Short Story: Holy Cow! by Ashvani Sachdev

In this short story, Ashvani Sachdev captures an incident that promises to leave the readers thinking.

Whenever there was a long road journey to be made, Raj loved setting off before dawn. The satisfaction of beating the city traffic and hitting the highway while overlapping tints of grey were still struggling to define the sky more than compensated for the mild discomfort of overruling his body clock’s subliminal alarm bell. An added bonus was the eager, almost anxious, anticipation of watching the sun come up. 

That morning, he was travelling from Puducherry Northwards towards Chennai along the East Coast Road, and the sun would come up on his right. He stole shifty glances to his right as he drove his Honda City at a sedate 60 kmph, as dictated by recurrent signposts along the highway. A hedgerow adorning the road divider blocked his view to the right but, where the soil had been unkind to the hedgerow roots, intermittent apertures appeared for brief periods, permitting a fleeting view through the hedgerow.  Beyond the hedgerow, a narrow strip of land varying from one to about five kilometres separated the highway from the Bay of Bengal.