Life and death on the mean roads of Delhi

White Lilies: An Essay on Grief: By Vidya Krishnan, Westland, 98 pages, ₹499.

- Vidya Krishnan

In one of my interminable internal monologues, I told myself that it was, statistically, a matter of time for someone I loved to die on these streets. Everyone has a story about the ugliness we encounter on the streets, behind wheels. I have covered such stories, and I have driven past such accidents. Everyone in Delhi knows someone who died in a road accident. Like people in Paris are likely to know a baker and people in London are likely to know stock market analysts.

The story I carry in my bones is repeated over and over in this city. We are, after all, recklessly driving a tank on crowded streets, without seat belts and traffic laws. The government, while doing nothing at all about it, records approximately 300,000 deaths in road accidents annually. For context, that is around 50,000 more deaths than from tuberculosis, the deadliest infectious disease. Any other country would want to do something about it—not India, where we will never run out of people.

If you've lived in Delhi, you have for certain witnessed the macabre sight of a road accident: a shredded tyre, a mangled frame of steel, a bloody shoe, shattered glass. And if you truly belong to Delhi, you've simply driven past it without registering the violence because it has not happened to you. Not today, at least.