It was a nice day with clear skies and a smiling sun over our heads. I boarded a bus from Mumbai to Rajkot. The journey started and soon after I was taking pictures of the natural countryside passing by me. After a while the bus entered the desert region. The magazine in my hands said that this was a hunting ground for dacoits. I wondered how such incidents had never happened with me. Suddenly I saw a man on a horse coming up next to my window. He was maintaining his speed to match that of our bus. I looked around and saw that there was not one man on a horse but several men on horses, one outside each window of the bus.

            Within seconds, they started firing at our bus. Our driver got shot and he fell off the bus. The bus hurtled out of control and smashed five of the twelve dacoits. Stupid dacoits!

            The remaining dacoits, however, managed to get in to the bus. As one of them drove the bus, the others pointed guns at us and robbed us of our money and valuables. They spoke some dialect I just wondered about the dialect being extinct, but yet they were killing people. One of the passengers dialled a call to the police but one of the dacoits saw her. He snatched the phone from her, garbled something and then threw the phone out of the bus. What he didn’t realise was that the call to the police was already made.

            The driver dacoit shouted, “Foolee zova!”, and the bus came to a stop. All of them stepped out. I guessed that the bus might have run out of fuel. I started a search inside the bus for some spare fuel can and I found it. It was below the driver’s seat. I fed it to the bus and the engine digested it. Then I tried o drive the bus. As soon as the dacoits realised that the bus was speeding ahead they ran behind the bus trying to catch up but in vain. We all had a hearty laugh.  

            We did find our stuff back. They had kept their loot bags in the bus, which we took back. The next day, the newspapers read, “For the first time in fifty years the police have caught the dacoits.”