Ritu Kamra Kumar
The car stopped at a red light yesterday, an ordinary afternoon. Except that the light seemed to have developed a mind of its own. It stayed stubbornly red, holding us there longer than usual.
The sun bounced off rows of windscreens, turning the road into a restless ribbon of glass and metal. Inside, the air conditioner hummed softly. Outside, the city continued its noisy negotiations with time.
A few cars ahead, a delivery boy on a Splendour tried to balance a precarious stack of pizza boxes while searching for a narrow passage between a truck and an e-rickshaw. Behind me, someone leaned on the horn, long, loud and impatient. A woman in the next car glanced repeatedly at her watch, as though staring harder might persuade the signal to change.
I felt the familiar irritation rising.
Then my eyes wandered left.
A rickshaw puller leaned against his seat, slowly sipping water from a plastic bottle. He was not looking at the signal. His eyes followed a sparrow hopping lightly between the stationary tyres of the waiting vehicles.
For a moment, the traffic disappeared.
There was something almost poetic about that small bird moving through the metallic maze while the man watched with the unhurried attention of someone who had nowhere else to be.
On my right stood a tractor, its cabin vibrating with a loud Punjabi song. A little boy beside the driver tapped his fingers against the window in rhythm. A burst of music, a flash of sunlight, a child’s tapping fingers. The red light had become a moving tableau.
My car, too, seemed to change character. It was no longer merely a vehicle but a room with windows, sealed from the street yet pulsing with it. I was inside and outside at once, watching the city while being held briefly within it.
I looked around again.
A girl in the next lane adjusted her lipstick in the rear-view mirror, turning the tiny glass into a private dressing room. An elderly man pedalled past with a marigold garland hanging from his bicycle handlebar, a sudden splash of saffron against the grey road. Near the divider, a flower seller sheltered a few roses from the harsh sun. A schoolchild’s blue water bottle swung from an Activa’s handle as its owner waited patiently.
Nothing extraordinary was happening.
And yet, everything was.
Perhaps cities are not really about speed. We imagine driving faster, arriving sooner, squeezing another task into an already crowded day. But perhaps we simply learn to live by the rhythm of red, amber and green. We stop. We wait. We watch. Then we move.
The signal remained red, but my restlessness began to fade.
I noticed how many lives could gather within a few square metres of a crossing. Different destinations, desires and dramas, all briefly sharing the same pause. The road was no longer merely a road. It had become a small stage where ordinary lives revealed themselves in fragments.
Then the light turned green.
The horns returned. Engines stirred. Wheels rolled. The city resumed its hurried choreography. I too moved But something had shifted.
Perhaps the signal had not delayed me after all. It had given me a few unplanned minutes to look beyond the windscreen and notice the colours I usually rushed past.
The road moves on. Signals change. But the stories stay. The sparrow threading through stationary tyres. The marigold garland swinging from a bicycle. The child tapping time against a window. The rickshaw puller drinking his water in no hurry at all.
Perhaps that is what a red light can give us, if we let it. Not a delay, but a pause. Not an interruption but an invitation to notice.
The road moves on. The signals change. But for those few minutes, ordinary life had stopped long enough to reveal its extraordinary colours.
Dr. Ritu Kamra Kumar, Retd. Principal and Associate Professor of English at MLN College, Yamuna Nagar, is an acclaimed academician, poet and writer. A PhD in Gender Studies, she has authored ten acclaimed books of poetry, prose and short stories, published 75 research papers and 500+ articles, and received numerous honours.
