Whenever I pass through the cross roads near the hyderabad railway station. I used to see a lady sitting on the divider of the road. I used to wonder about what could be the story of this mysterious lady. She looks like a young beggar woman. Her clothes are torn and dirty but her head is always covered with her sari. Surprisingly she sits there on the same spot irrespective of the season whether it is scorching heat, heavy rains or the pleasant and mild winter of hyderabad. Her face is expressionless and her eyes tearless and dull looking. There is a strange and vacant expression in her eyes…. Those eyes which haunt me in my dreams…. It is as if time has frozen for her. I feel sorry for the miserable lady. Being a woman myself, I feel some unknown attachment to that lady. She must have been a young woman with dreams and hopes about life like any other woman. Some tragedy must have made her speechless and mentally disturbed. Probably she must have witnessed some gruesome accident at the same spot, in which someone close to her heart must have expired. Or she must have been a newly married girl returning along with her husband after watching the second show of a film from a cinema theatre. A few alcoholic men must have chased them, hit her husband on his head making him die on the spot and later gang raped her. Or she must have lost her only girl child at the spot when some miscreants passing by in a car must have pulled the child into the car, , sexually abused the little child and left her in some brothel. Or her husband must have brutally beaten her following some argument about dowry and left her on the road to die and some kind person must have saved her. Any number of incidents could be related to that strange lady. Or could she be lost in some identity crisis? Could she be a mental patient of schizophrenia? Or could she be a case of re-incarnation searching for her roots? I wish she could narrate her story….. Whatever may be her past, my heart goes out to her. A tear or two well up in my eyes when I see her…. The mysterious lady on the road! 