Death on the Highway

One of the unavoidable side effects of living in a place abutting the national highway is one becomes an unwilling witness to horrific road accidents. If one has missed seeing any such accidents than one is sure to read about it in the next day’s newspapers. Not a day passes for me without coming across the mangled remains of cars, bikes and passenger autos lying on the roadside on the highway I take once a week. Only once did I get to see a body lying beside the road, a casualty of an accident that seemed to have happened just minutes before. It was that of a young motorcyclist, a student judging from the knapsack still strapped on his shoulders as he lay on his side, hands up as if trying to avoid something. His motorcycle lay beside him, its front wheel totally twisted out of shape. Needless to say there was no helmet on the head. I was on a bike and my colleague immediately slowed down. For the rest of the journey we were silent, each lost in our own thoughts. It was the time of Sankranti and I guess the boy was going home for the holidays.

Last week, I was sitting in the office that is just behind a government hospital called the ‘Area Hospital’ which seemed to a referral hospital considering the number of ambulances that stream in several times a day. It is quite a big hospital for the patients from the neighboring hospitals. One of the reasons why I dislike sitting in my office is something that is very disconcerting. At least once a day I hear loud wailings coming from the direction of the hospital. At first I did not know what caused it but now I realize it is the relatives wailing when they watch their dead being wheeled out. The crying does not stop until the body is taken out of the hospital premises. Till it happens I am totally distressed. On a particular day last week there seemed to be an unusually large number of ambulances streaming into the hospital, their sirens blaring away. There was also continous wailing that increased with the arrival of the ambulances. Later in the evening when I was returning in an autorickshaw after my evening tea at Anand Café, I heard the driver tell someone that there was a road accident in a nearby village that left eight dead.

Next morning, it was the first thing I read in the newspaper at the hotel where I had gone for my morning tea. I read that a truck had run over a passenger autorickshaw on the national highway near a place called Mothey, about twenty kilometers away from Suryapet. It seems twelve people, including kids, were killed instantly in the ghastly accident. The local supplement of the Telugu newspaper was filled with pictures of the site of the accident, a stream of blood snaking from out from under the mangled autorickshaw. The bodies lay scattered on the road and a couple of them were still in the autorickshaw. Only days before a tractor carrying a large number of people in its trailer had plunged into a canal killing more than a dozen people in another village in the district. It is very distressing to look at the pictures of the bloodied bodies of innocent kids who die in such accidents for no fault of theirs except being with their parents. It is equally distressing to watch the pictures of small kids orphaned by the death of both the parents in the accidents.

I wonder when how many more have to die before it enters our heads to keep autorickshaws crammed with people, off the highways. I wonder when we will learn the simplest of traffic rules- to wear helmets and to drive safely. One would be surprised to watch the number of truck drivers, bus drivers who talk on their cell phones even as they are negotiating the traffic in the busy highway. People who drive cars seem to do it more often than those who drive buses and trucks. It only shows that we are some of the dumbest and most stupid people endangering the lives of our loved ones and also those of others by such irresponsible acts. God save us.