Life’s Lessons

With my musical capabilities rediscovered after many years, I was singing loudly as I drove to the children’s dance class, alone in the car. Anu had to be picked up from the class after a sleep over. The lights turned red. I was making mental notes on fixing interesting lunch and dinner menus for the two teenagers at home. In addition I was also wishing very hard, “God, please give me an extra $500 a month, so that I can give my home a more comfortable living”. I knew He wasn’t listening as He hadn’t been doing all these years but I wished hard as I always wished. No harm wishing! I reached out for the cell phone on the empty passenger seat, to remind Shuma about something, the lights turned green, the car in the front started to move, I started to move, the car in the front stopped and I hit him!

In the moments of panic that followed, I let go of everything, picked my hands to my face and started to weep. With a hot flush passing over my entire body, I cried to the same God that I had prayed moments before, “I had asked you for 500 and now you have plans to take 600 from me???”

My Honda Civic hit the Honda Civic in front for the second time following all the principles of physics, on inertia and momentum, and I realized I had to stop the car. The driver in the front pulled over. I pulled over on to the grass side walk and stepped out wiping tears. He was a tall African American. We both walked up to look at the damage. I could not believe my ears when he said “nothing seems to have happened, are you OK?” I mumbled a ‘yes’. We were causing a small jam on the road so he asked me to drive over to the closest gas station. I followed him there and we parked side by side. We looked at the cars again and there wasn’t any noticeable dent. But even so he mentioned “I think we should exchange insurance information just in case”. I was reluctant since I knew this could lead anywhere. But he wasn’t pressing too much. An Indian guy turned up from somewhere and started to check the cars pointing out old scratches on both the cars asking if these were made from today’s hit. I wanted him to leave as he was trying to get things complicated.

The African American man passed his palm over his vehicle's back bumper one last time and said “ I guess we should go since there is no damage”. I thanked him profusely. He backed up and left. I reversed the car and followed him in the same direction to pick up Anu.

On my nightly readings of Shirdi Sai Baba’s book where I pray to him for a completely different reason, I have asked him in fun to show himself in some way or the other to me, as he has many a times to his devotees. As I wiped tears and perspiration driving up the road, I thought he had shown himself to me today.

Earlier that week I had encountered someone who had been not so nice to me and I was waiting to get back to Anu’s dance teacher to tell her about it. On a normal day it would have been half hour of juicy gossip between two women, bad mouthing the third person for his/her unacceptable social behavior. Today as I walked in I was filled with forgiveness. I pardoned the erring human with an expansive heart of exoneration just as my fellow Honda Civic driver had done to me. I had learnt my lesson in Clemency.