Another Chance at Life
A traffic accident left a young photographer badly injured on the road where he would have died, until finally a car pulled up
A road accident leaves a young photographer reliant on a Good Samaritan.
New Delhi, March 31, 1992: When I left the office for a news assignment that early summer evening, I had absolutely no idea that this was going to become a dateline of my own life story.
As a young photographer with The Times of India in Delhi, I was on my way to a photo shoot before I wrapped up for the day. I was thrilled to be leaving for Paris in five days. I couldn’t wait to fly out – I was going to visit friends and give my career a boost, as I had also planned meetings with photo agencies there. I had, in fact, received my visa only a while before I headed out for my assignment at about 7pm.
On Moolchand flyover, with my camera bag containing my equipment, passport and $500 strapped to my back, I rode my motorbike at moderate speed. Suddenly, something massive hit me from behind. All I knew was I was no longer on my bike.
I was flung from my bike and had hit the road. Before I blacked out, I could see my helmet lying at a distance, smashed into three pieces.
Hours, maybe days later, I opened my eyes. Was I at an airport terminal? But why were the air hostesses in white uniforms? I realised I was on a hospital bed and later learnt that I had been shifted to the ward 19 days after the accident. Under the influence of the morphine I’d been pumped with, it took me some time to understand this was the ICU of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). Even as I f litted in and out of consciousness, I could sense a lot had happened already. And who knew what was to come? Later I discovered that the impact of the crash was such that my skull had been fractured, leading to a complication called CSF rhinorrhoea, in which the
IT WAS A HIT-AND- RUN, AND JUDGING BY THE AMOUNT OF BLOOD, I HAD BEEN THERE A WHILE
fluid surrounding the brain drains out of the nose. After the doctors monitored me, waiting for me to stabilise, I was finally shifted to a private ward. A slew of surgeries followed – a reconstruction of the skull, my broken right wrist fixed and a rhinoplasty. My jaw needed mending, too.
I lived by myself in Delhi, and after hearing about my accident, my mother rushed from Kolkata – a 1500 kilometre and 20-hour train trip – to be with me. My colleagues rallied around me and looked after me like family. They donated eight bottles of blood and stood by me throughout.
As I lay in hospital, I tried to piece together that fateful Tuesday. A friend, Madhumita Mitra, who was the first to learn of my accident, told me that someone had found me badly injured on the flyover. It was a hit-and-run case, and judging by the amount of blood I had lost, it seemed that I’d been lying there for a while. The man drove me to Moolchand hospital, not far from the scene of my accident. He saw Madhumita’s number in my pocket phone book and because we had the same surname – I also had my press card with me – assumed she was a relative.
“I rushed to the hospital when I heard the news,” Madhumita told me. In the meantime, it seems, the kind soul had informed my colleagues with the help of the same phone book. The doctors instructed that I should be shifted to AIIMS immediately as they didn’t have the facilities to treat my case. In the commotion, Madhumita couldn’t ask for the person’s name or any other details. Assured that I was in good hands, and my colleagues had now arrived, the gentleman left.
It was a long road to recovery, which turned out to be a life-changing experience. I got discharged after about six months, my face visibly altered. I sported a ponytail before the accident, but one of the surgeries had required my head to be shaved. Even at home I underwent regular tests and scans, and wasn’t able to resume work until January 1993. Even today, my memory gets foggy at times and I find it difficult to recall things from my past.
Life, however, slowly returned to normal. I did a four-year stint with a TV news channel before I started freelancing. Though I never went to Paris, I did get an opportunity to work in Nepal in 2003 and moved to Kathmandu. When I came back to India in 2006, I decided to settle down in Kolkata.
I would often think of the person who stopped on the flyover to help
me. I had no idea who he was, but I knew I owed him my life. I wish I could tell him how I felt, but I did not know how to find him. As life took over, these thoughts got buried in the recesses of my mind.
One evening in May last year when I was cooking dinner, I got a call from Madhumita. She had been to a social gathering that day. A woman she didn’t know kept looking in her direction. Curious, Madhumita walked over to her and introduced herself. “If I’m not mistaken, we met briefly many years ago,” the woman said to her. “Were you the person my husband contacted, when we found that accident victim on Moolchand flyover many years ago?”
Madhumita was speechless. “It was like the events of that entire evening came back to me in a flash,” she said breathlessly over the phone.
It was amazing that 23 years later, the woman had spotted her at a get-together, after meeting her only briefly that fateful evening. Here was my chance to meet the man who had saved my life: I urged Madhumita to find out his contact details. I had to meet him now; I couldn’t wait any longer.
A few weeks later, Madhumita called me, “The gentleman’s name is Mr Rajiv Nag and I have his phone number. Maybe you would like to give him a call.”
“Of course!”
I thanked her and hung up to dial the number right away. A man with a calm, rich baritone voice answered the phone. Life, it seemed, had been conspiring for me to meet him in person – Mr Nag, who lived in Delhi, was in Kolkata to visit a relative. So, off I went to meet him.
I FUMBLED FOR WORDS OF GRATITUDE – NO ‘THANK YOU’ WOULD EVER BE ENOUGH
Although it was late at night, and he had to leave early in the morning for Delhi, the reunion was extraordinary. I fumbled for words of gratitude – nothing I said would describe how I really felt. No ‘thank you’ would ever be enough. All I wanted was to see him once: I just had to see the face of my saviour.
I left soon after, but not without an image that will stay with me forever – the smiling face and reassuring demeanour of Mr Nag. A man who thought of nothing, except that a life had to be saved, no matter what, even as bystanders looked on and vehicles swerved past as I lay there, on that flyover, bleeding.
WHAT DRIVES GOOD DEEDS?
When Reader’s Digest spoke to Rajiv Nag, he was hesitant about us using the word kindness to describe his gesture. “It was more an act of duty,” said the modest software consultant, now 62.
“I was on the flyover, driving home with my wife and three-year-old son,” he said, “when I saw cars braking ahead of us and then going past.” Soon, they were stopped in their tracks by what they saw. “A man lay sprawled on the road, drenched in blood and groaning in tremendous pain,” Nag recalled. “His head had hit the divider and, looking at the blood that been lost, it seemed that life could go out of him at any moment.”
With the help of a cyclist who had stopped, Nag heaved the injured man as gently as he could in the back seat of their car. “With my horn blaring, lights flashing and the man crying in pain, I jumped a red light or two to reach the nearest hospital as quickly as I could,” Nag said. “Each time there was a bump in the road, the injured passenger jerked out of the seat, by ref lex, and then fell back groaning.”
Nag got support at every stage. “We were helped along by the traffic police to reach the hospital. The staff at Moolchand started treatment right away, without waiting for paperwork to be completed, and the policeman stationed at the hospital was very cooperative, too,” he said.
The accident had taken place before 2004, when the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways issued a circular to police chiefs stating that there should be no legal impediment for being a ‘Good Samaritan’ in a road accident.
Didn’t the thought of being caught in police and court matters worry Nag at the time? “In life, if you keep thinking about things, you’ll never do them,” he replied.