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Death in the Afternoon
Seeing a dead body is one of the most unnerving sights on
offer: whenever I think of Hobart in Tasmania, I think of two pale, bloated
bodies washing up from a sunken car in the dock, trailing frothy white vomit on
the black water. Worse than this is to watch someone die, to go from alive to
dead in the blink of an eye, a pleasure I have yet to witness. But surely the
worst sight of all must be to see someone still alive, but dying slowly and
desperately in front of your very eyes, without a hope for survival; this is
why fatal cancer and AIDS are so frightening, because there's no hope. At least
a bullet in the head is quick.
Halfway between Janakpur and the Nepal-India border the bus
blared its horn and swerved to the right, not unusual behaviour in this part of
the world given the number of potholes and slow trucks that need to be
overtaken. From my window seat on the left-hand side of the rusting vehicle I
was idly staring at the passing scenery, the distant cloud-shrouded Himalayas
providing a backdrop to farmers' fields, bullocks pulling ploughs and women
carrying bundles of sticks on their heads. But as the bus swerved onto the
right-hand side of the road I saw what had caused the driver to punch his horn.
In the middle of the eastbound carriageway, a woman was dying.
I must have had a total of two seconds to take in the scene,
and initially I didn't register quite what I was seeing: it was only an instant
later, after we had left the whole scene behind, that it hit me what I had
witnessed, and it smacked me in the guts like a rabbit punch. On the side of
the road was a crowd of about twenty people, standing stock still in frozen
amazement at the sight in front of them, nobody moving a muscle. Buses screamed
by in both directions, the thought of stopping to help not even a faint flicker
in the minds of the driver and conductors, and fifty yards further up the
highway children pedalled their rusty bicycles on errands for their parents,
just another hot day on the plains of the Terai.
But back there on the searing tarmac lay a woman in a
spreading pool of blood the colour of rusty sump oil, a victim of a hit and
run. I have seen countless wrecks on the side of the road, both in the West and
in the Third World, and hulking and mangled metal is disturbing, but an
accepted and acceptable fact of life: what I have never seen is the human cost.
The photographs in Kuala Lumpur shocked me into realising the severity of road
death, the butcher-like quality of the lacerated leg or the tyre-crushed cranium,
but the sight of death in reality made those photographs seem pathetic.
She was still moving when we passed her. Lying in a position
similar to that of the unfit man doing press-ups – legs and belly still on the
ground, shoulders raised by her palms pushing on the tarmac – her arms were
clawing at the bitumen in an attempt to pull herself up. But what she couldn't
see was the mutilated mass of raw meat that had once been her legs and pelvis,
a sight that reminded me instantly of the death throes of water buffalo in
Sulawesi, and throughout her struggles to cling onto life the crowd stared,
unmoving. Two minutes up the road a flock of vultures preened itself, oblivious
as yet to the potential meal slowly growing colder and less aware just down the
road, and within half a second of us flashing past, the scenery was back to
normal. 'An accident?' asked my neighbour, a friendly Christian from Janakpur.
'Yes,' I said, 'an accident', thinking how inept the terminology was. An
accident is when you spill milk on the kitchen floor or don't make it to the
toilet in time; it hardly applies to a lonely and painful death while the
village looks on, friends frozen in fear.
I found myself trying to imagine what was going through the
woman's head. The pain would be so severe as to make a death from shock as
likely as a death from loss of blood; with Nepal's hospital facilities being
almost non-existent, let alone a national health plan, there is no doubt that
by the time I reached India the woman would be dead. Her frantic clawing was
futile in the extreme, but what else could she do? I imagined her calling to
her friends for help while they looked on in a mixture of horror and
fascination; for people who have not been educated with biology lessons and
horror movies, it would be amazing to actually see inside a human body, to see
bones, flesh and blood. Besides, it would be the will of the gods that she was
struck down, and who is the man in the street to interfere with the will of the
gods?
And I felt a rush of guilt, an unfair feeling seeing as even
if the bus had stopped, I could have done nothing to help. I saw a woman dying
on the road from a severely crushed torso and massive haemorrhaging, and I was
absolutely helpless. The same applied to her onlookers, who would have had no
idea about first aid; indeed, a skilled doctor could probably have done nothing
except administer painkillers and talk to the family. But I will remember that
desperate scrabbling for a long time, and I have no doubt that the first memory
of the eastern Terai that springs to mind will not be of happy festivals in
Janakpur, but of a dying carcass on the road.
Someone once told me that the reason buses and trucks
constantly use their horns in India and Nepal is that women who carry things on
their heads cannot turn to see if there is anything coming, so the traffic
blasts away to stop them walking across the road. Perhaps she didn't hear the
horn, or perhaps the driver didn't bother to sound his blower; whatever, the
result was another insignificant death of another peasant worker, or that's how
it would have appeared to the world at large.
It was far from insignificant to the western tourist who
flashed past on his way to the border.
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