“What do you want me to do?” Kaustubh shrugged.

Hashwini stared at him in disbelief. “If a female customer gets molested in your shop, what do you think you should do?”

“Molest? I thought you said he took a photo of you?”

“An upskirt photo!” Hashwini almost shouted, exasperated. “Don’t you think you should be calling the police?”

“Why don’t you call them yourself?”

There was again the nonchalant shrug. Hashwini wished she could smack the insolent, lazy young man. And then two concurrent realisations struck her—that she had left her mobile phone at home and that Sanmugan was gone.

“Where did he go?” Hashwini shrieked.

Kaustubh jerked his head in the direction of the entrance.

Hashwini pushed past the few shoppers blocking her way to the door. But the instant she stepped out onto the street, she was cruelly reminded of her height handicap. The pedestrians that streamed past her immediately blocked her view, and the man she was after had already vanished into the crowd.

Hashwini stepped back into the provision shop dejected. But the sight of Kaustubh wearing an unsympathetic smirk on his face infuriated her so much that she was instantly reinvigorated. There was no way she was going to let the pervert get away with this!

Hashwini took two steps towards Kaustubh and extracted the mobile phone she spotted jutting out from his back pocket.

“Hey…” Kaustubh could only utter a feeble protest; both his hands were lugging the crate of bottled beer. He watched with a frown as Hashwini called the police with his phone and reported the incident.

“Where do the workers get picked up from?” Hashwini turned to ask once she got off the phone.

“What?” Kaustubh looked bewildered.

“All those chartered buses that take these foreign workers back to their dormitories. Where do they pick them up from?”

“Just across the road, a little farther up.”

Hashwini sprang off.

The car park was 500 metres away on the other side of Serangoon Road, where more than thirty buses that had been chartered by dormitory operators to ferry the workers back waited with their engines running. Hashwini arrived just in time to see a convoy of five buses edging towards the exit. The first bus had to stop and wait for a gap to interject itself into the Serangoon Road traffic flow.

Hashwini dashed to the front entrance of that bus and pounded on the glass panel. The driver tilted his head and stared at her with suspicion. He could see her mouth moving but her words were muffled and indecipherable. The dormitory housed only male workers so she was definitely not part of his bus load. She looked deranged. He decided that it would be a bad idea to let her into the bus. So the driver turned his head towards the main road, spotted a gap and jerked his vehicle into the traffic flow, completely ignoring her.