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Dilip D'Souza

On The Road Again, You Do The Walk Of Life

On the road outside my home, the cement blocks that make up the divider were uprooted this week. They have been piled randomly on the sidewalk. Naturally. This means, if I want to walk anywhere outside the house, I have to step into traffic. Also naturally. And that's why, as I dodged a bus on the way to my occasional evening run, I found myself thinking about cars, running, transformers and a dead body. This column will try to explain.

Near Bombay's high court one sun-dappled afternoon, a bus had run over a young man. He was sprawled on the road in a pool of blood, his head at the awkward angle that spoke of the swift suddenness of his end. A woman lay on his body, weeping. A few feet away stood two small children, tears rolling dustily down their cheeks. The bus loomed over them all, hulking and empty, unaware of the destruction it had wrought in this one family's life. A small crowd of passers-by had gathered, as they do, around the woman and her little ones: looking on curiously, silently.

The scene is imprinted on my mind like a ghoulish snapshot, frozen sadly in the fraction of a second it took to pass in a taxi. "That's life," the taxi driver said with a chuckle, looking back at the body in his mirror. A startlingly banal thing to say, I thought. But his was no more or less valid a reaction than mine -- some sadness, some horror -- to what we had just seen.

That's life, indeed. It was death, but it was life, and life goes on. The bus would soon be driven away. The crowd was there, but in minutes they would be gone too, this little tableau no more than a blip on their day's canvas. The woman and her children would quickly fade into the background they had briefly emerged from.

As we sped on, I couldn't help thinking: perhaps the driver's was the right way to react. At least he is not -- I am positive -- haunted by the image of that smashed head. But I still wonder: why do deaths on our roads bother us so little? And why are the interests of walkers -- far and away the most numerous users of our roads -- so ignored, by authorities and by car drivers? By the walkers themselves, in fact?

Allow me two examples to make my case. I began writing this in an office in the heart of South Bombay, on one of the area's busiest, most important streets. At any time during the day, I can look out of my window onto a flood of pedestrians, cycles, buses and cars. A steady, harmonious blend of horns, curses, bicycle bells and sundry, unexplained bangs wafts into my ears.

The point, in case it's not clear, is that this is an extremely crowded street.

Some time ago, the sidewalk right outside the office was dug up and an enormous electrical transformer deposited there. I thought it was to remain only briefly, until it was moved to wherever transformers live. But that was before a barbed-wire fence appeared, surrounding and protecting the transformer. I have no idea what the device was doing there, but it took up most of the sidewalk. The fence went all the way to within a few inches of the edge.

That is, what it had managed to do, very efficiently, was to take that stretch of sidewalk away from pedestrians. And so it remained for the next two years.

So if, during those years, you were walking down this particular street, you faced a delicious choice when you came to the transformer. You could sidle past it in those inches of clearance, contorting yourself so the barbs would not gouge out bits of your flesh. Or you could step directly into the traffic rushing past and take your chances with the cars and buses.

Nobody bothered to explain why the transformer was there. Nor why it had to endanger pedestrian lives for such a long time. The pedestrians, meanwhile, inured for years to innumerable obstacles in their paths, began mingling with the traffic without fuss. Neither they nor the traffic slowed even slightly.

As for me, I took the coward's way out: I stayed at home.

Which is why I was witness to my second example: a "mini-jogathon" -- a race, in more understandable language -- that took place near my home last year. That morning, hundreds of kids, many obviously less than five years old, gathered at the start. The course had been marked out, winding through the neighbourhood. Right on time, the local municipal corporator got the kids off and running. My camera ready, I lay in wait near the beginning of home stretch, hoping to get some shots as the runners headed for the finish line.

What I saw, as they came past me, left me aghast. No attempt had been made to block, divert, or even slow down traffic. The kids weaved through honking cars and buses as they ran. Home stretch cut across the major road in the area; intent only on reaching the finish, the children were launching themselves into traffic on the road without a care -- traffic that, in turn, did not care to wait, or slow, for the runners. Not even the under-fives. It wasn't clear that the drivers so much as noticed the kids running across their line of sight: they drove steadfastly on. While there were plenty of cheerful volunteers handing out souvenir T-shirts and caps to the finishers, not one had been deployed to stop traffic so the race could be run safely.

It occurred to me, as I stood there stupefied, that nobody connected with this "mini-jogathon" -- not the organisers, not the sponsors, not the children running in it, not their parents, and certainly not the drivers of the cars and buses that were speeding by -- thought what was happening in the least odd. As far as I could tell, I was alone in my speechlessness at the horrific danger, willingly undertaken, to these kids's lives. Men and women who would be leery of letting their offspring talk to me, say, were lined up at the finish, smiling beatifically as the apples of their misty eyes ran -- not a race so much as a relentless gauntlet of cars.

This is what I mean: everybody who uses our roads, even the merely pedestrian among us, seems to believe they belong, by God, to the car.

If you are on foot, see, you are expected to put up with heaps of stones, hawkers, transformers -- with every possible inconvenience, no matter how dangerous it is. You even believe this is the way things must be, which is why you step so willingly around the barbed wire and into the path of the 8 Limited bus that bears down on you. If you are in a vehicle, walkers are a nuisance, that's all. They don't need space, they don't need consideration. Pedestrian as they are, they deserve no more than contempt.

And if you are among those who lay out and maintain the roads, you don't need to plan for pedestrians, perish the thought! There's no call for sidewalks in this day and age of the car. If, by some oversight of a bumbling predecessor, they happen to be there, they are convenient places to dump whatever rubble needs a place to reside. As, for example, the blocks outside my home.

Here's my theory about all this: out on the frontlines of our streets, life really counts for very little. What's more, the most vulnerable lives of all -- pedestrians, and among pedestrians, the weakest -- matter the least of all. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen old couples or tiny schoolchildren in the middle of the road, waiting indefinitely. Having crossed one half, they are held up by the stream of traffic on the other half, standing there as enormous buses trundle past on either side. Not one vehicle will stop to let them get across safely.

Oh yes, if some poor fool has had his skull crushed by a bus while crossing a road, we might stop and gawk at his keening wife, his bewildered children. For a few minutes, it's a fascinating sight. But then we go on. What's one more death on the road? What's the two hundred deaths on India's roads every single day?

After all, and especially in a rear-view mirror, that's life.

Dilip D'Souza