Near death experience II

We had another near death experience in 2005. My business partner was in India to attend a board meeting of a public company listed in National Stock Exchange. I was on vacation for three weeks in Chennai, India and returned to the United States only to leave for India back again in a week’s time on official work. We both were staying in Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai. When I landed in Mumbai airport, I asked the cab driver whether it was raining a lot in Mumbai. He emphatically said no to me but I was surprised about that answer as I nearly went through a roller coaster type of ride in the plane for nearly 45 minutes before landing in Mumbai. At that time, I did not realize what was going to happen.


My business partner and I had series of meeting in various places in Mumbai with several companies. On that particular day, we had an appointment with the Chairman of ICICI Bank in Bandra at 12 noon and my partner and I left from Coloba area to reach Bandra. The trip to Bandra was uneventful and we had a great meeting. When we left from ICICI Bank’s corporate headquarters in Mumbai, we noticed that it started raining heavily. We had another meeting in Andheri with a software product company and we were planning to return to Taj Mahal Palace hotel after that meeting. We reached Andheri without much problem and when we were in a meeting with the CEO, one of the staff members came in and whispered something to the CEO. The CEO nodded his head and told it was okay. While we were wondering what it was about, he told that the employees wanted to leave as Mumbai was experiencing bad rain storm. We were laughing about it and when we left from the meeting, we could not even get into the car as the rain was so severe. By the time we reached Western Express Highway, the traffic jam due to flooding reached unmanageable proportion. We spent nearly an hour on the road moving in a bumper to bumper traffic to move from Andheri to Santa Cruz.



We could not see anything outside as the rain was so severe and it was like water coming out of a motor pump. While we were sitting in the car, we noticed a few cars to our left in the last lane closer to the curb were drowning into the deep water with people inside. When we were screaming inside our car, slowly people were dying right in front of our eyes. The helplessness killed us and we started praying for our life. After reaching a particular place, our car driver asked us to get down from the car and try to move to our left side curb as it is the most elevated position not to get submerged. When we asked what he was planning to do, he said he has plans to bring the car through other ways to the elevated position but he did not want to take risk with us in the car. We left our coat and shoes in the car and got out of the car. There were slum boys who had a long rope across the street helping people getting out the car to hold the rope and slowly move to the left side of the road. Both my partner and I did that and moved to the elevated position in that severe rain. We walked towards a hotel named “Orchard”. After seeing a foreigner with me, the hotel staff decided to help us among so many stranded people to allot rooms to us as many of aircrafts did not land due to bad weather as otherwise those rooms would have been occupied by the airline crew.


We stayed in that hotel for two days as the rain did not relent for nearly 36 hours. Later we learned that Mumbai experienced nearly 1,000 MM rain in a single day. None of the mobile or regular phones worked. The electricity was cut off due to severe rain. We had no way of communicating to our respective families in the US. After two days, the cars that were stranded on the road were moved to one side of the road and the traffic was cleared. Our car driver took us to Taj Mahal Palace hotel.



Within a day, we decided to leave for the US and when we came to the airport, there was no power and the airport was running out of generator. The boarding passes were issued manually, luckily, the airlines we were planning to travel was the only one that landed that day in Mumbai. We took off in an hour after sweating so much inside closed doors of the airport. Many men removed their shirt as they were drenched with sweat. When we returned to the US, we felt so relieved and thought that God gave us one more chance to live.

 

Thank you for your feedback. You have made a wonderful observation that God comes in the form of human beings to help us when we are in need of His help. Without those people, we would have died in the most unpleasant manner drowned in the storm water far away from home or sucked into the drainage hole. When I think of the car driver Khan, the slum boys and the hotel staff, I still get tears in my eyes. Especially, the slum boys were doing it as a service in that rain with no expectation but to save lives.
What could be a greater service than that.

Viswa

 

Pallavi,

Thank you for visiting this blog. Every time, we get a chance to live further, we understand better why we are at the mercy of the Lord.

Viswa

 

Dear RGS,

Thank you for visiting this blog and sharing your relatives experience in rains storms. With rain coming so heavily with no power makes us think that we are at the end of the road.

Viswa