Some unfortunate day in September 2006.



The impact was hard when I heard. Enough to send my head reeling; to reduce my speech to mere incoherent blurts. But I guess he would have experienced a much harder impact, when that ill-fated hired taxi of his had a head-on with that truck on the highway, because that knocked the life out of him. A bastard of a driver, don’t know which one though. One of the two had to be, or maybe both.

They said he was on an official trip, traveling late at night. Why the hell was he traveling late at night if it was an official trip, that too when it was a taxi ride on the highway? He was always a bit too committed to his job. Why don’t these so-called highly-professional MNC’s have a policy against night-time taxi travel when on official trips? Guess they might think of it now. Too late for someone like him or his family & friends. Are those high-flying HR managers listening?

Someone from HR would have ‘notified’ his family of this ‘unfortunate incident’. Can’t even begin to think of what his parents would have felt? They would have also informed his to-be in-laws & his fiancée. They were engaged last month & were to get married in another couple of months. He had just bought two handsets with new CDMA connections for 10 grand. He said that they could talk for free through the night with these. He thought it was a good investment now instead of paying hefty bills each month till they got married. So much for a good investment. I heard all his belongings were missing from the accident site. Police suspect a post-accident theft. His wallet, credit cards all gone. Guess that bastard of a thief would have taken his new handset as well.

All this & lot more came gushing to my mind after the initial blank. Pretty much like a heavy metal number starting after the blank portion of the tape in a cassette. Not knowing exactly what to do, I instinctively called two of my closest friends to tell them about it. I know they too would have had a similar experience when I told them. Only few words were spoken among us when we met up that evening. The four of us had shared our last flat for more than a year. Evenings never used be so heavy then.