A few months ago, my wife turned to me and said, “It is only the poor who help people, isn’t it?” It caught me by surprise until she explained that she had noticed that whenever there was a car breakdown, an accident or the other on the road, most people in cars would drive by, but people on motorcycles would stop, and so do taxi drivers.

A couple of years ago, my jeep stalled at a red light. It is an old diesel vehicle that I had convinced my father to buy to drive to the farm. For years I feared that he would have an accident returning on his motorcycle in the evening, on the dark and mostly broken road. In the end my fears came true nevertheless, and he died when a truck hit him on his way back from the farm. He had not taken the jeep. I cannot now give it up, it is too tied up in my love, guilt and sorrow, but I rarely drive it.

That day, I had turned off the engine at the red light, unwilling to pollute more than I was already, but when the light turned green, the engine wouldn’t start. The battery was pretty much dead. Luckily there was an almost imperceptible decline along the route to my house, and I was able to push the jeep by myself. Almost at the last turn towards my house, a man stopped his scooter, jumped off and helped me push the jeep another 50 yards. As I turned to thank him, he brushed it off and apologised for not getting there sooner, and sped off.

I was deeply touched by his kindness and, maybe as a result, I have always tried to help people stuck on the roads. As I prefer to walk to the local market, I often encounter people riding tricycles loaded with goods in front of my home. Going up to the main road, the decline that had aided me in pushing the jeep home, becomes an incline for the heavily-loaded carts. The people pulling them tend to be poor, struggling with broken footwear that provides little grip as they drive, head down, muscles taut and standing out from thin bodies.

It costs me nothing to put a hand at the back of the carts, apply some weight, but every time I do so, I can see the muscles relax, the spine straighten a little, and then, usually, the person quickly glances back to see what has changed before turning back to pushing their carts. They still have to labour to earn their day’s wages.

The road flattens out when it meets the main road, and I usually give a slightly harder push for the last bit, and then we go our different ways. At most the person has a chance to spare a smile, but we never have the time to chat, or say anything to each other. For a person in their position, every minute wasted is precious earnings lost, and it would be silly to delay them. But my wife’s remark set me thinking. In the year or two that I have been doing this, I have never seen anybody else do this, and I wonder why.

Maybe it is because I reside in a colony where most people have cars, and also drivers for those cars. Maybe for them it is too much of an effort to stop and help a poor person struggling up an incline. Of course, the road is just wide enough to accommodate two cars going in opposite directions. If a car were to stop it would block traffic and make life more difficult for everybody on the road, poor and rich alike.

It seems to me, though, a bit of a loss. If our roads are only ways for us to get from one place to another, locked into our air-conditioned cubicles, unseeing, unaware of our fellow citizens struggling to get by while we rush here or there, where are we living — in the prisons of our homes and our cars, going from one to the other? In the end we are only human in our interactions with each other, in the accepting and giving of little kindnesses; if we remove even the opportunity to do that, what do we become? Or maybe it is only the poor who understand humanity, because they need it so much, and so give it freely, while the rich have become parsimonious.

Omair Ahmad is the South Asia Editor for The Third Pole, reporting on water issues in the Himalayas; @OmairTAhmad

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