INDIA
“Hey Kim, did I ever tell you about my worst travel day ever?”
The old man was wearing all-white pajamas and a turban. He casually rode his bicycle across the highway while looking down, away from oncoming traffic. He didn’t see the three thousand pounds of steel barreling toward him at a hundred kilometers an hour. And our taxi driver didn’t see him either.
How did I end up in this situation, zeroing in on grandpa?
If North India’s Jat people didn’t riot and shut down the local trains and buses—to get their caste eligible for affirmative action benefits—I’d have taken the bus instead of this taxi.
If I didn’t meet two cool Dutchmen at my hostel—who were in a hurry to get to the Taj before attending their buddy’s wedding in Delhi—we wouldn’t be sharing this taxi.
And if I didn’t get Delhi belly—even though I never stepped foot in Delhi—and spend the previous week in bed and get an IV at the local Jaipur hospital, I would’ve been long gone by now.
But fate had it her way. As always.
Our taxi nailed the old man on his bike. His head smashed through the rear door’s window, and glass exploded onto the Dutchmen. The sound was sickening; the thud from bones breaking against steel, and glass shattering.
Impulsively, I put both hands on my head, and lowered my head between my knees. Like an ostrich burying its head in the sand. I couldn’t believe the nightmare we just drove into. I kept thinking to myself “holy shit, we just killed somebody! Oh. My. God.”
Our taxi driver never had any intention of stopping, we didn’t even slow down below sixty kilometers an hour. As we sped away, he immediately started defending himself. I don’t speak a word of Rajasthani, or Hindi, but I understood exactly what he was saying.
“It wasn’t my fault, the old man rode his bike right in front of my car.”
We started yelling at the driver to stop the car. He refused. We drove for about five minutes, and finally he stopped at a small roadside restaurant. The impact from the old man’s body jammed my door, so it only opened a few inches. The whole back seat was full of glass.
I grabbed a dish towel from the restaurant and wiped glass off the Dutchmen. A big shard of glass was stuck in one of their ears, and blood was running down his cheek. As I pulled the piece of glass out, my hands were shaking so bad I worried about dropping it into his inner ear.
The driver called his boss to explain his innocence, and a group of men gathered. It seemed like they were condoning his decision not to stop. At one point, they were all smiling and laughing.
One of the men drove us the rest of the way to Agra. The Dutchmen hurried to visit the Taj Mahal, before they caught another taxi for Delhi in the morning.
I wasn’t in a hurry anymore. I bought a couple beers at my budget hotel’s bar, went up on the roof top, and tried to wrap my head around killing someone.
Manslaughter wasn’t in the plan for our Kim’s View epic journey, Sis.
That night I met up with the Dutchmen for dinner. All of us were still freaked out.
“Do you think we killed him?”
“I hope so, because if we didn’t, he’s in a world of hurt right now” one replied.
The next day I battled the cluster-phuk of tourists and visited the Taj Mahal. It was anticlimactic, to say the least. My Indian visa expired in less than a week. I thought about extending my visa, but a month in India had worn me out. I decided to go back to Jaipur, and catch a flight to Kathmandu, Nepal.
The trains still weren’t running, but I scored a front row seat on a bus back to Jaipur. The engine was too loud to listen to music, so I just stared out the window and vegged for six hours. I focused on the old men wearing all white, especially those riding bicycles.
Who was our hit-and-run victim? I saw many goat herders wearing the same type of white turban and pajamas. Was grandpa a goat herder?
“I’m sure the driver was worried about a local mob beating him for hitting the old man.”
Back at the hostel in Jaipur, I talked to one of the locals, Santanu, about our hit-and-run. I told him grandpa was at fault, and it was just a horrible accident. I asked him why our taxi driver didn’t just stop and explain everything to the police.
“I’m sure the driver was worried about a local mob beating him for hitting the old man” Santanu said.
“The hit-and-run part was definitely a crime. If you go to the police with your pictures there would be a court case, but the driver would just deny everything.” He didn’t encourage me to go to the police.
“In the rural areas, they’re unemployed and illiterate. The angry crowd will just kill a driver involved in a fatal accident, regardless of who’s at fault.”
Kim’s View of the Taj Mahal is impressive. I had the rare opportunity to visit one of the seven wonders of the modern world.
And even though my India experience included death and sickness, I enjoyed my month-long exploation of Kochi, Goa, Mumbai, Jaipur, and Agra.
I can’t complain, Sis. This is what I signed up for. Our Kim’s View epic journey includes the good, the bad, and the ugly.
My road-trip to the Taj was beyond ugly. It was deadly.
