Lopen Jangchub turned around when he heard a thunderous sound of metal crashing and crumbling in his ears. His mouth opened wide and eyes became still when he saw two vehicles embracing, growling as if in annoyance. He was panting after jogging for two kilometers down town. The sun had not come up yet. Incredible scenes began to unfold before him: right out of a fiction novel.
A tipper truck loaded with cement to the ceiling and an azure Land Cruiser Toyota seemed to be saying ‘good morning’ to each other in an unusual way. Some cement bags lay split open on the road. Its white plume of dusts lingered over the scene. The Cruiser’s bonnet was crunched and twisted mercilessly like a beer can. Its engine was steaming. The windscreen of both vehicles broken into pieces were scattered over the road. Morning joggers and other pedestrians began to gather at the collision site as if they were detectives drawn towards the scene of cold blooded murder.
The driver of the tipper truck kicked opens the door and jumped out. He appeared furious and confused. He was holding his hankie over the left brow from where warm blood oozed out his face. Lopen Jangchup climbed up from the left door of the truck, driven by human concern and philanthropic instinct, and peeked in to see a child lying in a pool of blood. A pang of total fear gripped him. The head was in a contorted angle and fractured from the left. A woman lay unconscious on her seat. He silently prayed and jumped to the road. As he sat on the pavement to take a breath some men retrieved the child and woman from the truck to help him. Unfortunately the child was lifeless. The child’s mother regained consciousness and wailed in utter agony. She had a broken arm. The child she said was her first born and just three years old.
Jangchub helped others to pull out the Cruiser’s driver through the windscreen of the jammed door. He cried in pain as they laid him on the cold pavement. Through a deep gash on his temple, a broken windscreen glass protruded menacingly. Lopen Jangchub asked the others not to pull out the glass to prevent loss of blood. The other two passengers were the driver’s wife and a school boy in his mid teens. His wife had a broken wrist and perhaps a fracture in the ribs too for she winced in pain as she heaved while breathing. The mother said his son was sleeping when the accident occurred. The boy’s head was gruesomely crushed from the brow inwards and anyone who saw through the fissure could have vomited or fainted in fear.
Police arrived few minutes after the accident followed by the health officials. They tried to resuscitate the boy on the spot but to no avail. There was absolute anguish in the air; from the stench of warm blood to the chill of horror. Everything, even the azure morning sky which predicted a good day, seems to crumble on Jangchub and upon the serene valley. He realized the swift mortality of man which indicated the impermanence of all things; all death in life, darkness in glory. The invincible force of fate snatched life, their bodies, their ambitions and everything.
One was too immature, too innocent to understand the raw nature of living and dying. The child would have grown up, if assumed optimistically, to be a paragon of success in the eyes of those who would have encountered him, if at all. He would have been the center of love and beauty for his parents as he grew up clambering the ladder of life smoothly. What legacy did the child leave behind, but the memory of mortality and ignorance?
There was other in his teenager who perished carrying with him myriad of fantasy, hopes and anticipation of life. He is another treasure lost. He could have become an important man, a symbol for generations, in this unpredictable world. How do we define the struggle of life and living when death knows no time? The mysterious and bizarre routine it follows is far from predictable to man!
When the first life-giving rays of sun sauntered into Thimphu valley it was the rays of doom that carried sorrow in the hearts and soul of men. That day Jangchub railed against the almighty for creating beings to be destroyed without an ounce of human mercy. Not even the sunshine gave him any tranquility, any halcyon touch of life unlike his everyday spiritual morning walk. Self pity smothered self complacency to tears of repentance for the inability to fathom the crux of everyday life,leaving more questions than answers for him that morning.
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