The Highway

Coming from a truck driver, this might sound like a butter-fattened lie: I never drive rashly. Yes, you read that right. I also don’t drink. I do smoke at times, but I have cut down on that too. That’s because I want to stay in my senses and preserve myself for the day when Minal, my 11-year old daughter graduates. That’s another thing you need to know: I have one child, a girl. And I am very happy and proud to have her. This makes me a bit of an outcast and recluse in my community. But I can’t blame other people when my own buddhi (mother) welcomed the arrival of Minal in the world with a sullen expression of mourning. I just believe that one day, with the success of Minal and other hard-working girls like her, they’d know better.

For now, I just be. I don’t have many friends and people don’t like me. But no one bothers me. They know that’s not going to end well. I was a three-time winner in my annual zilla dangal (district-level wrestling championship). Even after 17 years since I last wrestled in a competition, I can take on two 25 year-old mushtandas (well-built goons) and give them a fight. And I don’t mean the flimsy kids from the cities. I mean the kind that grow up like I did: drinking 3 litres of unprocessed milk every day and working all day in the fields. But I am not one for violence. I just don’t believe in letting others get away with being jerks.

I am mostly calm while driving. There is so much and yet nothing much to think about when you are driving up and down the length and breadth of this country. Listening to old local hits on my almost broken radio, I drive on, with my complete attention on the road. And at least in this regard nothing was different on the night it happened.

I was carrying sheets of stainless steel from Ahmedabad to Nagpur on NH 47. It was around 2:30 am. There was no other truck behind or in front of me for as far as I could see. I passed an expensive car though. I must be driving at about 85 kmph. Before I could so much as notice the shape and form of the being, a man jumped in front of my truck! I slammed the brakes instantly. But my truck dragged on for 20 metres before coming to a screechy halt. He had come under the tyres for sure and it would be a miracle if he had survived.

There was no such miracle. I was hit by a bout of nausea the moment I saw him. It was one thing to consume the idea of an accident or death through movies and quite another to see the innards of a man torn apart by the means of your livelihood. I panicked. I had to think very quickly. There was no time to calm myself down. I had to act.

The man was wearing a blue suit. His face was smudged but he looked like he must have been handsome. A key dangled from his pocket. I looked up and saw the car that I had noticed. A silver coloured fancy looking car with a big boot. Its logo had four rings. I saw the same four rings on his key ring. I struggled to make sense of the situation. The man was certainly not calling for help or a lift or anything of that sort. He had quite clearly intended to get killed by my truck. Any truck. But why? A man (I don’t think he was a driver) in a suit driving an expensive car trying to get run over by a truck in the middle of a highway? He must have driven all the way there! What was he going through? What made him do it? My mind was going crazy with all of these questions.

But then I also knew I ought to be thinking of what lay ahead rather than what must have happened earlier. A rich man drove from god knows where to jump in front of a truck. I didn’t see how anybody was going to believe that story. At the very least I was going to get arrested. He must have been a powerful man. I was going to get jailed. The vision of my wife and Minal visiting an old and frail version of me in prison acquired a very clear shape in my mind. But the art of driving for 12 hours straight had taught me how to block thoughts and focus on the thing in front of me. To some extent.

I wished there were some people on the highway to act as witnesses. I felt utterly confused about my next move. Why would I kill the man? I pointed a pistol at him, forced him to step out of the car, took his money, ran over him when he tried to fight: that seemed like a more believable story when the killer was a good-for-nothing, whore-fucking, wife-beating, rash, drunk truck driver. And if you ask a random person about the men in my line of work, they would probably roll their eyes and say: aren’t they all like that?

Another car would have come driving in at any moment. His blood and innards were all over the road. There was little I could do. I dragged him to the side of the road. With the cloth that was tied around my head, I took the keys of his car, put it on neutral, pushed it to the point where he lay, and put the keys back in his pocket, hoping against hope it would look like he stepped out to pee and somehow managed to get himself run over. It was a highway after all. Accidents happen. Even as I was cursing the man for the situation he had put me in, I felt devastated thinking of what must have gone through his mind before he decided to to what he did. I wished he found peace.

