The night of the dead
You know how we look back and think about how barbaric certain customs were
After so many years of seeing it in comics, I was finally witness to ‘trick or treating’ on a large scale this October 31. While putting on costumes and accosting the neighbours for sweets is common now in urban India, when I was growing up, Halloween was remembered more as the day on which then prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated.
It was fun to watch our neighbourhood here in the outskirts of Los Angeles come alive towards sunset, with parents sheparding mini princesses and superheroes for the early part of the evening, and tweens out in groups by themselves later on. It didn’t take long for our large bag of sweets to empty, after which I turned off the porch light to signal that we were cleaned out, and turned to dinner.
About an hour away in Orange County, the night didn’t go so peacefully for three families. Three 13-year-old girls, twins and their friend, were killed at a crosswalk by a hit-and-run driver. They were in costume and out trick or treating. In another incident a father, almost home with his 4-year-old son, was killed after they were both hit by a car. The little boy—who’d been wearing a Captain America costume—is in critical condition.
Halloween will not be the same again, not just for those families, but the whole community, including the many families who witnessed the accidents. Several people thought the three little girls were dolls flung from the speeding car, it was so hard to accept that humans could fly through the air in that way.
There’s a large group of us from my hometown in India who have similar associations with New Year’s Eve. About 20 years ago, three young men were killed in a car accident very early morning on December 31. At least one of them was known to almost everyone I knew, or separated by just one degree. They were leaving a club that we often visited, and were on a road my friends and family drove on at all hours every day.
You know how we look back on olden days and think about how barbaric certain customs or ways of life were? Depending on how far back, we can be relieved we no longer live in a time of, say, bear baiting and plague, or surgery without anaesthesia, or slavery. Even within my lifetime... I’m amazed you can undergo a major operation in the morning, and be driven home that afternoon, thanks to the development of laparoscopic surgery.
Medical advancements
I often wonder, when people look back on 2014 from a 100 or 200 years hence, what they’ll consider barbaric. There will certainly be huge medical advancements. To our nanobot or engineered-virus cured descendants, I suspect chemotherapy will not look too different from bloodletting and lobotomies. And certainly high on their list will be our selfish, inefficient and smoky road and vehicular system, along with its resultant carnage. I wrote here recently about how car deaths seem to fade fast from our collective memories, but I want to amend that. It’s about social and physical geography, all about how much it “could have been me”. I like to think many lives were saved in the memory of those three young Bengaluru men: one less drink at a party, a lighter accelerator foot on the drive home, more attention at late-night intersections.
We didn’t need the In Memoriam in our papers on New Year’s morning to remind us to say a little prayer and take extra care on that beautiful, dangerous last night of the year. We never forgot.
Gautam Raja is a freelance journalist based in Los Angeles, USA.
