A split second...

It took only a split-second. But the effects were long-lived. It was a late Saturday morning and we were on our way to my friend’s place for lunch. I was really excited to be going since I hadn't seen my friend in a long while and so were the kids for they adore any outing. The music was playing and I was humming along happily when I felt the car lurch to an abrupt stop followed by the sound of a sickening thud and an immediate webbing of fine cracks on the windshield. My daughter who is five got frightened and started sobbing. My son was upset that the car ‘broke’ as he put it. I felt nothing just an eerie calm underlying the thought that was a prayer “Let whoever hit us not be dead, oh God!” My husband, S jumped out and so did the driver. It was a scooter that hit us. There were two people on it. Neither was wearing a helmet as the rules require and the guy in the lead had head injuries but was able to sit up and talk. They were overtaking a bus and were on the wrong side of the road – our car was fairly large but they didn’t see us – we rammed the brakes and so the accident was not fatal. It couldn’t have been avoided because there was no place for us to swerve except onto the bus the scooter guys were overtaking. The car shows a clean cut right in the middle of the bonnet and the windshield shows the impact of the man’s head exactly in the centre.
Immediately after the accident, as is the case anywhere in India, people swarmed over the car and started to terrorize us for we were in the bigger vehicle. It didn’t bother them that there were two small children scared witless in the car or that we were being harassed for no fault of our own. Our insurance will prove any day how careful we were over the years. My husband insists that even in the middle of the night, the driver needs to follow all the rules like he does. It’s a common enough practice in Bangalore to flout every traffic rule so that you can inconvenience others in order to land up where you are going 3 minutes earlier than expected. Lanes are drawn to be ignored and if there is any way to cause a jam, then go for it.
In any case, they tried to scare us because we were not ‘Kannadigas’ – meaning we weren’t originally from Karnataka. They insisted we pay for the scooter as well as for the hospitalization charges of the two scooter riders. We refused. They were in the wrong and scaring us or threatening us with violence wouldn’t change the truth. But no one was interested in the truth – they wanted to see some action. The kids and I got back home in a taxi while S and the driver, K went to the police station to file a complaint. The police did not want to file a complaint. They kept them waiting till eight in the night and suggested that a compromise was better than complaining officially. The scooter meanwhile was towed in and it was found that it had neither insurance nor indeed any other documentation. The twenty people who had assembled to fight for the scooter riders began to disperse when they figured out that no one was going to get any money – neither the police nor the scooter guys. So both sides filed a complaint and the car lay in the police station for three days since it was a long weekend. We finally got the car back and the cost of repairing it amounts to the price of four good quality scooters. The insurance will cover 60 to 70 percent but the car would take 15 working days to be fixed.
We may have to go to court when the summons comes along and I bet that the other party will not show up. It may take 7 or 8 years before the case is even settled and if we want to sell the car off in the interim, we will not be allowed to but even then there is some satisfaction in sticking up for oneself and taking a stand when everyone else was saying “ Just compromise or they’ll trouble you” . Appearances are all that matter in today’s India – perception rules and truth has no place whether in government or day-to-day life. Almost everyone I know especially the IT crowd in Bangalore just don’t want hassles – they would just pay and move on to avoid unpleasantness because they don’t have the time to wait endless hours in government agencies. We were also like that – never stepping out of our comfort zone or dealing with anything less than pristine. But it is possibly this attitude that bolsters those who prey on the law-abiding. We should just refuse to be cowed, to bribe, to agree to ‘adjust’ – in short we should just stick to what’s right and not what’s convenient.