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I was almost seventeen-and-a-half when I saw a bus held back from falling headlong into a river by a mesh of electric wires; this was after I had jumped out of the driver's seat of the bus. I had successfully cracked an exam the previous evening, one that defines my existence to this day, but that didn't matter. My big story for the next few weeks was that my overnight bus was nearly thrown into the Pangala River. "You should've seen it, mare. Too good!"

I was nearly twenty-six last week when another overnight bus nearly killed me, but killed another man, and injured at least three more. I wasn't awakened by the jolt this time. I was there in the thick of the action, standing a few feet behind the driver, begging him to stop at a place from where I could take a share auto. One moment, the conductor cackled, "Non-stop! Central!" and the next moment, he gasped.

The mind calculates really quickly, or time slows down, I don't know - it just takes a second for you to know that you're done for. And another second for impact. I was too scared to look. I opened my eyes to shattered glass, screaming, commotion, and a yellow van that had fallen on another taxi. The mind told me again - my bus hit the yellow van that tumbled over and fell on the taxi. Save for a few small shards of glass on my body, a few scratches, and a diffused pain in my cheek, I was fine.

I noted with relief that the taxi driver made his way out of the taxi, looking shaken, but not injured. I craned over the debris, from inside the bus, to take a look at the yellow van. The driver didn't get out. There was glass everywhere, and blood on it. The driver's body emerged only when people pulled him out. I read the lettering on the side of the van, now facing the sky. "School Bus". Immediately the mind conjured an image - of screaming, bruised schoolchildren, blood, battered bones, broken glass, all struggling to crawl out of the mangled school van.

It was six am, the school bus was empty, and there were no children.

Yet, three days on, this image haunts, turns me into an insomniac, worries me each time I drive, wrecks me when I see an overnight bus. Soon, this image will become a part of that memory, so skilfully woven into what I actually saw, that I will not be able to separate the two.

The mind has a way of numbing the effect of what it has seen, it has its antidotes against what it knows. But against what it imagines, it is powerless.