So I'm on the bike, heading to work, on what seems to be another routine, uneventful daily commute. Bah, you smart alec's out there have already decided that it wasn't an uneventful ride, just after reading the first sentence, haven't you! I'm tempted to spite you and stop writing now just to aggravate you. But I won't, that'd just be letting you get away with your smart-ness.
So...riding my bike in the rain in Mumbai isn't the most stress-free experience of all time, but it generally is uneventful(no prizes for counting how many 'uneventful's' I'll use..). I'm in the left most lane, going at a fairly brisk speed, it is the highway after all, and I see a brown Qualis ahead to my right. I'm pretty sure that he's climbing the approaching fly-over, so I don't slow down, and head to the service road under the fly-over. Just as the flyover is about to begin, our friend in the Qualis decides he doesn't wanna drive on the fly-over, and so he swerves left, almost side-swiping me, and when he does see his attempt failing, brakes like a maniac. Imagine the scene....tyre's screaming, people screaming, I'm screaming, I swerve at 60 kilometers per hour, brake hard, skid to evade him and eventually regain control a few horrible seconds later.
At this point I should tell you that I'm probably not the most understanding, calm guy around. And I do have anger management issues. So, I stop the bike, get off, take off my helmet, and come towards the Qualis with very bad thoughts running through my head, like breaking his legs at 3 different points and shoving the handbrake lever where the sun doesn't shine. As I approach the Qualis, the driver gets a very nasty surprise...remember, he's now between the entry ramp of the fly-over and the beginning of the service road, in short, in the middle of nowhere, with his rear end facing traffic that wants to climb the fly-over, and his front facing the service road. So I'm walking slowly, deliberately towards him, he stays inside the car, and a few seconds later, karma kicks in. An 18 wheeler behind him hasn't noticed that he's stationary. He He He :) The 18 wheeler brakes a little too late, and smashes into his rear end! If you have ever seen 2 vehicles smash into each other, you'll know how horrible it is. Metal against metal, grinding twisting and emitting noises that remind you of aliens in a sci-fi movie. The Qualis is smashed from the rear. The rear entry door literally bent and mangled into scrap metal!
Now any normal human being watching this would run to the driver and see if he's hurt or not. Not me. I almost pointed and laughed. Not that I'm proud of it, but in hindsight it does seem a bit mean minded. But at that point in time, I'd narrowly missed getting hit by his car, and lets just say I wasn't feeling any sympathy for the man. So as slowly and deliberately as I was approaching him, I turned back to my bike, rode to work grinning like an idiot...happy that for once, karma was on my side.
