# 5 - Vichitra and How he got Fooled by Randomness

It was a typical March night, neither too hot nor too cold, giving refuge to a calm weather with stars twinkling in the sky. The ethereality of the night was compounded by soft and soothing winds, blowing just to make you feel relaxed.

All you had to do was to give a free reign to your worries and go for a refreshing walk.Vichitra was coming back from his office at one in the morning when he realized what a wonderful weather it was, and wouldn’t it be cool to go for a long drive and that too all alone! Damn! That was where he was wrong.

Decisions taken at a blink are good but not every time. Vichitra couldn’t care less.

He had often gone on such long drives just for the heck of it. He loved the speed and the thrill associated with his long drives.

And so, there he went on a highway which ran past the place where he lived. The moment the car hit the highway, he butted the accelerator pedal to the floor and lo the car was racing along the highway. At times the car was doing 155 kms/hour and still he would curse it that it was not going any faster when theoretically it could. There was heavy traffic on some stretches and he just loved it because the heavier the traffic, the more he would get to zip-zap-zoom past heavy trucks and trailers.

In the blink of an eye, the car covered around seventy kilometers when he decided to head back home. The journey back home was equally thrilling but wildly unpredictable! The fatal bullet was about to puncture the serene randomness.On the way back, the car did around twenty-five kilometers when he stopped to get the petrol tank filled up.

Vichitra stepped down from the car, looked up into the sky and basked in his solitude. The cool breeze was blowing into his face and he was enjoying every moment of it. His mind was blank and he wished if somehow he could freeze the moment forever. His monologue was interrupted by the attendant as he asked Vichitra for the money.

He paid for the petrol and got inside the car. The tyres squealed and ferociously kicked the dust behind, and before the attendant could count the money, the car was already burning rubber on the highway.Vichitra was very well aware of the perils of driving too fast but he reasoned that if something had to happen it would eventually happen irrespective of the speed of the car, and this ‘something’ meant accident in this case.

The faster he drove, of course more alert he was but this time he missed out on something. Or it was just that he was so fast that in a jiffy, after another ten kms, he was at an intersection where he shouldn’t have been, and reached there a little too early or a little too late!

There was a trailer in front taking a U-turn. It was trying to come from the east-bound lane to Vichitra’s west-bound lane, and in the process had occupied the entire left lane of the highway laterally. The west-bound lane was the left lane. Somehow Vichitra realized this when his car was only 40 meters from that trailer. He slammed hard on the brake and when his car stopped the truck had already gone, and he was sitting inside all alone. When he hit the brake pedal, the car was doing a little over 130 kms/hour.Everything had happened too fast. All he remembered was that the car swerved to the left, switched directions and slammed onto a concrete structure. In fact, what had happened was that due to the sudden braking, the car swerved to the left away from the tarmac, hit a kiosk, spun 180° and collided sideways with a samadhi, a concrete tomb. The impact was so strong that the entire kiosk lay in tatters twenty feet away from where it originally stood and the samadhi stood shaken off its foundation. The car got heavily damaged and was not movable anymore.

All this while, amazingly Vichitra was very calm. He waited for a while for the dust to settle down. He simply unclasped the seat belt and got out of the car from the front left door. Fortunately, he was unhurt.

He tried to think of the reasons why he came out unscratched.

The most conspicuous one was that he was wearing the seat belt. Another plausible reason was the presence of kiosk. When the car hit it, it absorbed much of the car’s momentum. Had it not been there, the accident could have been fatal.

Apparently there was one more reason. Later that night, he came to know that in the last six months at exactly that same spot, four major accidents had taken place and miraculously every time no one was hurt. According to a folklore, sometime ago a monkey had died. He was buried there and a tomb was built by the roadside. It was the same tomb, which Vichitra’s car had hit just an hour ago. So, it was this monkey who was saving lives.In the end, Vichitra refused to believe any of this.

There was only one reality to it. He was just plain lucky.

He was simply fooled by the randomness.


© 2007 Ankur Shanker
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