Highway Blues

I seem to be doing a lot of morning drives lately. Early morning drives. Really early morning drives. Not all of them pleasant.

Thursday 6 a.m. saw me heading to a spot 300 kilometers outside Mumbai. The drive for the first 287 kilometers was uneventful, if refreshingly swift.

13 kilometers from our destination we encountered an accident. We didn't have one, but we came to close quarters with one. Accidents on India's highways are nothing new, but I've never encountered them as anything more firsthand than a mangled truck lying with its wheels in the air and its nose in a ditch. Usually about a week old. Those I've seen plenty of. There was a two-day drive that we once took from Mumbai to Delhi where we kept score of the accidents and we counted 104 of them. All but two involved trucks.

However, this accident had obviously just happened, perhaps a few minutes before we came around a bend in the road and spotted it. Well, it was hard to miss. An Esteem car was parked on the shoulder and its right headlight and fender was completely smashed; the rest of the car seemed untouched. A motorcycle lay in the middle of the road. Just beyond it were two bodies. Both were men and each was lying on his side in a crumpled heap. One had on a leather jacket, the other had a bandana tied around his head. Neither was wearing a helmet. A group of men and women stood around the two bodies; these seemed to be the car passengers. They looked like the small town, semi-well-to-do sort - far from your average below-the-poverty-line villager, but not quite city slickers.

We gingerly inched our car around the scene and goggled at it in typical rubberneck fashion. Two things struck me immediately: one is that, surprisingly, there was no blood to be seen on the road. The second was the attitude of the people standing around. Their chief emotion seemed to be bafflement. This was weird.

In the city when there's an accident, there is an immediate rush of onlookers to gawp at the scene. But the onlookers also contain a fair percentage of action-oriented doers who attempt to assist, call out instructions, hustle the injured into a taxi, or beat up the hapless driver. Here, in the rural hinterland, there was nothing of the kind - just a baffled, helpless look on the faces of all the hangers-on. There weren't that many of them either, just the car passengers, maybe four or five, and a few villagers who had been passing by. None of them seemed to have a clue what to do.

Everybody was simply standing around gazing down at the two bodies as if willing them to get up and get on with it. As if on cue, the man in the leather jacket groaned and tried to raise his head.

We had parked our car on the verge and were wondering what to do: drive on in a it's-none-of-my-business style or hop out and join the baffled lot in their bafflement. My chauffeur turned to me and said, "Help karega?" meaning "Shall we help them?"

Well, I was all for it, but I confess to sharing some of the bafflement of the party. What does one do in a situation like this? My knowledge of medicine is restricted to knowing when to pop two aspirins and that MRI stands for Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Once I've exhausted those two, I'm a spent force when it comes to healing.

What the two accident victims obviously needed was an ambulance: the lack of blood could have been a good sign, but somehow I doubted it. Internal injuries seemed likely. Both were hulking specimens and there was no way they would have fitted into any car, even if we could have picked them up and maneuvered them in. Not that that would have been a wise thing to do, given the possibility of internal damage.

All these thoughts flashed through my mind in the few seconds between parking the car and getting out. As soon as the baffled lot spotted a city slicker emerging from his car they shook themselves out of their torpor and meandered over to where I stood. Just then a State Transport bus appeared around the bend. They promptly asked me to stop it and request the driver to take the two injured men to the nearby town.

I have no clue why they didn't try to stop the bus themselves or why they thought I would be more successful at it.

In any event, their faith was ill-founded. The bus driver cast a dispassionate eye over the scene, shook his head forbiddingly at all of us, moved up a gear and took off down the road. In the next four minutes or so this scene was re-enacted with a jeep, an SUV, a small truck and another State bus.

This sudden burst of traffic seemed to enliven the crowd, whose numbers had been swelled by a couple of motor cyclists who had stopped, perhaps out of solidarity with two of their kin who had been mowed down. They decided that the two were safer on the shoulder of the road rather than the center and some of the burlier specimens managed to half-carry, half-drag the bandana-clad man, who was most at risk from being run over, to the side of the road.

While I had been watching these proceedings, I had not been idle. Technology to the rescue. I whipped out my cell phone and dialed 100 for the police. As soon as my phone was spotted in my hands, a set of the group detached themselves from the main lot and clustered around me to gawp at my phone; obviously a more interesting spectacle than the accident victims. It struck me, even at the time, as quite ghoulish.

