RED DUST

The road was familiar.

That was the first thought that struck Tina; not fear, not confusion, but recognition. The long, slightly curved stretch that began near her native village Hurua, a quiet place near Kalachhera, and ran stubbornly toward the small but restless town of Dharmanagar had always been woven into the fabric of her growing years. She had crossed it in school buses smelling of dust and iron, in shared autos packed with sleepy students, in rickety vans that rattled like loose memories, and sometimes perched behind her father on his old scooter while wind tugged at her braids. The road led to her school, her tuition classes, and most lovingly to her maternal uncle’s house; a place filled with afternoon laughter, steel containers of sweets, and the unforgettable taste of laddoos made by her Mami and, in earlier years, by her late grandmother whose warm hands and softer voice still lingered in Tina’s mind like a blessing she could almost touch.

Even now, sitting inside the speeding vehicle, she could predict every bend of this road before it appeared.

Yet something felt wrong.

The sky looked bleached, almost like a faded photograph.

The driver hummed.

Then he began to rap.

Tina stiffened.

She recognised the voice before she fully turned her head.

Ashish Vibyarthi.

For a second her mind struggled to match memory with reality.

Only a month ago he had stood on the stage of her college, laughing, singing, asking students to adjust microphones and arrange lights.

“Engineers!” he had shouted cheerfully. “If the sound system fails, the hero fails!”

Behind him, the giant screen had flashed images of him driving cars in different films: sharp turns, gunshots, burning roads.

The audience had cheered wildly.

Tina had clapped too, though her palms had felt slightly cold.

Because somewhere in her childhood, he was still the villain from her aunt’s favourite Bollywood film Bichho. She remembered hiding behind curtains whenever his face appeared on television. Later she had loved the action of the Bengali film Challenge 2, but even there speed had always meant danger.

Now he was here. Driving.

Too fast.

The engine roared.

Wind sliced through the half-open window. Trees flashed past like dark thoughts she could not catch.

“Sir… maybe we should slow down?” she said carefully.

He did not look at her.

Instead, he increased the tempo of his rap, tapping the steering wheel like a drum.

Dust began to rise ahead.

Red dust.

Then she saw them.

Construction trucks.

Huge, mud-streaked, overloaded trucks rushing toward them in chaotic lines. Their tyres spun violently. Their horns screamed in desperation.

For a split second, the rushing trucks did not look like trucks at all. They reminded her of the race tracks she had been watching obsessively on her phone for the past three weeks.

It felt just like the other day in Formula One when Lando Norris had tried to hold his line while Max Verstappen surged forward with ruthless speed; machines screaming, tyres almost kissing disaster, survival decided in fractions of a second.

The same reckless urgency now unfolded before her eyes on this narrow road, only heavier, rawer, coated in red mud instead of asphalt shine. Her pulse began to match that terrifying rhythm she had admired from the safety of a screen.

One swerved dangerously close.

Her heartbeat stumbled.

“Please slow down,” she repeated, louder.

He laughed softly.

“Life doesn’t come with brakes, Tina.”

“How do you know my name?” she whispered.

He didn’t answer.

The trucks multiplied.

Metal thundered against metal. One vehicle tilted as if drunk. Another rammed into it. Red mud exploded into the air like scattered blood.

Fear rose in her throat.

Suddenly another memory struck her, sharp, intrusive, refusing to be ignored.

“Sir… please listen to me,” Tina said, her voice trembling as the vehicle sped forward. “There was an accident… just a few months ago. My friends…”

The rushing wind almost swallowed her words.

But the memory had already opened like a wound.

It had been past midnight when Rohini’s name flashed on her phone screen. Tina had answered with sleepy irritation that instantly turned into dread.

“Don’t panic,” Rohini had said first; the way people speak when panic is exactly what they are feeling. “Ritu and Daniel met with an accident… near Ranirbazar.”

Tina remembered sitting up in bed, heart hammering.

“What? How? Are they okay?”

“Daniel’s knee… it’s badly fractured. He’s in hospital. Doctors said he may take weeks to walk properly. It’s already been twenty-one days. Ritu got minor injuries… but I …”

Her voice had broken there.

“My eye almost got squashed, Tina. The glass… it shattered everywhere. I somehow turned the wheel at the last second. If I hadn’t…”

The call had ended with long silence on both sides.

