When Life Makes Your Choice For You

A personal story of a near-death experience which altered the trajectory of my life.

There was a song playing in my car. The Corrs were singing to their lyrics from “Only When I Sleep”,

But it´s only when I sleep
See you in my dreams
Got me spinning round and round
Turning upside down

But it´s only when I sleep
And when I wake from slumber

That was the last thing I remember.

The impact woke me up. My head was spinning round and round. You know that feeling when you get abruptly interrupted from deep dreamy sleep, that’s how it felt. Only this time I was awakened in my car.

A few seconds passed, and the spinning came to a halt. There was a ringing in my ear. Everything looked blurry. My face felt weird. My tongue tasted flesh. The smell of burnt rubber and smoke crowded my senses.

My hands reached out and felt the roughness of the asphalt. I was in the driver's seat of a car that was slanted to one side, my side, that had been crushed to become one with the intercity highway.

I was on my way back from Bangalore city, a 70 kilometer mid-afternoon drive on December 3rd, 1999. The last thing I remember was cruising at 80 km/hr in my Maruti 800, which apparently did not have any airbags installed.

I don’t have a picture of my Maruti 800 but it looked exactly like these.

I remember wanting to pull over when I had felt the car wavering off towards the median. It was the second time I caught myself dozing off, a sign that I foolishly ignored.

I had even considered stopping over at a dhaba, a roadside restaurant, to splash water on my face. But I didn't, and I drove on, ignorant as ever, distracted by the tunes from the new mixtape that I had made especially for this drive back to my engineering college.

I was listening to the mesmerizing tunes and haunting vocals of a band I was introduced to that weekend, The Corrs.

I haven’t slept at all in days
It’s been so long since we’ve talked
And I have been here many times
I just don’t know what I’m doing wrong

The music stopped when I rammed into a cargo truck. It was pulling back on to the highway from their roadside rest stop.

My middle-class parents didn’t approve of the need for a car in college. I was to focus on my studies and nothing else. But after much begging and pleading, and support from my big brother, my dream had become a reality.

The car redefined my image in the mere 22 days that I had it, or so I thought. I would drive to college every day, showing off in front of friends. I was one of those cool kids.

When I finally realized what had happened, I was overcome with guilt. I repeatedly asked God why I was still alive. In that moment, the embarrassment of having survived such a loss was unbearable.

It took only about 5 minutes for me to shake off that dreaded feeling, to rescue me from regret. I quickly reassured myself, saying, “What’s happened has happened. It’s time to move forward.”

I got out of the car. I pulled out my spare glasses, one that I always carried in the glove compartment. I was determined as ever to move on and survive this incident. But the spare glasses were of no use on a bloodied and tenderized face.

With blurred vision I looked around. There were people approaching me. Vehicles had stopped. I realized that I was literally standing in the middle of the highway, blocking traffic that had started to pile up on both sides.

The minutes that unfolded could only be summarized as many acts of kindness from strangers. I am ever so grateful to the occupants of the victim truck that I had collided with. Obviously, they were the first to assist me into a passerby van that had also stopped and kind enough to put their plans aside to rush me to a nearby local hospital.

On the way, the truck driver said that I drove straight into him. He said I cam on to them head-on, even though they tried to honk, wave and scream at me to stop. He too was in shock.

At the hospital he phoned my friends and then stuck around until they arrived. Then the white coats of this remote village hospital came in examine me as I sat on a bed in a small waiting room.

They patched me up, rejoining the torn parts of my face and elbow with a total of 10 stitches. I felt every one of them — 3 around the torn lip, 4 to fix a torn ear, and 3 to close up the deep gash on my right elbow.

Hours passed. Then some friendly faces walked in, relieved to see me alive. I remember my friend’s strict words of reassurance.

You are ok. Just take rest. Don’t say anything to anyone. Don’t worry about anything. We’ll take care of it all.

And they did.

Here’s the irony of it all. The Corrs were singing songs of love, most of which included words synonymous with sleep, about dreams and of being awake. If you believe in signs, there were plenty on that mixtape.

Photo by Tom Parsons on Unsplash

What if I had paid attention to any of those signs? What if I had the sense to pull over to wash my face, or grab a bite to eat? If I had reached my destination that day and kicked off events that were planned, how would life have changed?

That accident was surely a turning point in my life. Those who saw the remains of the crash would never have expected the driver to survive. It was a miraculous escape, and triggered a new set of events.

I see the accident as a fork in the road of life, like the many we all encounter in our lives. Many of them are intentional, and we inevitably arrive at the juncture, and we get to make a choice. Some appear when we least expect it, like this one, and a choice was made for me.

Maybe it is a way of the universe correcting us from a destructive path. Whatever it might be, that choice has brought me to this moment, all those years later. Here I am.