Twenty-two-year-old Maya (name changed) was walking from her house near Yediyur lake (Jaya Nagar) in Bengaluru to her gym last Tuesday when she got the worst shock of her life.
“It was around 7:30 pm, I was walking to the gym and suddenly a used tender coconut landed on me. It hit my arms and it hurt. Before I could recover more parts of tender coconuts hit me," Maya told The News Minute.
As Maya looked around she realised that a bunch of people from the first floor of a building had thrown the coconuts at her.
"I lost my cool and yelled at them. What was surprising is that there were guards in buildings nearby, and a man on a bike, but not one of them spoke up for me. Then I started walking again, and after 2 minutes someone grabbed me and slapped me on my face," she said.
Two of the people on the building had followed Maya, they were unhappy at her rebuke.
"They were surely teenagers, they looked very menacing," she said.
"For two minutes I was numb with pain. They left as soon as they slapped me. I felt very humiliated and ran to my gym crying," she added.
Maya and her gym trainer came back to the building looking for the boys, but they were told that no one was living in the place and that maybe someone was using it as a hangout.
"We found some alcohol bottles strewn there. The next day I was supposed to go to Mangaluru, my native, and I did," she said.
On Monday, Maya went to the Jayanagar police station to lodge a complaint.
Why did she decide to act only after a week?
“Many times I have read stories in the paper and wondered, why people didn’t react or why they didn’t carry a pepper spray. But trust me, I now realised what people go through. I could not think of anything. I was just shamed and hurt and I went home. I narrated the incident to a couple of friends who told me to lodge a complaint,” she says.