Rain and resurrection: How Harry Potter saved my life

It’s the first day of a small class. The professor or TA starts that dreaded round of icebreakers. “Give me your name, major, hometown and a fun fact!” they say excitedly. It comes around to me.

I start off fairly normally, “Hi! I’m Diva, physics major from Mumbai, India.” Then, “Oh, yeah, and my fun fact is I died once.” It’s silent for a good 65 seconds.

Someone goes, “Wait you can’t not explain that.”

Then I tell them it’s an incredibly long story, and the class moves on so we can actually get work done. This article is for everyone I’ve dropped the “I died” on without actually telling the story.

This is the story of the day a cloud burst (yes, literally exploded) over Mumbai, causing the whole city to flood in a matter of hours.

Here’s how I remember it.

It’s July 26, 2005, I’m eight years old, and my mom’s picking me up from school in her bright red car that she thinks makes her look cool. Around 3 p.m., the car decides to stop functioning. Being the lazy human I am, I refuse to leave the car to walk around in the flooded streets.

My ulterior motive was that my mom had given me my shiny new copy of The Order of the Phoenix, and nothing was going to stop me from reading it. Well, except dying, of course.

There I am, nose deep in my book, at that scene where the crystal balls are exploding off the shelves and everything is going ballistic. Then suddenly there’s a random man standing over my hospital bed, gripping my wrists and shaking me.

Man: “Give me your address.”

Me (being the stupid eight year old that I was):  “I don’t know my address.”

Man (seems fairly annoyed, shakes me a little more): “Tell me where you live.”

Me (I was really trying here): “Behind that big tree and the building with the thing.”

So naturally the man pulls a knife on me because he somehow thinks that’s going to help me become less stupid. Finally, a woman realizes there’s someone holding a knife over an eight year old and intervenes.

I look to my right and my mom’s next to me, maybe unconscious, maybe asleep. No one answers when I ask if she’s waking up. I cry myself to sleep. She does wake up, though, six hours later, and immediately wants to march out of the hospital and walk all the way home.

Home, by the way, is a five-hour walk away through a flooded city. As we’re preparing to swim through the five-feet deep flooded street leading to my house, a guy screams “Are you crazy?” at us and walks us home, carrying me on his shoulder.

That’s the end of my story. Here’s what we found out later, what really happened.

Turns out as I was reading my book, carbon monoxide was slowly creeping into the car because the floodwater had blocked off the exhaust vent. My mom and I both passed out instantly. I was unconscious for eight hours; she was unconscious for 14. Neither of us has any memory of what happened in between, but the hospital filled us in. Our hearts stopped beating at some point. We weren’t breathing for a while. They said another minute and we wouldn’t have come back.

Now let’s go back to the car at 3 p.m. There’s more to this story.

We’re in the car slowly turning blue because there’s no oxygen in our systems. My colorful book bobs around in the water. Seeing it, a passer-by peeks in to check if there might be people in the car. We’re almost submerged, but he sees us. He breaks the window with his umbrella and pulls us out of the car.

Some people on the street make us a stretcher and take us to the nearest municipal hospital. A woman follows and stays with us all night; She’s the one who stops the man with the knife from hurting me.

The man with the umbrella takes my mom’s purse for safekeeping until a man with a knife slashes his wrist and takes off running with it, hoping to rob our house with the keys in the purse.

The problem is that there are two address cards in the purse because we’ve just moved. The poor robber can’t figure out which address to rob. So he comes back to the hospital to ask me. Figured it out yet? Yep, that was same the man with the knife who woke me up.

Eventually, this story filled itself in, slowly and in pieces, as the different people involved told us what had happened after a newspaper article connected us weeks later.

Three people saved our lives in different ways: man with umbrella, woman at hospital, man who carried me home. To these people, to the reasons my mom and I were the only two survivors out of the 100 that died of carbon monoxide poisoning that day: I’ve forgotten your names, but I can never forget your actions. I’ve forgotten your faces, but you will always be in my memory.