On a lonely stretch of the Delhi-Mumbai Expressway near Nuh, a mangled grey Wagon-R sat abandoned for nearly eight hours, its doors jammed, its occupants bleeding inside — as night passed, then dawn broke, and hundreds of vehicles continued on their journey.
Inside were 42-year-old Lachhi Ram and his wife, 38-year-old Kusum Lata, whose lives might have been saved had a single motorist bothered to stop.
The car had been struck not once, but twice. First, a multi-axle dumper truck barreled into them, forcing their small car into the side lane.
Their vehicle buckled under the impact, airbags deployed, doors crushed shut, leaving the couple trapped.
The crash happened around midnight. Injured and likely still alive, they lay helpless. Almost twenty-two minutes later, a speeding white Maruti Ertiga struck the car again.
The Ertiga driver didn’t stop to check for survivors — he reversed and fled, leaving the wreckage behind.
Then began the darkest hour: not theirs, but of our collective conscience. For nearly eight hours, the shattered car remained visible on the roadside, close enough for any passing driver, police patrol, or highway surveillance team to see.
Yet no one stopped.
No one tried to rescue them. Not a single call was made.
Not even a hesitant knock on the window. Their phone rang throughout the night — the only sign of life the family had when they kept calling. But no lifeline came.
By early morning, villagers walking by finally saw the grisly scene. Only then did someone alert authorities.
By then, neither Lachhi Ram nor Kusum Lata was alive. They had died waiting for compassion, for help, for a stranger’s kindness.
Their maternal uncle, Nahar Singh, a 60-plus man from Rajasthan’s Karauli district, struggled to comprehend the apathy.
“A crushed car, two bleeding people — on a national expressway in the middle of the night — and still no one stopped?
Either people have forgotten what it means to be human… or they are too selfish to care.” He recalled being told that highway patrols check every hour. “How did they miss this?”
In talking to the family, you realize this tragedy is more than a story of collisions, CCTV footage, or hit-and-run drivers.
It is the story of a society declaring its values dead. When people move out of their homes, perhaps they leave behind more than their doors — maybe they forget empathy.
This is not the first time such horror has played out on our roads — and perhaps not the last. Often, passersby don’t offer help; they raise phones.
They record.
They livestream a dying person’s agony.
They hunt for likes instead of calling for an ambulance. It seems that for many, human suffering becomes a spectacle — even when the victim is bleeding, writhing, crying for help.
If a single passerby — an old man, a teenager, a driver rushing home — had stopped, had knocked on the door, had made one call to 108 or a nearby hospital, maybe Lachhi Ram’s last breath wouldn’t have been spent alone in silence.
Maybe Kusum Lata wouldn’t have slipped away unnoticed. But no one did. And in that long night, our collective indifference killed them.
When bureaucracy, patrols, and surveillance systems fail, the last hope lies in people. But when people become unwilling to pause, unwilling to feel, unwilling to care — that is when death wins.
They died in a crash — but more than that, they died because we failed to see them as human beings.
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