Payal was eventually stopped by some Israeli tourists. Payal was eventually stopped by some Israeli tourists.

Once she took off, she never looked back. Not at her companion fallen by the wayside, not at the motorists who stared at her wedding finery and certainly not where she was headed. With the sea stretching out ahead of her on the Bandra Worli Sea Link, the wind billowing in her hair, Payal’s mind was far from the wedding procession where she would be the centre of attention, and she shrugged off the hand that sought to rein her in.

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Payal, 4, is a ghodi who ran away on April 23 at 3.45 pm en route to a wedding, where she was supposed to ferry the groom. In entering the Bandra Worli Sea Link at 4.01.47 pm and being subdued and brought to a stop by an assorted crowd of Israeli tourists and panicked guards at 4.09.30 pm, she went where no horse had gone before. In the process, she also left behind Mumbai’s human residents by covering 5.6 kilometers in peak-hour traffic.

Payal also left behind a jockey with a fractured leg, a frantic owner searching through Bandra, and a trail of stunned toll collectors, sweepers and policemen who had no idea how to deal with a runaway wedding ghodi.

While the Mumbai Police did make unofficial inquiries at the sea link, it recently concluded that Payal’s case is not that of a major security breach at the city’s premier infrastructure project.

“They didn’t see her coming until she crossed the toll plaza,” said Rajesh Kedar, referring to a sweeper and a couple of toll collectors whom Payal left behind — not exactly in a whooshing blur of white and red and a tinkle of bells, but by charging through before slowing down to side-step past a stationary taxi, and taking flight once more. The sea link’s security cameras recorded Payal running alongside two dozen cars on the widest part of the bridge.

Kedar, the toll plaza in-charge of the sea link, then called the Mumbai Police Control Room. “We didn’t want her to stop until she reached the end. That way, she wouldn’t get hit by a vehicle or cause damage to a car. We were more afraid that she would jump into the sea,” Kedar said.

Payal was pushed to a corner by a couple of Israeli tourists travelling in a taxi as she closed on the sea link’s final few yards. Before the sea link’s guards rushed at her, Payal had been pulled and calmed down by the foreigners. She was later taken away in a van to the BMC’s Cattle Pound in Malad West.

“The tourists knew how to handle a horse and helped calm her down. They even administered first aid after she got scratches on her hooves from running on concrete,” said inspector Arjun Kengar of Worli police station, who responded to the call for help.

By the time Payal’s owner Vijay Chulaisa reached Worli, she was inside the BMC truck. It would take two weeks and Rs 7,000 before Payal was freed and brought home, but Chulaisa had already made up his mind. The big city was not for Payal and she would be returned to the countryside.

Chulaisa, 34, cares for five white horses in a large shanty that doubles up as a stable in an Andheri slum. All five horses are currently at home, with no work till the monsoon. Chulaisa, a second generation horse-owner, purchased Payal for Rs 25,000 in November last year at a fair in rural Solapur. “She was priced at Rs 1 lakh. I couldn’t afford that, but still wanted her. She walked with grace and could dance too,” he said. With an agreement to pay regular installments, Chulaisa brought Payal to Mumbai.

“She was very lucky for me. She got us a lot of work. She was selected to work in the shooting of the television serial Maharana Pratap and appeared in a newspaper advertisement for a clothing brand,” Chulaisa, a native of Sitamarhi, Bihar, said.

Chulaisa doesn’t blame Payal for running off, but is grateful her run didn’t land him in jail. “Had she been hit by a car or caused damage, I would have been in a lot of trouble,” he said.

After an incident-free six months, a blast of noise did Payal in on April 23 when she and Bantu, the 25-year-old jockey, were trotting to 90 Feet road in Dharavi. Chulaisa recalls that Bantu had taken the slip road flanking the Western Express Highway at Teacher’s Colony in Bandra, when a BMC garbage truck came up from behind. “When the truck driver sounded the horn, Bantu was able to keep Payal in his control. But then, the truck hit a pothole and the sound scared Payal. The truck then drove past, coming within a foot of Payal,” he said.

Frightened, Payal threw Bantu down. Unable to move with a fractured leg, Bantu called up Chulaisa. “We had to forfeit the money we were going to be paid for the wedding,” Chulaisa said.

Payal’s toll-free lap of the sea link prompted no official inquiry by the Mumbai Police, but elicited a lot of smiles from those who manned the bridge that day. “We were just not prepared for this sort of thing,” Kedar said.

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