Today is the third day of the Random Acts of Kindness Blogfest. In the summer 2009, my Dad had to go to the land registration office in town and I was driving him. With us was a relative who would be appearing as a witness. Dad needed to transfer some land into my brother's name.
The moment we got there, Dad found out that he had forgotten to bring along an important document. It had been left at home. I then decided to drive back home, get the document and take it back to Dad. That way, Dad will be able to get into the queue (more like a very disorganized collection of people -- aka a mob).
Driving home meant that I had to pass through narrow village roads. As I was about to take a left turn, there were two guys on bicycles coming from the other direction. As the road was pretty narrow, I honked twice to get the guys' attention so that they would move a little to the side as they were at the center of the road.
However, those guys stayed in the middle of the road so I had to turn a little to my right to avoid them (in India... It's right hand driving). The thing was, as I had to avoid them, I was running out of road. They were still clueless and kept laughing and pedalling. As my car tried to make as much space for them as I could manage, the right side of the car came pretty close to the end of a dirt side of the road. Unfortunately for me, below that edge of dirt was a rice field.
That meant the field was full of water that, in turn meant that the dirt side of the road was very wet and soft. I felt the right side of my car dip lower and lower until it tipped over and turned turtle. In a blink of an eye, I was sitting upside down and had no idea how to get out.
I undid my seatbelt and tried my best to open the door so I could get out but the door would not open much and I just could not maneuver myself to get through the door. To my surprise, a guy opened the door wide and pulled me out. I found that a small crowd had gathered on the road watching me getting out of my car.
I called my cousin because I could not worry my Dad (and he had no way of getting to me anyway as I had the car which was then upside down in soft and watery mud). My cousin came to take me home on his motorcycle. Through all the scary madness of it all, I never thanked the guy who helped me! I was soooooo stupid! I owe that guy a lot. I would never have been able to manage to contort my body to get out of that upturned car on my own.
Although a crowd had gathered and someone would have helped me at some point, it was that guy who made the decision to stop his motorcycle (he was on his way to work) and get himself all muddy and dirty to help a stranger he had never met before -- me! Yet I did not even make an effort to say thanks.
After getting home, I washed and changed, begged my cousin to make arrangements to somehow get my car out of the rice field, and called Dad to tell him I would be a little late because the car broke down. By then, Dad managed to hear the news that an accident had occurred at a particular village road and hired a taxi to take him home.
We then took that same taxi back to the land office. After all that trouble, the land office people never even mentioned or asked for the document that was the root of all the fuss.
To this day, I have not met that guy to offer my thanks. Wherever he may be, whoever he is, I hope he knows that I owe him a lot for helping me out when I truly needed help. He could have easily kept going on his way. He could have decided it was not worth it to get down into a rice field to save a stranger. But he did. And his kindness means the world to me.
