A Brush with Death?

In January 1977 I was one of four people giving a set of lectures on computer networking at a conference in Bombay India. The conference organizers had arranged a 4-day break in the middle of the conference, and I used the break for sightseeing. Along with another lecturer and his wife, I flew from Bombay to Aurangabad, a city of about one million people 170 miles northeast of Bombay. There are two fascinating historic religious sites near Aurangabad: a Buddhist site at Ajanta and a Hindu temple at Ellora.

Our first day in Aurangabad we took a tour bus to the Ajanta site, 65 miles away. This is a horseshoe shaped valley surrounded by vertical rocky cliffs. Around the 5th century about 30 temples were carved into the cliffs, perhaps starting from small natural caves. Each temple was originally reached by individual stairs or ladders from the river 35 to 110 feet below. The temples are large and airy, decorated with many carvings of the Buddha and scenes from his life, and in some cases showing original painting. After a full day of visiting the temples, we boarded the tour bus and headed back for Aurangabad.

Driving in India is challenging and exciting. The main roads, at least all those I saw, are only two lanes wide. The roads are shared by everything from sports cars trying to go over 100 miles an hour to ox carts moving at perhaps 2 miles an hour. If a vehicle breaks down it is frequently left in the roadway, with large stones placed around it to ward off other traffic, until it can be repaired on site. It requires skill, attention, and steady nerves to use these roads.

Both the driver and the tour guide on our bus were young men who were obviously self-impressed by their positions of authority. It was dusk and we were moving fast. Suddenly the driver saw something in the road ahead – some people said that an old woman was cooking her dinner at the edge of the pavement – with not enough time to stop, so he swerved onto the right shoulder. At that point the shoulder sloped smoothly into a ditch about 3 feet below road level, and was planted with shade trees at 10-20 foot intervals, each about 4 inches in diameter. We were fortunate that the bus lost its momentum by shearing off many of these trees, and as it slowed to a stop with its right wheels in the bottom of the ditch, it tipped sideways to rest at an angle against the far bank.

The seats in the bus were very close together, so most of the passengers (including myself) were wedged into our places and didn't get tossed around by the crash. I don't remember getting out – one minute we were driving into the ditch and the next I was outside the bus. The driver and tour guide were disappearing in the distance. The other passengers all seemed to be OK, although one woman had hit her head. We spoke a variety of languages, but no one spoke any Indian language. It was growing dark – a million stars shone brightly overhead – and a crowd of local people using the road was beginning to gather around us. Were they hostile or simply curious? None of us could tell. A few cars flew by. Would we have to spend the night by the roadside with our dead bus? Would it be safe to do so?

Eventually another bus stopped at the scene. It was jammed full of religious women, apparently on some sort of pilgrimage. We didn't share a common language but they indicated by gestures that they could give a few of us a lift, and some people climbed on. But none of us wanted to be left behind, and with each person aboard there were fewer of us remaining and our panic rose. So we pushed ahead until all of us were packed in, standing room only and damn little of that. The bus headed off through the night, eventually dropping all us tourists in the center of Aurangabad at around 10 pm. Looking back, it was an adventure. At the time I was quite scared!

Written as an assignment for the writers' group at The Fountains in September 2014.  The assignment was to write on the topic "A Brush With Death
".