After cleaning the most visible and obvious marks of the man’s blood on my truck’s bonnet and tyres, I drove away. I took the first exit from the highway, stopped my truck on a deserted road in a village and washed the stains properly. I burnt the cloth and drove off to deliver my consignment in Nagpur, all the while staring at the road, driving slower than ever, wishing that the picture of the tongue-wagging goddess on the front and back of my truck would be able to ward off further evil.

After getting done with my work in the morning I lay down to take a nap, with thoughts of the previous night’s events buzzing in my head like flies over it. Eventually, I did get some sleep. I woke up in the evening and went to a local tea stall. I was expecting to hear about the accident. They cannot not talk about it there. What I hadn’t expected… well, nobody could have expected what I learnt soon after.

Sipping piping hot tea, people had gathered around to watch the television in the dhaba (a roadside restaurant) next to the tea stall. They were watching the story of the accident on the news. 24 Ghante (24 Hours) showed the footage of the car and the blood marks (that I instantly identified) and a picture of the victim from a better time (that I struggled to match with the condition in which I had seen him). The man, identified as Pushpak Chandilal was the son of a Kolkata-based jeweller, had been going through a depressive phase. The police hadn’t ruled out suicide. But the driver of the vehicle which hit him was absconding, the news reader of 24 Ghante added.

Feeling like I would puke my life out at any moment, I left. I loaded the next consignment that I was supposed to transport and drove to Mumbai. My subsequent visit to a roadside tea stall held more surprises. News channels were still talking about Pushpak Chandilal. Apparently, the man’s lawyer had reached out to the police and media with a letter that Pushpak had written a few weeks before deciding to jump in front of a truck. My truck. The news presenter read it out:

If you are reading this, I am probably in a better place.

I am a complete failure. I lost faith in life long before I died. At the time of writing this, it has already been two years of failed suicides for me. Who the hell fails in that? Just tie a noose around your neck. Jump from a tall building. Slit your wrist. Poison yourself. Sounds easy enough, right? It isn’t. I know because I have tried them all. If you are too stupid to not know how it’s done, don’t worry, there are online tutorials for that. At the very least, you would find ‘Suicides for Dummies’ (I am sure that book is reaching its target audience.). But it isn’t a question of information. The pain of death is too much too handle. It’s too scary. I know this very well as that’s what’s kept me alive. I can’t kill myself. Period.

But I don’t want to go on living either. It’s not like you can walk up to your family doctor or close friend and ask them to help you kill yourself. So it has to be a hapless stranger for me. I think the best shot I have got at an instant death is by jumping in front of a fast moving vehicle. That would be scary too. No doubt. But I wouldn’t be the one delivering the final blow. It would be someone behind the wheels caught unawares.

But this isn’t fair to them. I cannot ruin their life for my liberation. So I am writing this for whomsoever it may concern:

1. Whoever kills me didn’t kill me. I am committing suicide. Do not arrest them. Do not prosecute them. Do not convict them. I am using their help.
2. I know how the system works. So there is a chance you might ignore point 1. Therefore, for their divine service, I want to leave all my assets (having a combined worth of INR 17 crore) to my killer. They can use this to gain access to the best legal help possible (I have attached a list with some numbers along with this letter) as well as fulfil their dreams (I couldn’t live mine. I really wish they can.). I thank you my friend. And I am eternally sorry for the miserable experience that I am going to put you through. I hope my offering will compensate in some way.

May both of us find peace,

Pushpak Chandilal

With exchanges of amazement and amusement, the crowd shared its expert opinion:

What an idiot!

Pagal tha saala (He was crazy)!

Ameer baap ki bigdi aulaad (Rich dad’s spoilt kid)!

I was taken aback by what I had just seen. Along with the relief of being officially absolved of ‘killing’ the man, I was overcome by immense confusion. Who the hell leaves 17 crore for their ‘killer’? Even 17 lakh was a life changing amount for me. But then, I couldn’t trust the story either. Sure, he committed suicide. But maybe they made up the letter in order to find the ‘killer’. Who knows?

