Accident ho gaya rabba rabba

Since she started driving, mom has discovered that no two driving days are alike. There might be little to no traffic one day, while the same route at the same time the next day might take a good hour to navigate.

“It’s not that hard to drive here,” says dad. “You just need to figure out the traffic patterns.”

“You mean the traffic here follows a pattern?” asks mom, firmly of the opinion that India needs skilled transportation engineers as urgently as she requires bakers who can make authentic bagels instead of pandering a bun-with-a-hole-in-the-middle for a hefty price.

Most drivers seem to carry a death wish on their heads, which explains why so many of them leave their brains unprotected and travel with their helmets swinging from their arms.

For all the chaos that reigns on the road, one would expect accidents to happen as often as power cuts in the city. But to our immense surprise, we’ve only witnessed a handful of accidents in the last year.

The latest one occurred yesterday almost in front of mom’s eyes. As she waited behind a long line of honking vehicles and irate drivers on her way to the grocery, a mob gathered out of nowhere and began running toward the collision.

A car had rammed into a bus full of passengers. Nobody seemed injured, but there was a lot of shouting and jostling as gawkers quickly surrounded the two vehicles in idle curiosity.

It never fails to amaze mom to see the number of men in India who stand near tea stalls doing absolutely nothing. While the women seem busy and are always going somewhere or doing something, the men seem preoccupied mainly with their balls. It's almost as if gravity pulls their free hand southward, and one suspects these men would be genuinely bewildered if they were forbidden from seeking comfort in their crotch.

When the vehicles collided, some of these very same men loosened their grip long enough to run to the scene. In a matter of minutes, the mob swelled to a few hundred people, making it impossible for mom to gape from the comfort of her car.

So, she did what anybody would do in a similar situation - she drove away.

It was not the collision that unsettled her even though she’s come close to being mowed down by a bus herself. What frightened mom was the mob and the melee, capable of stripping a crashed car and its dazed victims of money and valuables.

“What do I do if I find myself in an accident?” she asked dad.

Never having been involved in one in either country, my humans are clueless. If they were in the U.S., mom would have waited for a cop.

What should she do in India other than pray?