For nights after that, Tina had kept imagining twisted metal, broken headlights, blood on asphalt.

Now the same images returned violently.

She leaned forward desperately.

“Please slow down!” she cried to Ashish Vibyarthi. “I’m telling you, accidents happen like this… suddenly! My friend Daniel is still in hospital… Rohini barely saved her eye… near Ranirbazar… Sir, please!”

The trucks ahead roared like they had not heard a single human plea in centuries.

Ashish Vibyarthi only tightened his grip on the steering wheel.

His rap did not stop.

Now the same fear returned with double force.

“STOP THE CAR!” she shouted.

The road seemed to narrow.

The sky darkened without warning.

Ashish Vibyarthi kept rapping, louder and louder, his voice echoing unnaturally as if the air itself was amplifying it.

The trucks ahead began crashing in a chain reaction.

The sound was unbearable.

Glass shattered.

The vehicle lurched violently.

Time slowed into fragments.

Her body slammed forward. Pain burst through her chest and shoulders. A scream got trapped somewhere between her lungs and her mouth.

Smoke swallowed the road.

For a few seconds there was only ringing silence.

Then distant cries.

She forced herself to turn.

Ashish Vibyarthi was bent over the steering wheel, motionless.

A thin line of blood ran down his temple.

His rap had ended mid-rhythm.

A chilling realization crawled into her mind.

The driver was gone. Dead.

The vehicle had stopped.

But the world had not.

Pain spread like fire under her skin. She felt strangely detached, as if watching herself from somewhere above. The red dust settled slowly on broken metal, on shattered windshields, on her trembling hands.

Footsteps approached.

Voices blurred.

“She’s alive… lift her carefully!”

“Don’t close your eyes!”

Hands held her. Someone wiped her face. Someone kept speaking to her though she could not understand the words.

The sky above looked vast and frighteningly beautiful.

Darkness pulled at her again.

She fought it with the last strength she had.

Because she suddenly wanted to live.

The next moment she sat up in bed with a violent gasp.

Morning sunlight lay quietly across her hostel room table.

Her notebook was open to half-solved circuit problems.

Her phone blinked with notifications: Instagram reels paused on a racing car frozen mid-turn.

A message from Rohini read:

“Class at 9. Don’t be late.”

Tina pressed her palms together unconsciously.

Her heart was still racing.

Only now did she begin to understand.

Not as a sudden revelation, but as a slow assembling of fragments, like solving a complex circuit where every wire had seemed disconnected until the final current passed through.

The road had not merely been a road.

It had been memory.

The trucks had not merely been machines.

They had been speed, pressure, unfinished fears gathering weight inside her.

The rap had not merely been noise.

It had been the restless rhythm of a mind refusing to remain still.

The accident had not merely been disaster.

It had been confrontation.

The formidable villain she had feared since childhood had vanished, and beneath the cameras, she recognized only the talented actor she had seen days ago, rapping and giving an unexpectedly inspiring speech.

Somewhere deep within, she recognized the familiar territory of what she had once read in a psychology elective; the subconscious storing impressions, replaying them in disguised forms, forcing the waking self to face what it kept postponing.

Life’s anxieties had arranged their own theatre while she slept.

She had been both the passenger and the witness.

Checking her phone, she found Google News alerts flashing on the screen.

A day after the motorcycle accident in Guwahati, actor Ashish Vibyarthi and his wife Rupa Baruah are reported to be stable and recovering well from their injuries.

Tina sighed, a sign of relief of her conscious and subconscious mind.

Her phone vibrated softly on the table, pulling her back into the warm ordinariness of morning.

“Maa” flashed on the screen.

Tina answered.

Her mother’s voice carried a simple tenderness that felt more real than anything else in the world.

“I don’t know why… I was missing you since morning,” she said. “Your mama brought your favourite laddoos this morning. It’s hard to have them without you.”

“It's okay, Maa. You all can have them now. I’ll get more from Mami when I come next week.” Tina smiled.

A strange lightness spread through Tina’s chest; as if the fear had burnt itself out in the night, leaving behind a quiet, cathartic relief she could neither fully explain nor deny.

Outside, the day had begun like any other.

Inside, something had shifted forever.