7.15 pm.

The main street near my house.

A smart and well built cop swerves his bike to block another bike ridden by a young couple. The cop gets down, goes up to the man, pulls off his helmet and uses the very helmet to rain blows on the man.

The ferocity of the attack is straight out of a Bollywood movie. Pedestrians, shopkeepers, people on their balconies and porticos just watch in utter shock as the young man staggers and weeps. The woman, his friend, pleads with folded hands. But the cop is a machine gone berserk.

Then it's over. The cop says something to the couple and they get on their respective bikes and go into the woods of the university nearby.

And then, slowly, all of us bystanders unfreeze and collect in clusters. I have by then noted down the cop's bike's registration number. Since people know me in the neighborhood as a writer, some of them come to me, quite agitated, urging me to take some action.

I call up the local police station inspector who at first refuses to listen to me; he says that particular stretch of road falls in the jurisdiction of another police station. I tell him calmly, "Listen, you have a dirty situation building up here. There are a hundred people baying for that police man's blood for hitting a civilian. This is the bike number. Identify that cop and bring him over here to apologize."

The inspector starts to respond but the line disconnects.

Meanwhile several people have followed the cop and the couple into the woods, fearing more violence. My friends urge me to come along.

About a kilometre away, a crowd has formed and in the center is the harassed couple and the cop. The woman starts to plead again, but this time with us. "We have settled the matter with the policeman. Please go. Leave us alone."

Apparently she's extremely frightened of the issue snowballing into something ugly. We ask the young man what exactly happened. In fits and starts, he tells us that he himself is not sure what went wrong. All that he had done was ride with his friend on a lonely road within the woods and this cop came and asked them to stop. Since nobody was around, the man grew frightened and sped away. The cop followed and eventually caught up.

"We both are classmates, Sir," he told me. "Both of us are doing our Ph. D. theses at the university. We have done no wrong."

Meanwhile the cop standing nearby, is quite subdued now, even looking a bit worried becausethe crowd has swelled to over fifty people and traffic has come to a stop on either side. We ask him to beckon his inspector. Nothing short of a public apology will do, we say. No cop can act in so high handed a manner. Today it is this young couple, tomorrow it could be anyone in the neighborhood who might not even be literate. "You cannot let loose your brute force on innocent people. Even if you are suspicious of their behavior, you have to first question them. And that too in the presence of a senior police officer."

Eventually, the inspector I phoned send his deputy. The deputy convinces the cop to return to the place of misdemeanor and apologize to the couple. The cop initially refuses, saying he would apologize right there on the road. No, we say. You have hit the man without reason in a public place. You have to apologize there. Seeing our determination, the cop relents. He returns to the crime scene and in front of everyone there tenders an apology. The young man, choking back tears because he's still shaken by the experience, extends his hand to the cop and says, thank you. And all of us returns to our homes, satisfied that justice was done properly and quickly with no violence or abusive language on our part.

And one thing strikes me as I write this. The immense and instantaneous response of everyone in the neighbourhood at the cop's atrocity. The human species, I say to myself, is not yet doomed.