I try to figure out what exactly happened today. It’s 11:45 pm and I canot find any sleeps. “It was nothing,” one of my friends had said. “Not something you need to remember all the time. Not a big deal. None of us got injured!”

Well, to another friend, it surely was a very big deal; bursting out into tears right after the incident, she said, “My mother told me not to go. My mother told me not to go. I should have listened to her. My mother told me not to go.” Would things be different, I wonder, if her mother had agreed all along before us having to convince her to let her daughter go?

It’s still 11:53 pm, and I still can’t make the voices go away. Voices of men shouting from the back of the bus, “Somebody pull the brakes. The brakes!” I was there in the front of the bus, a few steps away from the driver’s seat. There, I was helpless, trying to figure out where the brakes were. I did not have even the most basic idea of driving; so I knew I should not be wasting my time on it. “Only if I had known,”  I thought. For a moment, I was ashamed.

A flashback… just few minutes before the incident, we were gaily out on a trip. Nine of us—six girls and three boys—sitting in a crowded bus. I was humming to the song that was playing on the stereo, enjoying the moment and moving with the music, literally. 

My friend was laughing at me, teasing me, and two fat men seated in front of us were staring at us, probably annoyed. Opposite to us were the two lovebirds, lost in their own world. All passengers in the bus were in their own world, content with the moment.

I had changed my t-shirt about four times that morning. I wore these baggy pants that I had always wished to have. I had bought it from a shop selling men’s clothes, because supposedly women only wore tight-fitting pants. At least, that was what one of the shopkeepers told me. Well, none of the shirts matched, and finally I went with a brown one. Did it even matter what I wore, I wonder now. Maybe I could have got ready a bit earlier. Maybe then it wouldn’t have been the wrong bus. Eventually, all I had on me that could help identify who I was, was the watch my mother gifted me and the silver chain from my aunt.

They say, just when you reach the end, there are these flashes of memories that dance before your eyes. All the important people, all the people you love, one by one, you see them. But in that few seconds of jeopardy I was in, I remembered no one. Not a single person, no family, no friends, not the guy I had a crush on. Weren’t you supposed to remember them? Call it instincts, but all I remembered in that few seconds was of living, of all the possible ways there was to survive. It was selfish. But I had hope. And that hope was selfish. Because I didn’t think of any of my friends who were right next to me, shouting for me. I didn’t even hear their voices. All there was; only me.

After the incident, as I got off the bus, I remembered my mother. I had talked to her over the phone that morning; she had said, “Wear warm clothes, don’t play too much in the water, you catch cold too fast.” I was also glad I sent that message to my father, the day before, saying that I was sorry—sorry for being rude to him. And he replied that it was ok; in fact, he never minded.

I asked my friends if they were hurt. I ran towards this woman lying unconscious on the ground,  bleeding heavily from her nose. We carried her to the side of the road, called the ambulance and sent her to the hospital. To add to the list of things I realised that day, I didn’t even have the phone number of the ambulance. It has been two years, since I have been a medical student, but I don’t even know where to call for an ambulance. Shameful!

I heard the passerby say, it was just a minor accident. Only two were severely injured, no one got killed. Well, isn’t that how we look at news? The headlines are always about how many got killed and how many got injured. So few casualties?

Then probably it doesn’t deserve the front page. 

I was not injured, I was not bleeding, I didn’t have a broken limb, but I will never be able to forget those few moments of my life. Imagine yourself standing in a crowded bus on a slight downhill slope. The bus is moving, slowly increasing its pace. People are screaming inside the bus. The ones near the door are jumping out. One of your friends has already jumped off. Why? The bus does not have a driver. This happened to us on 10th Jan, 2016. We were out on a trip to Dolalghat, Kavre. The driver stopped the bus to pee. The tires of the bus were probably held against a small rock, which was not enough to stop it. Now the road, you see, wasn’t on a flat surface. At the time, we felt we were inclined on a mountain! On the right side was the side of a hill; on the left, a cliff, the river gurgling hundred of meters below.

Luckily, the bus moved on to the right, crashing into the hill, smashing its laterals with the windows against it. I held onto the back of the seat, where I was standing and my eyes had probably forgotten to blink. I was glad, glad it wasn’t the other side.