The first time I dialed 100, I was cordially informed by a recorded message that all lines on the route were busy. I disconnected, waited a few seconds and tried again. This time the phone rang. After about five rings someone answered. I explained that I was calling from a few kilometers outside the nearest town, on so-and-so road and that there had been an accident with two people badly injured and that an ambulance was needed. I was asked by the voice at the other end where I was calling from. I went through the explanation again. Ah, but I needed to call another number which the cop would be happy to give me if I would take it down.

By this time, hearing my conversation, most of the crowd had transferred their attention to me, so I was able to collar one of the gentlemen closest to me and get him to write down the number that was being dictated to me in Marathi. (For some reason, even in the urgency of the situation I remember remarking mentally that his shirt was a crisp white khadi one. And that his hand shook while writing.) Numbers in anything other than English are not my strong suit, but surprisingly I could figure out what the numbers were and could dictate them in turn to the gent. There was obviously no point in continuing the conversation with 100, so I disconnected and tried the number I'd been given.

No luck. I just got the exasperated tone of an invalid number being dialed. White shirt helpfully volunteered the area code of the locality we were in, so I tacked that on and redialed the number. I got a different exasperated tone. Over the next three minutes I tried various permutations of area code and phone number and got precisely nowhere. White shirt belatedly discovered that he had a cell phone too and started dialing the various permutations frantically. I have no clue why he hadn't thought of it earlier. Shock, probably. I also have absolutely no clue why cell phone networks are so bloody opaque!!!!

In the meantime, my chauffeur had been trying to wave down various passing vehicles with absolutely no luck. Leather jacket was still moaning feebly, bandana was unconscious, crowd had returned to their baffled stupor.

Enough was enough. We were getting nowhere and time was running out. I told the crowd that we would drive on ourselves and attempt to contact an ambulance or the police at the next town, which was about ten minutes away, but could well have been in China for all the good it did us at this spot.

We got back into the car and sped down the road. In about five minutes we reached a toll booth. While we were paying the toll, I asked the teller if he had a phone on which he could call the police as there had been an accident a few kilometers away. As soon as he heard the word accident, he sat up alertly, then hopped out of his booth and yelled at a colleague to fetch the boss. His yell was taken up by other colleagues who appeared from nowhere. This was obviously more interesting than making change for tolls. But this display of interest and alacrity heartened me, until the said boss emerged hastily from a hut a little way behind the toll booth.

He was a youngster who looked like he had bunked college that day to hang out on the highway. He also looked quite clueless, but I was shamefully wronging him. He proved to be the most resourceful guy yet. He heard what I had to say and then whipped out his cell phone and punched out a number. He repeated what I had said, and was evidently given another number. He repeated it to confirm it, disconnected and dialed the second number. This is a trick that I just can't do. I need to write down a number so that I can look at it while I dial. My respect for toll boss grew. Whoever answered the second number wanted more details than toll boss could give him, so he handed me the phone. I got into my routine once again, starting as usual with the location of the accident. Amazingly, the voice on the other end immediately grasped what I was saying and even before I could complete my sentence, he asked me to hold on. I could hear him barking orders to someone to grab the jeep, take 3 or 4 men with him and go down to the accident spot. Once that had been done, he returned to me and then asked me more details about which vehicles seemed to have been in the accident. He then reassured me that he would handle the matter and rang off.

I thanked toll boss and returned his phone to him. He explained that he had called the local cops - that was who I'd been speaking to. I was feeling good about the sense of urgency that the guys at the toll station had about the whole incident and about the way the cop on the phone had reacted quickly and sensibly.

We drove on. About three minutes later the penny dropped. We had been passed at the accident scene by about 10 vehicles heading in the same direction that we were. All of them would have had to pass the toll booth before we did - there was no turn off in the road before the toll booth. All of them had seen the accident. Yet, when we spoke of it to the toll attendants it had clearly come as a complete surprise to them! Obviously, not one of the other passers-by had thought the accident and two dying victims either important or worthwhile or even interesting enough to be mentioned to the first authority that they had encountered.

Reluctance to stop at an accident and get involved is perhaps understandable, given the way that authorities and red tape can sometimes create unforeseen and unpleasant repercussions for innocent passers-by. But this was more than a reluctance to get involved. This seemed to be just plain disinterest.

The value of human life is evidently very little indeed.

About an hour later, my appointment done, we drove past the spot again, headed back home. The Esteem was still parked at the side of the road, with the motorcycle next to it. There were no victims lying around, there was no crowd. I could only hope that help had reached them in time.

For the rest of the drive, my chauffeur took extra care when overtaking or encountering two-wheelers.