Picture by Amit Datta

A braveheart mother took on a rod-wielding rogue of a driver and had him arrested on Friday after barely managing to save her four-year-old son from being mowed down by the bus he was driving.

Schoolteacher Arpita Das Kanungo, 30, had stitches on her forehead to show for her battle to get driver Swapan Debnath behind bars for almost killing her son Sagnik while they were waiting for a Belur-bound bus at the Rabindra Bharati stop on BT Road around 6.45am.

Not only did Arpita and husband Sukalyan, an engineer, take the trouble of tracing the racing bus after reaching their destination, they risked danger to life and limb by standing up to a driver who was trying to hit his way out of trouble with an iron rod.

“He (Swapan) first grabbed my husband by the collar and then hit him on his broken right arm, where he has an implant to hold the bones together. When I tried to save my husband from further injury, the driver took out the rod and hit me on the head. I was injured but I was determined not to let him flee,” recalled Arpita.

Swapan did flee after pushing away Arpita, who had grabbed him by the arm, but he later surrendered to Howrah police after a complaint was lodged with Bally police station and a hunt launched.

“We have started a case against the driver. He will be produced in the chief judicial magistrate’s court on Saturday,” said Sukesh Kumar Jain, the additional SP.

So what prompted Arpita, a resident of South Sinthee, to take on a rogue driver in a city where his kind get away with murder because no one dares confront them?

“I could have gone back home thinking we were all safe, which is what matters the most. But I couldn’t have let a callous person like that driver get away with what he did. Who knows who he would have hit the next time he drove,” Arpita, who teaches at Liluah IP Memorial School, told Metro.

Before the show of courage, it was Arpita’s alertness that saved her son, a nursery student at the school where she teaches.

“The bus was barely 10 feet away when I noticed it coming straight at us. Sagnik would have been under the wheels had I not grabbed his hand and pulled him away from where he was standing,” Arpita said.

Sukalyan noted down the number of the Golpark-Belur bus — WB11B 0287 — even as Arpita muttered a silent prayer and bent down to check whether her son was hurt. “Once we got the number, we knew what we had to do — track down the bus, come what may,” Arpita said.

The trio hopped onto the next Belur-bound bus that came along and found the vehicle they were looking for — run by a private operator under the banner of the South Bengal State Transport Corporation — parked in the public bus terminus there.

Sukalyan, who escorts his wife and child to school before heading to his workplace, spotted the driver and asked him why he was driving so rashly. “He was unrepentant. He shouted back instead of apologising,” he said.

Swapan later claimed that he did not hit Arpita with a rod. “She was abusing and pulling me by my shirt collar. My elbow hit her head when I tried to free myself,” he said.

Sanjib Roy, the owner of the bus, said he wouldn’t defend his employee’s actions but added that Arpita and her husband were also guilty of “heckling Swapan”. Roy said he was “willing to arrive at an amicable settlement”.

Who is to blame for the reign of rogue drivers?
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