping. Since there are a couple of them side by side, you will never run out of options. Unlike a normal clothing shop, coming here is a task in itself. It will surely take away a good amount of time. But then you can do all your shopping from this one place and avoid visiting shops one after the other looking for clothes. They are always crowded no matter what the occasion is. One of them even has a supermarket inside it. They fight for customers with sales and offers throughout the year.

The sidewalk and the entry to these arcades are silent and empty. Only when a hartal happens does one come across such a scenario. The smaller shops that try to pick on the leftover customers are also closed.

I can see the junction in front of me. It is awfully quiet. As I approach it, I see a local bus rammed into the bus stand on my left. It has destroyed the waiting shed. There wasn’t one in my college days. The road was extended in width and a bus stop was made there. Buses had to take the left lane and stick to it to enter the parking bay. They had built a divider to serve this purpose. They must have done this to lessen the congestion caused by the buses halting here to unload their passengers.

Apart from this, a car has rammed onto the sidewalk on the other side of the road. I overtake the crashed bus and look at it from the front. The windshield is cracked. It remains intact. There is no sign of anyone inside it. The sign board reads East Fort. It was coming from the northeastern part of the city. I deduced it from the remaining names of the places printed out on the board below the destination.

I resume my journey and take the free left onto the road leading to Thambanoor. It is a significant part of the city. Everyone knows it. This is the end point of your journey into the city. The railway station and the bus stand, opposite each other, make sure that you reach in or get out of the city. A ticket to Trivandrum will see you getting off here to the call of the conductor or the blare of the railway announcement system. Get into any auto or taxi and say your destination as Thambanoor, they will drop you in front of one of them. They will obviously ask you which of the two along the journey.

Thambanoor can be considered to be the center point from which the city grew. It is a low-lying area that feels the brunt of the monsoons every year. During heavy rains, the place becomes flooded and becomes difficult to navigate. Since it is a place seeing a lot of travelers, there are a lot of restaurants and food joints to cater to everyone's needs. I was introduced to the iconic red spiral building of Indian Coffee house. Dad took me here to have breakfast on my first visit to the city. We had come to complete the process of admission to the college. The building and its structure impressed me a lot. Once inside I was fascinated by how things were managed inside it. It did have a lot of tables inside it, which surprised me given its design. It spiraled upward with the tables placed on the outer edge. They were mostly full. We had to walk to the end of the spiral and take the last table to have our meal. It felt like I was being a part of a heritage.

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As I take the free left, I come across a car that has driven off the road and into the pavement. It hasn’t crashed onto anything. It stays part here, part there. A bike lies flat on the little strip of divider that began with the turn. I wonder how it fell this way. It intrigued me. So I stop to examine it. It doesn’t look like a crash. It looks as if it was standing stationary when it fell down. Since it has fallen to the side that doesn’t have the side stand, the only explanation I can think of is the driver disappeared when he stopped here. That is a bit strange. It doesn’t feel like the crashes I have come across. I have seen many of them in such a short time period to figure out their dynamics. There is no traffic to come to a halt. I wonder why he stopped.

One of the factors that made me reach this conclusion is that in the other bike accidents I came across, some part of the bike was damaged or disfigured. This one is intact. Also, the way it fell on the divider seemed to be like how we sometimes leave our bikes to fall on the ground as we rush onto something. We come to a stop and then let it fall. That doesn’t damage the bike. Maybe a bit of paint might peel off. Or a small scratch.

I am wondering why the rider stopped his bike. What made him stop at an odd time of the day in the middle of the road? If I had to stop, I would take the left end and stop at the edge of the road, not in the middle of it. Seems very strange.

I get back to my scooter and continue on. I cross a newly opened vegetarian restaurant that she had discovered while I was away for work. She was looking for a reason to take me here for a meal. She got one when we decided to go for a movie at one of the theatres around here. We had our dinner after the movie and parcelled home some sweets.

There are a lot of movie theatres in and around Thambanoor. This was a boon for us during our college days. Movies were a craze back then. The balcony ticket cost sixty rupees while the first class was half of it. It was really cheap. Because of the close proximity of the theatres, there have been multiple occasions where we would go for back-to-back movies. If the movie was a super hit, we would buy the balcony tickets. If it was a mediocre one, we would settle for first class.

Back then the concept of a multiplex was alien to the city. The generic theatre design was to have a lower seating called the first class with an upper balcony section jutting out from the back of the theatre to a certain distance so as to not create a hindrance to the viewers sitting at the end of first class. This design was universally followed in the country. Some modifications can be included on the balcony or in the first class. Like the cinema complex that stood close to the railway tracks close to Overbridge junction. It housed four theatres. Three of them followed the traditional design. The fourth one was carved out from the remaining space. It was small and cramped. It extended length-wise because of which they had to go for a single sweeping floor. We knew the theatre and avoided it at all costs as the movie experience was bad.

Adjacent to the restaurant is one of the oldest theatres in the city. I remember standing in long queues to get tickets on Fridays. Theatres have changed with time. They have adopted the trend of making the movie-going a wholesome experience by undertaking a major revamp. They brought in comfortable seats and premium seating options (like the recliner), improving the sound system, keeping the seating to a comfortable number, and providing more options in the food and beverages department. The ticket price went up as a matter of fact. But the public was ready to shell out the money for a better movie experience.

With the advent of mobile apps, booking a ticket has become easy and quick. One need not stand in long queues to watch a movie premiere. They can book them beforehand and show up on the day at the allotted time. Times have really changed.

Adding to that was the exponential growth of media streaming. If you had asked me when I was passing out of college about a technology that will bring the movie-watching experience into your palms in real time, I would have scoffed at you and had a hearty laugh. One had to overcome the existing big screen industry followed by the DVD/home media. Back then we had to download a movie first to watch it. It has not even taken a decade for it to evolve into a form wherein you click the play button and start streaming a movie the moment it releases. Technology indeed has grown by leaps and bounds.

But has it failed to take into account a doomsday kind of scenario? Kind of like the one I find myself in. The bitter truth is I have become wholly dependent on it from the time I wake up to the moment I shut my eyes and call it a night. To a very large extent we all have.

This technology that we rave about is absolutely useless to me right now. I want to throw my phone into the ground and see it break into pieces. But I need it. It has been the preferred method of communication for us for a long time. If something has to happen, it will happen in this space. There have been outages worldwide. They do get restored soon enough. This is also something like that. I will hear the chime of a message or my ringtone and jump with joy. I just need to give it some time. It is being looked after as we speak. Just some more time.

I take out my phone from the left pocket. I double-tap on the screen to wake it up. The familiar home screen greets me. Both my networks are dead.