A mob had gheraoed a scooter that tried to pass a barricade next to Pride Plaza. Driving it was a lady, with a frightened child in front and an elderly man riding pillion.
This is what I got out of my car to see. The goons shouted at the lady to get lost and I clicked this picture on my phone. I had tried to be discrete but every corner of this road had tens of people squatting on the footpath, perched on tea stalls and someone somewhere had seen me. They started calling out.
I sensed the danger and rushed to the car, parked a few steps away. But the driver was loitering outside.
He had barely got seated when the crowd reached us.
They slammed my window with their fists and shouted: “Delete the video!” As if the bored crowd had finally found something fun to do, hoards of people swarmed the car like bees.
“Delete it or we’ll break the car!” they thundered and broke the door’s handle to prove they weren’t joking. Through the rolled-up window I showed them that I deleted the video. But they had tasted blood. “Give us the phone!” was their new demand.
They yanked the driver out of the car and beat him. They opened all the doors — even the rear one that opened upwards — and started pouring into the vehicle. Three or four hefty women surrounded me and demanded the phone. By then, I had taken the mobile out of my bag and stuffed it into my clothes.
The women snatched the phone from me by force — I later found scratch marks on my body — and passed it to a man outside. But he couldn’t unlock it. He asked me to do it for him but I wanted the phone handed back first.
That was it. When they failed to unlock it, they decided to destroy it. The men started playing catch with my phone. I chased them and clung to the arm of the man holding it for as long as I could.
By now, my colleague had reached. “Stop all this! Debraj ke phone korbo?” she screamed, alluding to Trinamul Congress leader and Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation mayor-in-council Debraj Chakraborty. “Ke Debraj?” shot back a man and slammed the phone to the ground.
My colleague had been a stone’s throw away all this while, speaking to Chakraborty, the only familiar political leader we had managed to spot amid the sea of outsiders. Even as they tried to snatch her phone too, she rang him up and he rushed out from a party office set up in a temporary shed close by. A minute too late.
My months-old phone, that did not have a scratch on it, that contained my work, my photos, my memories was smashed to the ground at least twice and stamped on with full force.
Chakraborty reached the spot and dispersed the rabid crowd, which beat a quick retreat on being shouted at. “A few elements earn us a bad name,” he said, apologising and offering to replace the phone.
But what about the trauma? What about the driver’s bruises? What if he hadn’t reached? Would the crowd have stopped at destroying the phone? If this is what happens to a female journalist, are other citizens safe?