Oh, Blast!

One night, as we relaxed after dinner, we heard a huge explosion that rattled window panes and sent people pouring into the streets within seconds to locate the disaster area. To appreciate what I'm about to tell you, you'll need to know a little bit about my locality. It's just off a busy main road that boasts of half a dozen eateries always packed to the brim, video libraries, net cafes, a few small businesses and many other pretenders. Ours is a typical middle-class neighbourhood - small families (big quarrels), working single men and women, bored housewives, happy drunks - in short, a very ordinary neighbourhood with lots of action every day but all of us still convinced that we lead a quiet bored existence.

Into such a quiet and bored night was injected this aforementioned blast and the resulting outpour of human curiosity. Now, if such a thing were to ever happen in your neighbourhood, take my advice and do this - do nothing. Just stand by and watch a fascinating drama of humanity that will unravel itself; find a vantage point for your observation - from where you can watch two or three streets simultaneously. If you can move, unnoticed with the crowd, nothing like it. Here's what I saw:

From the convenience store at the corner of our street, emerged one of its owners, an affable bald man (now obviously distressed) walking rapidly and chanting in a low monotone to no one in particular: "What happened? What happened?" as he rushed into the first unlocked gates within sight - a block of the sprawling apartments nearby, and disappeared.

Next, a group of young men came charging down the street screaming, "Bomb! Bomb!" and turing the corner, raced out of sight excitedly. Following them were a band of young girls with their older female wards chattering animatedly. I stopped the group and asked "What happened?" "Sounds like a cylinder burst," one of the ladies ventured. A passerby picked it up and began running around screaming "cylinder burst, cylinder burst." This caused everyone to barge into the eateries on the main road which were all empty - because the crowd from the eateries were in front of an electronic gadgets shop guessing that to be the disaster site. The electronic gadgets shop was empty - they had set off to investigate the source of the blast too.

The entire crowd now charged into the next street loking for fire, smoke, blood, limbs, anything that would confirm a massive mysterious blast. They were met there by an equally huge crowd headed into our lane in hopes of finding similar carnage. Two drunks stumbling home met the excited crowd from both lanes and blabbered unsteadily, "Shumbudy shot the priminishter." Someone screamed, "Assassination!!" and everyone ran back into their homes to turn on their TV sets.

During all this time, there was one bewildered man following the crowd everywhere trying to get someone's attention. He kept saying "but please, listen to me.....listen to what I have to say...." but they rushed on mindlessly. Now that the street had emptied, I stopped the perplexed guy and popped the question "What happened?"

"I'm a truck driver," he said, "I was speeding down the road tonight and I ripped my tyre. I was trying to explain to these people that was the sound they heard."