Me and her, husband and wife, we
were in the midst of an awkward post-fight reconciliation phase in front of a
stationery shop when a red Hyundai i20 screeched to a halt dangerously close to
the divider on the road beside us. Five seconds later, a few people with
concerned faces had crowded at the driver’s side of the car trying to pull open
the door. If this was an year ago, I would have just carried on like nothing
had happened, choosing neither to be a good Samaritan nor a curious onlooker,
not because of a lack of humanity or compassion, but purely practical reasons. Curious
onlookers usually block traffic and one too many good Samaritans usually lead
to confusion and delay in a decision.
But now, I was married to a
doctor. I felt like she, and by extension me, was duty bound to help. “Come!”,
I shouted at her as I crossed the road towards the crowd. When I looked back, I
found her in a daze still on the other side of the road. I ran to her and led
her back towards the car by hand, pushing the crowd aside with shouts of “she’s
a doctor!”. As we approached the driver’s side, I caught a glimpse of an
unconscious young man in the driver’s seat. There was foaming at the mouth, his
eyes had rolled upwards and both his fists were clenched into balls so tight
his fingernails were digging painfully deep into his palms. She got near him
and I watched as she instructed the people there to lift him out of the car, lay
him on the ground and stand back. She knelt down to check on him. People poured
in from all sides to see what was happening and I got pushed back. I watched as
a growing wall of people separated me and her. As the stream of people flowed
into my vision from its peripheries, I felt my sense of self shrink in my mind.
As the accumulated weight of the ideas of my own importance and centrality in
the world lifted off me, strangely I smiled to myself.
He had regained consciousness in
under a minute or so and it was decided to take him to a nearby hospital. Some
people laid him down in another car and just as they were about to drive off,
they looked at her in expectation. She in turn looked at me in contemplation. I
nodded in affirmation.
I made my way to the hospital in
my bike. The cloudy sky had let loose a cold drizzle as I waited outside the
casualty. A few minutes went by before I saw the familiar outline of the curly
haired girl come out, her golden-brown eyes looking for me. The corners of her
mouth curved upwards as her eyes caught mine and immediately I felt a ticklish warmth envelope my
chest, like it does every evening when I go to pick her up from the metro
station, and I thought to myself, “my life is in safe hands!”.
