Accident and A Bloody Nose

It was a gloomy winter day in 2014, but sixth grade me was surprisingly excited. It was our annual excursion.  We were driving to a heritage site, and were supposed to learn more about the ‘culture and stuff', but the day's agenda, according to us, compromised of clicking lots of pictures and flexing our mother's cooking. The outing went as planned, and it wasn't until the journey back that things got interesting.

A rather loud game of Antakshri was our chosen mode to pass the 90 minute bus ride. We were loud, out of tune and not ashamed - screaming Bollywood songs on the top of our lungs. As 11 year olds, our sense of things that were safe to do on a moving vehicle included swinging around between the aisles and tackling our friends. We were having a blast.

We were running late, and the roads were bad. With dusk underway, visibility started becoming an issue. A thunderstorm was predicted for the night and the teachers were anxious to reach the school as soon as possible. They kept ushering the driver to drive as fast as ‘safely’ possible and wanted to push the ETA of 7:30 pm as early as possible.

Somewhere around the halfway point, our driver took a sharp swerve to the left and brought the bus to a screeching halt. It was to avoid a deep pothole, we were told. This impact caused my friend, who was fooling around in the aisle to fall straight into my lap, her head smashing into my nose. I was in shock. I could sense a ‘clunk’ inside my nose. I was not in pain, but something was off. Just as I collected myself, the hand nursing my nose turned bloody.  Concerned teachers were by my side immediately. My nose was thoroughly examined, and despite constant bleeding, seemed ‘un-broken’.

I was instructed to lie on a set of bus seats, and keep my head elevated. First aid was administered, and after keeping me ‘under watch’ for 15 minutes, I was sent back to chatter with my friends. Armed with a cotton swab, I came back to my ‘place’ and saw a series of eager faces who asked me to narrate the ‘incident’ at length. My bruised nose made me a lot more popular than my un-bruised nose did.

Everyone seemed excited, and talked about the ‘accident’ at length. Apparently my face after being punched was ‘comical’, and my bloody nose ‘gory’. I was enjoying my new found glory.

The bus started trudging along on the half-made roads. The generally deserted road, had a surge of vehicles, and a traffic jam formed. Network signals were bad, and no one could inform their parents of the delay. My injury was so mild that I didn’t think of informing my mother immediately. I could see a classmate trying to frantically call up her parents out of the corner of my eye. She seemed to barely get hold of her mother, and utter the words ‘Arushi, accident, blood’ before the call was disconnected. It was a weird choice of words, but I didn’t think anything of it.

Our teachers were concerned about informing our ‘anxious parents’ about the delay, but we were overjoyed to get to spend more time being menaces. None of our phones had more than one bar of signal- we must be passing through a patch of bad connection. As soon as our phones regained connection, they started buzzing, multiple calls were coming in.

My mom was among the first to call. Her voice was distorted, but I could sense her nerves. She asked me, ‘Are you hurt? Are you okay?’ before the call was replaced by a static. Why wouldn’t I be okay? What even was up?

The teacher’s phone buzzed. It was surely an over-paranoid parent. While we were definitely a bit late, having your parent freak out so can be a bit embarrassing, especially in middle school. The teacher answered the phone, and it turned out to be my mom – in tears. ‘How is Arushi? Is she hurt badly? How bad is the accident? Tell me!’ This is what I’m assuming mom reacted.

My teacher was taken aback, but quickly reassured my mother that I was perfectly fine, and the bus was never involved in an accident. There must have been a lack of communication. She was quick to put an end to all the speculations, and informed my mom that we would arrive at the school soon.

As more and more parents could call up their children, it became apparent that a rumour stating the crash of our bus had circulated amongst the parents. Even more surprisingly, everyone seemed to be worried about me. While I did have a bloody nose, this amount of concern was unwarranted for.

It was past 8 when we pulled up at the school. A huge herd of parents had gathered in front of the school. They all seemed overly relieved to see us all safe and sound, and my mother consumed me in a tight hug. She had streaks of tears in her eyes, and seemed to have aged a few years that day.

She said that the past 30 minutes or so had been the longest and the most stressed thirty minutes of her life. With the bus running late, she had been waiting for us at the school for a while, like most other parents. The mother of a classmate had managed to get hold of her daughter, who had simply told her ‘Arushi, accident, blood’ before disconnecting. That parent, without trying to get hold of more information, had conveyed ‘the message’ to my mother. My mother and all the other parents had hence frantically tried calling up and get hold of more news. Each passing moment made her more and more anxious, with her head picturing the worst. My father had been out of town, and she tried all her ‘sources’ to be able to talk with me. Bad weather, knowledge of a traffic jam and rumours that her daughter had a ’bloody accident’, made her dizzy, and she couldn’t regain her calmness till my teacher reassured her that I was fine.

That long ‘eventful’ day was meant to be tiring for us, but it mentally exhausted my mom. She still remembers and talks about this day- more than six years later.

One thing we can’t understand was why would my classmate use such an unfortunate choice of words, or even describe such an irrelevant incident when signals were really bad? And why would her mother, a full grown adult, to take these three words to heart, and spread ‘the word of an accident’ to create panic? While, their intentions were certainly good, this was a classic case of a ‘story’ being re-told and re-interpreted to such an extent that it becomes untrue.