Accident

Its 10 p.m. on a weeknight and Arif and I are on our way to a friend's house. There is a silver civic ahead of us as we chug our way up the slope that
connects Sunset Boulevard to defence phase 5. In the distance the glare of approaching headlights turns into a monster with burning eyes as a black
civic coming from the opposite direction veers suddenly across the road and slams head on into the silver civic. There is a bright flash of sparks as metal
strikes metal and a dull thud followed by silence. By the time we have stopped the car and are running towards the civics the screaming has started. It
sounds like a woman or a girl. As we get to the car the scream shatters and becomes two. Arif dashes to turn both ignitions off.

There is a teenage girl in the back seat of the civic with head wounds and blood running down her face. She continues to scream as we drag her out and
is joined by her younger brother who has been trapped in the front passenger seat by the seat moving forward because of the impact and his mothers'
body. He seems to be about 9 years old and is bleeding profusely from the head and alternating between panicked glances at his mother and us. She
was sitting in the back seat and has flown forward into the windshield. She lies stretched across the space between the seats with her head on the
dashboard and her feet on the back seat. Broken glass and blood surround her. She is not moving. The boy continues to scream as we pull him out. Now
the amorphous pain sounds have become shrieks of 'ami ami' from the brother and sister.

By this time a crowd has gathered. The young man driving the
car is still sitting behind the wheel. A piece of the steering wheel is missing. It matches the wound on his head. Surprisingly he isn't bleeding much,
saying nothing but is just sitting frozen in shock, staring straight ahead of him oblivious to the chaos around him. There are men outside his door yelling
at him to get out so they can reach his mother. He does not respond till someone speaks in a low, calm voice and asks him to move out, then he does.

The mother is still in the car. Her position, the bent front seats and her weight make it difficult to move her. Someone screams don't touch her she might
have a neck injury. There is a doctor in the crowd and he appears, a few minutes later he manages to examine and then move her with the help of some
men. The family is piled into a car volunteered by a passing motorist who gives his keys to the doctor and they are whisked of to the nearby mid-east
hospital. There is a minor problem getting the girl into the car. She initially refuses to move without her brother, when he appears she screams for her
mother, in between she asks me if her face is all right, is it badly cut, will the marks go away. The father is called on a cell phone and promises to come
ASAP. The cavalcade moves off.

The driver of the black civic has disappeared. Arif says he saw him run out of his car, peek into the windows of the car he hit and then run away. He
probably thought he had killed them. Another witness says he was a teenage boy. Logic says he must have been either asleep or drunk to lose control of
the car like that. In the aftermath of what is a disaster for the family involved certain questions come to mind.

Would the people not have been as badly injured if they had been wearing seatbelts? Both front and back? The mother would certainly not have been
nearly flung through the windshield if she had. If we had something like a speed patrol doing the rounds of busy roads and checking speeding drivers
would the chances of an impact at that speed have been lessened? Where was the police? When are we going to take our blinders of and admit there is
such a thing as drunk driving in Pakistan and spread awareness accordingly? When will we take our heads out of our armpits and face the stench of
collective responsibility?

The thing that disturbed me most was that 5 minutes into the scene there were 50 people around and the mother was still in the car. I got into the drivers'
seat and touched her to see if she was alive. She moved as I attempted to lift her arm. I couldn't. When I asked somebody to help me I heard a voice say
"app karain yeh to ladies hain". Isn't this carrying the ban on interaction of the sexes to a ridiculous extent? What kind of a person would refuse to help a
badly wounded person in an accident on the grounds of gender? How deeply have people been brainwashed? For a split second I was reminded of
stories about women dying in Afghanistan from medical neglect prompted by the lack of qualified female doctors.

This is not Islam; this is (in a word) jahalat.

There was no mention of the accident in the papers the next morning. Just like there was no mention of an accident that took place about a year ago in
the papers the morning after. No mention until a few columnists dared to raise the issue in a public forum. Some students from Karachi's (supposedly) top
school were speeding down boat basin at 1 in the morning when they hit a Suzuki trying to join the main road. The driver of the student's car was drunk;
the car was doing something like a 100 mph. All the people in the Suzuki were badly injured. One died, his bones shattered and his internal organs
pulverised and another was in critical condition for a long time. The driver hurt his nose and his eye and had to have reconstructive surgery.We all know
who he is. He has done no time in jail, he has spent no time in court and he continues to drive down Karachi streets as and when he chooses to. A
month or so after the accident I saw a one page feature on him in our most 'X-rated glossy in one of those 'oh lookie aren't our rich kids talented and
wonderful' spreads. How pathetic it is that those in control of an agent of influence and change choose to champion someone just because of what was
an accident of birth.

The landowners kid who killed a man in a hit and run accident and boasted about his invincibility later. The lawyers son who crippled a woman and was
sent out of the country to avoid a case. The well connected society woman who had her maid servant nearly beaten to death.

Who is going to pay the human cost of suffering?