Scared To Death

I had intended to write this post soon after I had seen the last episode of How I Met Your Mother (Season 3). Instead, I write this post bored; halfway through my session of (this is where I begin to term-drop) numerical stability analysis. In the episode, Ted and Barney meet with accidents and figure out what happens to you when you think you're going to die. Both of them report seeing only the most important people in their lives when faced with death.

I intend this post to be more than anything else, an interaction with my readers and co-bloggers with interesting experiences. After having narrated mine, I want you, the reader, to tell me if you have had an experience where you thought you were a goner (going to die, wham, kapoot and the like). I don't mean the "Oh my God, it's so hot I could die" moments, but those that really made you think that this was it. I want to know what these incidents were and what went through your head.

Now there's two ways we could do this. The first is to regard this post as a blogger tag. Those of my readers who write blogs of their own can perhaps put up a post in the same vein as this one and leave me a comment with their blog address. If that's too fancy for you (or you're not one for writing blogs), you could perhaps leave a long-ish comment with your story.

On to my stories then. I can distinctly recall three times in my life of twenty two odd years when I was of the opinion that this was the premature end. I divide these three incidents in two categories. The first category, is when the whole incident is a matter of a few seconds. The second, is when it is a more prolonged process of doubt and uncertainty and needless to say, more unpleasant than anything else. On with the first incident then.

The first incident took place one summer evening around south-central Delhi. My father, my sister and I had to cross the road right at the end of a flyover. There was no subway, so we had to risk crossing a fairly busy road at rush hour. At my father's insistence we began to cross the road, but soon found ourselves in a precarious position in the middle of the road where the traffic from the flyover merged with the rest of the road. We knew we had got ourselves into a tangle. No sooner than we had this realization, a truck decided to overtake a vehicle which would soon whiz past our backs. Do the math and you'll realize that as soon as the truck driver overtook the car from the right, he'd have noticed that he was heading right at us at full speed. The truck driver wasn't the only one who was enlightened thus. We saw the truck and realized there was nothing we could do. My father had already thrown his hands in the air, my sister had already let out half a scream and my brain had already got stunned into inaction by the time the truck flew past us, missing us quite literally by a couple of inches. All of this, in a matter of three seconds. Truth be told, that was too little time to even know what was happening, let alone have my life flash in front of me. After all was done, I knew I had drawn a blank and my only concern was to get across to safety.

The second incident took place when I was on a family trip, headed to Arunachal Pradesh. We had to cross a mountain pass at 14000 feet to get to Tawang. The weather had been fine all along, but as soon as we reached the pass, we got stranded in a blizzard that nearly blew a couple of cars off the cliff. The blizzard intensified and brought down so much snow that our car could no longer grip the road to carry out the final fifty metre climb to the zero point after which the rest of the journey would have been downhill. We were forced to turn back and make our way back down to the valley floor. Everything had turned white by now. There was no way one could make out where the road ended. On our way down, in an attempt to cross a stationary army truck, our car slipped and slid on the road and there we were, caught in a blizzard with a tyre buried in the snow on the side of the mountain. We surely couldn't spend the night at that altitude inside the car, and the tyre refused to budge. By now every one began to panic. My father and I tried to push and shove the car out of the ditch but the biting cold and the heavy car made it impossible to move it. Thankfully though, after about an hour's pushing and shoving, we managed to intercept an army vehicle that had come to recover the stationary army truck that had got us into all this trouble. Another half an hour of shoving by about ten of us finally got the car out of the hole and we headed back down, thankful for our lives.

About three months after the Arunachal incident had transpired, I found myself at Kangla Jal. Three friends and I were making our way from Manali to Leh on a bus that had snaked through treacherous roads all day long. We came to one of many grinding halts behind a long line of vehicles. There was a river crossing ahead and a bunch of cars had got trapped inside the water, preventing traffic flow from either side. What started off as a short halt, slowly turned into an hour, then two, and as nightfall began to approach, there was talk of spending the night in the bus. It was dangerous to spend the night inside a bus at 16000 feet. Some tried to cross the river on foot but realized that the current was too strong and returned. Then it began to rain, which further raised the water level, and flooded the river with sediment. The end result being that we were trapped inside a bus, having had no food for over 24 hours, no water to drink, little air to breathe and no way of informing anyone of the trouble we were in. We were careful to keep our windows slightly open so as to not choke ourselves, but that too had to be abandoned once it started raining in the middle of the night. My mouth had gone completely dry because of the lack of water and my head was throbbing because I felt like no matter how hard I inhaled, there wasn't enough air getting to my lungs. Throughout that night I constantly thought of what would happen if the road didn't clear up the next day as well. That, thankfully wasn't the case. The water level reduced sharply the next morning and we powered across the river and onward to Leh.

The last two incidents belong to the second category I mentioned above. The long hours of uncertainty were excruciating. None of those times though, did incidents of my life flash past my eyes. The only thing I was obsessed with was getting on the other side of the ordeal. Of course I wondered about things I'd do differently once I got out on the other side; deals I never really respected, come to think of it.

All said and done, being scared to death does leave you with a few stories to tell.

Do you have any?