A few seconds, worth a lifetime

In 2009, two workers came to install a new signboard on the terrace. It was a small office with an open terrace on the rooftop. The metal frame of the signboard was heavy, so Ritesh asked Darshan to hold it steady while the workers bolted it in.

Everything was going like normal, people talking and checking measurements, passing tools up from below.

Ritesh noticed Darshan gripping the frame, his whole body completely rigid and frozen in place. His face appeared tight and his legs were shaking. He quickly realized at that moment he had touched the live electrical line from the old signboard next to him.

He grabbed a rope the workers had been using and looped it around his torso and pulled. Darshan broke contact and fell backward, and for two seconds nobody moved before someone shouted and then everything happened at once. People rushed in, and Ritesh stayed with Darshan until they reached the hospital.

He was fine. The doctors said he was lucky.

When Ritesh speaks about that evening now, he doesn't think about what he did. He thinks about those two seconds where everything stopped, and he has no idea if he would have known what to do if he'd had the time to think about it.

That's what stays with him. Not the action itself, but the fact that he never had time to decide. In those two seconds, with no time to think, he was just someone who acted before thinking.