(Robin D'Cruz, my brother who is based in Dubai, is my guest writer today. His story sends shivers down the spine.)
Sunny day as usual.
I had just picked up my car
from the service station and was on a side road waiting to merge with a
highway heading back home. A few cars were ahead of me, some in the rear
view mirror, all doing not more than 30 km/hr.
The cars in front slowed down and eventually
stopped to allow for queue jumpers and pedestrians at a T-junction that
is very known for being busy with delivery vans and other industrial
traffic including traffic from the cement factories
and ready-mix concrete outlets nearby.
As the car in front lazily ground to a halt, a
flickering red light flashed at me, rather harshly. Perhaps the driver
ahead was a gadget freak who missed it completely that apart from
distracting drivers, it was a violation to add modified
blinking brake lights that did not comply with regulations.
I stopped too,
leaving some distance where I could get a good look at exactly what
accessory he had installed below his rear bumper that shone so brightly.
A shadow crept slowly over me from behind. A big black
SUV had come up so close to my rear that I could only see its front
grille through my rear windscreen. It looked extremely menacing. I
wondered why people needed to do this and why they couldn’t be patient enough
for their turn to arrive.
I took one
glance on the left where a road was joining the road we were on, and I
froze for an instant. Then as if driven by instinct or some supernatural
force, I immediately sat up and looked back, then front, as if wanting to
fly my car out of there!
Almost 100 meters away, a dumper truck, totally out of control, was skidding and swerving sideways at about 60-80 km/hr headed straight for the intersection I was on. I thought
that was end of the road for me. My turn had arrived!
In split seconds, so many things raced through my mind... things that seem so very easy now. For instance, jumping out of
the car and running as far as possible like hell, or ramming into the car
in front to escape. The commands
were all issued in such quick succession, and overlapped each other in such a way, that nothing happened. The body
reflexes just refused to carry them out. It felt like being in a dream where
one wanted to yell, shout, kick hard, hit and run but no sound comes out
of one's sound box that has jammed and nothing
moved.
Then, yes, there was sound.
The sounds of people yelling, horns blaring and screeching tyres... but all was
peaceful inside my car. I chose not to look in that direction of
the truck again and closed my eyes...
Images of so many people and so many good times and scenes
flashed through my mind at unbelievable speeds until I heard a
familiar cracking sound.
Yes, I knew that one... it was
like lightning striking... and you instantly know it
has struck something/someone very near.
A sharp whipping crack...
Immediately a loud BOOM!
Then as if a drum filled with
boulders has dropped on your roof and was coming down the stairs...
As
kids we would all huddle together with our grandmother
in her bed and await these thunderous bangs after the flash of
lightning at the time when the monsoons retreated. The eerie
silence before the bang, the tingling of hair, the fear, the comfort of the feeling that she would protect us from whatever
happened next... But nothing ever happened.
Today, too, nothing happened. I opened my eyes slowly
and all I could see was only the inside of my car. Outside was white.
Totally white like white!
Then there was a break in the white. I was on an
airplane. Fluffy clouds surrounded the windows. As if we had just taken off
or were preparing for a landing. But then wait….where was the sound of the engines
and the continuous hum of the airplane moving
across the skies?
Oh no, we had crashed!...but I was alive, no pain,
no blood... and what was my car doing aboard an airplane that had crashed? Maybe a plane had crashed on the highway where I was?
No! No! . . .wait.
Yes, I was driving and was behind some cars that
had stopped. But what I could see now in front of me was different.
There were no cars. Instead what I could see of the road was all white
as if everything out there was completely erased. It could be partly
because my front windscreen was also cloudy white.
As
the dust settled, I saw real people running in front of me going right
and towards a hole in the wall that I remember never existed. I'm dazed but
I can think. It took a while to reason. I was in
my car driving/waiting and a truck had lost control. I did not want to
look for more but from the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of a
rear car bumper in the midst of it all that I recollect seeing before.
The horrific images will never go away. It made
for a ghastly sight. Broken pieces lay everywhere covered with snowy
white powder.
Panic
gripped me now and I felt sick in the stomach. Don’t know why but I
just took a left turn on that road from where the truck had approached
and drove as I far as I could from the place.
The windscreen in front of me cleared up. Probably drove about five minutes. I stopped and let down the window glass and took some fresh
air. I had almost forgotten I needed to breathe!
The cacophony of police and ambulances could be
heard in the distance. I thought for a while. That is the time I picked
up the phone and called Lyra at home and asked her to buy or bake a
small cake today to celebrate my birthday. . .
11th of May. She sounded totally perplexed but that didn't matter then.
I have no idea what happened but next day the story in the news goes thus - 2 perish, 6 critical in dumper crash.
The truck was overladen with raw material/ore or similar
substance that was very white in color. The driver, in an effort to
control the monster, would have rammed sideways into
the cars in front of me, missing me perhaps by the width of some
thousand strands of hair put together (guessing by my position in
relation to the truck's original travel path when I first saw it), sweeping the cars away, smashing them against
the concrete wall, punching a hole through the wall, and
stopping in a mound of dust just inches away from a kebab restaurant.
I
have changed my service station after moving house and usually keep
away from the place now.
Lightning doesn’t strike the same spot/same man
twice as my old man says but who knows . . . and
why take that chance!
