The time I almost died - Part 1

I have already posted about one of my car incidents. The time has now come to recall another one of my incident on cars. This was way back in engineering college when I was 19 yrs old.

But before the actual incident, let me write a bit about the scenic beauty around Vizag. Like the Western Ghats along the west cost of India, there are also the Eastern Ghats which are older, more discontinuous & of lesser height than the Western Ghats along the eastern coast. As they are of lesser height, they don’t attract as much attention as their western counterpart. Now Vizag is a city nestled between these Eastern Ghats on one side & the Bay of Bengal on the other. The city however has now expanded beyond the ghats.

Araku Valley is a scenic spot deep inside these hills. It is about 115 km from Vizag. Along the road to Araku, about 85 km from Vizag, there is a diversion leading to an ancient cave formation, the Borra Caves that are 1,400 m above sea level.

I was just learning how to drive cars back then. We had a white Ambassador (Mark 3). The steering wheel was tight, the pedals were heavy, the steering gears were especially difficult to handle. That was the time when driving our car was invariably associated with excessive mental tension. At that time I didn’t realise that driving any other car would be any better. This misconception soon disappeared after I drove a few other cars. Now that I look back, I think I could have easily driven any badly maintained truck too. We now have a Fiat Palio – no worries whatsoever. Nevetheless, an Ambassador is Ambassador – it was spacious, it was big, it was heavy, and most of all, my nostalgic childhood memories are associated with it.

So back then in engineering college, we were hanging out in the hostel (though I was not a hosteller, that was still the hangout place). An elder cousin of a friend ‘S’ had come to Vizag in his Maruti 800 car. Now this person had left the car with S, incidentally for safekeeping, while he attended an important work over the weekend. Little did he know of the kind of experiments we would be doing with the poor puny machine.

We took stock of the situation then. We had a car at our disposal. We had me – the only person who could drive the car through traffic and had a valid licence (yeah I got a licence made when I was 18 without paying a single extra rupee. I am really proud of it). We had six (including me) enthusiastic boys raring to go somewhere. And we had just two days to do whatever we wanted to do. A plan of Borra Caves + Araku Valley was hurriedly finalised. I told my parents about the plan. I just missed one crucial bit – the bit about six of us going by car and most of all “me” driving the car. I convinced them that we were going by bus. And then it began.

We packed the six of us (4 in the back & 2 in front) in the Maruti. The first leg of the journey was getting out the city. Not much adventure here. The traffic kept us subdued.

The next leg was an almost straight road between the city and the hills. We got a bit adventurous here. The traffic was less, the music system was blaring hard and we were moving at around 70 km/h. Somehow we felt the crazy need to touch 100 km/h. Now doing that is fine when you have a bigger car or a jeep and when you are travelling on a highway. But this was the smallest car in India with small wheels on an Indian 20' wide road which had some minor potholes too. We selected a stretch of road which appeared traffic-less and pothole-less and floored the pedal.

The speedometer reading slowly started moving. We reached 80 km/h. The car started vibrating. The speedometer lazily inched beyond 90km/h. The vibrations became more & more violent. We didn’t know who would give up first us (out of fear) or the car (out of sheer exhaustion). Just when we thought the speed would increase no more, somehow, the car managed to cross the 100 km/h mark. Victory at last!

The time I almost died - Part 2