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My friends decided to go on a bike ride at twilight on the day of my arrival from a wedding. It was a bright 8 pm with the moon on the zenith and the hushed honk of cars on the road. Our wheels were quantifying a four-lane road when my eyes turned to a man sitting on the sidewalk. There was no one walking there, just him sitting in the middle of that desert road. Even for stray dogs that spot was a no man’s land.

His jaw was touching his chest, and his dominant hand supported the forehead. A phone was dripping from his left-hand manifesting what happens when someone gets a bite of bad news in the middle of the road.

A part of my conscience whispered that “You should go up to him, talk for a while, and maybe take him on the bike ride.” But the other parts of that conscience were too occupied in pondering “What if my friends don’t see the world with the same eyes as me? and the thought vanished with the speed of our bikes. The next day started pretty much the same as every day until my mom laid her hands on a local newspaper. She quoted a headline that a 27-year-old man committed suicide because his fiancée came to know that he lied about his salary.

An eerie shiver came to me what if this 27-year-old boy was the same person sitting in the middle of the road last night? And if I could have just gone up to him and confronted him somehow, he would still be alive. Maybe this was him. Maybe this is someone else. But it’s hard to ignore the chronology of things that happened. Every inch of my moral sense wants to believe that it was not him, but this doesn’t seem easy as just saying and believing. He wasn’t my friend or acquaintance, and I shared no part in his problem. But I can’t deny that, if this is the same person, a life could have been saved just by turning a deaf ear to my shyness and utter ignorance. Now there is no way to confirm whether this 27-year-old boy was the same person or not, and also, I can’t stop thinking about him. I’ll always be suspicious of this guilt for the rest of my life.