REALTY SPEAK
Don’t get rash inside apartments
D. MURALI
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Nobody needs to show driving prowess and speed thrills inside residence blocks
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Drive cautiously: Residential apartments are not the venues for display of driving skills or one’s vehicle’s prowess.
Sekar is an acquaintance of mine who lives not far from where I live, and so we see each other once in a way, say ‘hi’ and go about our jobs. But a few days ago, when I waved at him across the road, he seemed quite forlorn. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “My mom is bedridden after she suffered a fracture,” he said.
I remembered having seen her too in their apartment complex passage. By my reckoning she must be 75 plus, short and habituated to slow walking, as most old people are, within the block, stopping by to pick a flower here, or tend to a creeper there.
Over a coffee at a roadside shack, I learnt from Sekar that she had, in fact, been hit by a car within the apartment premises. “You know her habit, Murali,” he said, “mom was having her back turned to the passage and picking some flower from a nearby bush when she got hit from behind.” “What happened then?” I asked. “It was Lucy, a neighbour of mine in a different floor of the same block, who was at the wheel. We all know her as a rash driver, but strangely Lucy took her husband’s held to lift my mom and reach her to my flat.” “Quite human,” I said. But Sekar was shaking his head, “No, they told my wife, ‘What a pity, she fell down.’”
As it turned out, when the old lady was taken to the hospital in excruciating pain, and X-rays taken, the doc had said, “Multiple fractures, some thing more than a fall.” The story takes a predictable turn thereafter, with Sekar going to the police station to file a complaint, cops visiting the hospital to collect info, and a family reorienting itself to an immobile elder who needs care for, who knows, the rest of her life.
Sekar tells me that the cops visited Lucy too but she seems unrepentant. “What more can I do?” he asks me and I shake my head, clueless. “Do you know what a cop told me when he visited me a few days ago?” Sekar asked me, and I said, “What?” “Sir, they are trying to find a driver,” said Sekar, and I was naïve enough to ask why. It may shock many that accident cases often meander through shady routes – where the culprit finds a willing person who agrees to take the blame for the accident upon his head for a neat fee. “That’s the system?” I asked Sekar and he wryly acknowledges. “I’m not looking for money or compensation though already we’re incurring a lot of expenditure for visiting hospitals, running the treatment, engaging a nurse and so forth. What I want is that Lucy and her people should realise their mistake. But even that seems to fail if they succeed in finding a scapegoat to pass on the culpability to.”
We are used to reckless driving on the roads, and so drive defensively, providing for erratic auto drivers, and quixotic bikers. But accidents within your own abodes, caused by people like Lucy are unpardonable, even if the aggrieved are as mild-mannered as Sekar. Imagine what would have been the consequence if the accident had happened on city roads or highways; all residents nearby would have converged on the vehicle and any attempt to escape would have met with serious repercussions.
Apartment associations can provide boards reading ‘Go Slow’, ‘Speed: 5 km’ and so on, put up speed breakers, but much depends on individual residents to be careful when driving, especially with old people and children. Residential blocks are not the venues for the display of one’s vehicle’s prowess. To view pedestrians, be they exercising grannies or playing kids, as pests in front of a sedan fresh from the showroom is inhuman. What could be more inhuman and cowardly would be to be unremorseful after causing hurt.
Feedback to dmurali@thehindu.co.in
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