I decided to lie low and not jump into the trap. But such was not the thinking of hundreds of other men. The ‘non-killers’ came forward and confessed to the police that they got scared and thus ran away but they hadn’t killed Pushpak Chandilal, he jumped in front of their truck/ car/ jeep. Some had tyres too small to leave those big marks–didn’t they think of that? Maybe they did, but who wouldn’t take a chance for 17 crore? News channels aired such stories the whole month. Sitting in a different city every few days, I sipped on my tea, and gathered from gossip, newspapers and television, updates on the Pushpak Chandilal suicide mystery. It had almost turned into a TV show in its own right.

I would be lying if I tell you I didn’t consider going for the money. I thought about it every single day. The amount could have transformed the life of my village, let alone my family. I thought of Minal. Would she be proud? Would she think of me as a murderer or a thief? Would I even be able to tell her how I had suddenly managed to send her to the best private school, move us out of our one room hut to a palace, and quit driving a truck? Being behind the wheels of a random truck that smashed a man to pulp felt like winning a strange kind of lottery. The idea was repulsive. The prospect of riches cost me my sleep. I remembered I was happy before Pushpak Chandilal chose me as the facilitator of his suicide. I tried to keep the man and his money out of my mind. But how was that going to happen when I didn’t stop watching the news?

After putting several men in the lock-up for lying and telling the others to get lost (including one of my friends, who discussed his elaborate plans of buying expensive cars like the Pushpak fellow, once he convinced the police that he was the chosen one), the police identified the man who was behind the wheels of the truck that killed Pushpak Chandilal. News channels aired his story for a couple of days before another man (clearly an enemy of his) approached the police with proof that the ‘killer’ was dancing like a monkey at a wedding and his truck was lying in a garage at the time of the incident.

A few days later, when I was at my home in Jind, two policemen came to take me away for questioning. They collected a sample of my blood, saliva, and urine. They interrogated me for hours on end, asking me pretty much my entire life’s history. In the evening, a subordinate handed the policemen an envelope. After reading the letter inside it, one of them came up to me and slapped me hard. He handed me a half burnt cloth, my head cloth from that night! They accused me of being the man driving the truck that killed Pushpak Chandilal. I was scared and confessed to it immediately. I don’t know how they tracked me from a piece of cloth. I couldn’t ask. They didn’t tell. There could be a thousand ways. How much evidence can you hide?

They were confused as to why I didn’t come forward to get my money even after it had been made clear that it was a suicide. I knew it wasn’t a trap after my friend came back with nothing more than a warning from the police. Honestly, I don’t know why I didn’t go for it. The policemen told me I was legally entitled to the money. I broke down and refused it. It was too scary an amount to handle. I didn’t even know if I would feel able to use it. Pushpak Chandilal might haunt me forever. The policemen eventually let me go. I walked back home, wishing I could walk back in time just as easily.

They next day, a masked man on a motorcycle threw a bag inside my house and sped away. It was full of currency notes. I counted them. It was 30 lakh rupees! Before this, I had never seen more than 2 lakh in front of me, 2 lakh that was mine. I had already understood what had happened. To confirm my understanding, the news in the evening showed that the ‘killer’ had been found and would receive his entitled INR 17 crore. I had seen the ‘truck driver’ at the police station. He was probably a peon.

A few more months passed. Nothing happened. I was glad that it was over. Sort of over. I made peace with having a share of the money and thankfully not the entirety of it. It did feel good to live with the assurance that my Minal would graduate one day, probably even study further. I went back to my job. Listening to old hits on my radio, I drove ever so carefully, watching out for Pushpak Chandilal.

— — —

Written in response to the following prompt:
“You accidentally kill a reclusive millionaire and manage to cover it up so it’s untraceable to you. The next day, however, it’s all over the news that the millionaire you killed had left his fortune to whoever killed him. Now, you set out to find a way to prove it was you.”