Do you like driving? Yes, if it’s cricket. No, if it’s a car. And a big no if it’s a car in Coimbatore. The city in which I grew up. The roads are a mechanised forest of wheels. The huge state buses are like giant whales overrun by teeming shoals of sardines — the sardines, of course, being the two-wheelers.

When I was a teacher back in the 1980s, owning a car didn’t figure on the list of one’s aspirations simply because, like a dream, it was unattainable. In 2006, however, when the middle class was starting to enjoy a surge in buying power, a former vastly junior colleague of mine purchased a car. More for making a status statement, I’d like to think, than for any practical purpose, because why does one really want to have a car when one lives on the school campus and home is a cottage a mere five-minute walk away down a non-driveable road?

He did tell me recently, when we met up after two decades, that he and the family engaged in some ‘pretty solid’ inter-state driving during the winter months (when schools in the hills take a much longer break than the schools down in the plains). So I may be wrong as to why the car was bought in the first place.

Any way, one day, the family of four (three physically present in the car; the fourth still cushioned in the womb) was making a return trip to the hill school at which they worked. They had journeyed down 84km to the flatlands to visit a friend. A rare visit, but circumstantially overdue. They had spent a pleasant night and were now heading back to school. Mainly, there was the small matter of a meeting to attend. The meeting had been scheduled for an afternoon hour, but had, for some inexplicable logistical reason, been brought forward. This, in turn, necessitated a bit of a rush; keeping one eye on the dashboard clock.

Clear demarcation

The scenery as one drives up the hill is, on a clear day, quite breathtaking. On a misty day, it possesses a ghoulish eeriness, as lush green tea bushes, sloping for miles and miles, appear and then vanish before the eye, or when the edge of the road suddenly becomes clearly demarcated and in that mist-cleared instant one perceives how steep the drop is way, way below. On misty days, progress is cut to a minimum as speed is, sensibly, reduced.

On this day, however, the sun was ablaze in an azure sky and the higher one drove the rarer the atmosphere became — and chillier. At some point, near the 43rd kilometre, the wife from the back seat said: “Pass us the water, we are thirsty.” Or something to that effect. And he mechanically reached out, picked up the bottle lying on the passenger seat and turning his head for a mere two seconds looked back and like a relay runner ‘handed the baton over’ to waiting hands. Then he looked in front again. Two seconds later.

“What are the thoughts that go through your mind as you hurtle over the edge?” I asked both him and his wife.

Both shook their heads and said they couldn’t remember a thing, they couldn’t remember thinking anything. It all just happened so fast. One minute they were about to negotiate a sharp bend the next they were struggling to free themselves from a horribly mangled piece of tin, 200 metres below.

A clump of trees had checked the car’s fall.

Beyond the cluster of trees lay a sheer drop and almost certain death. In the strangest irony, a funeral procession passing by put the body down; mourners became rescue squad. It was they who helped deliver three victims trapped in a horribly mangled tin cage from the jaws of death.

Sometimes, as they say, you’re lucky enough to live to tell the tale. Life and death, separated by mere millimetres.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.