Chapter 13 Die-Hard

• Before Arunava could stop his black Tata Innova and get out, Shivangi's red sedan crashed at the metal barriers. His heart seemed to stand still. The fog made visibility very poor and even with the foglights on he had difficulty in locating the car swinging on the left railings. He had screeched to a halt at the sound of the collision, but now while running on the deck, he found the distance to be around twenty paces. Even such a small distance appeared very long now and he knew every moment was costly. The bridge side they were negotiating was from Kolkata towards Howrah. The one carrying traffic from Howrah to Kolkata ran parallely in the opposite direction. A double line railway track separated the up and down routes, confined inside massive steel girders. Upon reaching the location, he tried to look inside the car to ascertain whether Shivangi was still inside. Then without a second thought, he climbed on to the railings.
• The dark waters was a raging torrent several feet below. He felt dizzy. Just when he was about to jump he heard a woman's wail near him. He found her at last, desperately holding on to the steering of the car whose rear wheels were stuck at the broken railing. The windshield on which her upper abdomen rested now was giving away slowly from her weight. Her weight was also pulling down the vehicle like in an acrobatic feat of a circus play, except that there was no trampoline below to save her fall here. If she fell, which she was most likely to in her situation, she'd go down headlong and hit the scour protection floor around the piers. Her skull would be shattered to pieces just like the glass of her car. He took out a nylon chord, the first thing which came in his mind, and tried to wind it around the railing. He discovered to his utter dismay that the crash barrier wasn't built of metal and there was no way of tying the rope around the concrete wall.
• He had to go for the other option. He tied one end to the toe bar of his car, throwing the other end down the railing. He knew he had to drive the car in reverse gear as there was no space to turn back the vehicle. Shivangi was still inside her car and the rear wheels had almost cleared off the railing. The girl was suffering from a sleep related disorder, he knew. Earlier at her sister's flat she had climbed into the bathtub in a fit state and would've drowned herself to death if he had reached her a few moments later.