Saviours

Sometime in the late sixties, while in senior school, my father, mother, a mechanic and I were returning from Benares in our Landmaster car.  With us was Connie, a most uncontrollable mongrel we had been gifted. Earlier, on reaching Benares, my father had thrown his back, due to a recurring slip disc problem caused by lifting a piece of heavy machinery. He lay immobilized in the hotel bed for days. Obviously then, we were in a cautious mood on the way back to Kolkata.

Around 8pm we stopped for dinner, only casually aware of a group of people at the next table. Some hours after we left, I was jolted out of sleep as the car braked with a terrific crash and all the breath blew out of my father’s lungs in a loud ‘ooof Ma!’ The traumatized mechanic’s bloody face had shards of broken windscreen glass. The impact of my father’s chest on the steering wheel had broken it into four and he had a gash on his leg from the gear while I was relatively unhurt except that I could never fall asleep in a car again. However, it was my mother’s obscenely swollen forehead and groaning which scared us horribly.

The car had hit the back of a truck parked with no lights on the left side of the road, exactly where my father had swerved to avoid an oncoming truck bearing down full force on us from the right. And then the police arrived. We learnt later it was a hot spot for such parked trucks at night to steal sand in a nexus with the local police. The police report no doubt stated our car was speeding at such a rate it hit the’ moving’ truck. I remain silent on the name of the accident site; who knows, things may have changed by now? To top it all, Connie wailed and scrambled around.

Suddenly, a car with the strangers from the next table at dinner pulled up; they said they recognized our car from the parking lot at the restaurant. As if it was the most natural thing to do, they took responsibility for my mother and me while my father stayed back in that condition to tackle the police .The kind  locals, also strangers, took care of Connie, tying him  to their charpoy and feeding him dal and chapattis till he went back with my father.

Meanwhile, our restaurant friends took us back, stopping first at my father’s colleague’s place for him to make arrangements for my mother at the company enlisted Nursing Home. Before taking us to the nursing home, they rang up my father’s best friend who left immediately for the accident site .All this happened pre dawn. There were no cell phones then. My mother had acute subdural hematoma, blood collected between skin and brain; her forehead was swelling like a balloon. She needed to have the blood drained immediately, potential hazards being amnesia or even death. She recovered from a successful surgery without any complications. Our new friends helped save her life and took us out of a real messy situation otherwise.

My father was treated on reaching late afternoon.. Connie had been dispatched to my grandparents’ place, the mechanic’s wounds superficial. Curiously, the sudden jerk cured my father of his backache permanently, moving something back into place after a decade. The broken steering wheel left no impact. Our benefactors kept in touch till all was fine. While I am sure my parents expressed their overwhelming gratitude to them I salute the magnitude of their hearts once again.