“Aagh!” I yelled, as the cockroach ran over my eyes, nose and finally inside my open mouth. My eyelids fluttered open and I groaned with agony. It was a nightmare. I’m afraid of cockroaches and I won’t deny it.

As the effects of my nightmare wore away, I checked the calendar for the date. I gasped as I checked the alarm clock beside me. It might’ve gone off, probably I was too deep in slumber. It was Sunday and the time was eight in the morning. I ran down to the breakfast table. Everyone else was up and about.

An hour later, we had to set off for my aunt’s place. My aunt lived in Nwengdor, the city next to ours, and we’d decided to drive down there for a visit. The problem was that my aunt was quite strict and firm about timings and punctuality, especially when it came to commitments. And my father had committed to her that we would reach her house by 11 o’clock. Her place was a two-hour drive from our place.

As per our planning, we set off for Nwengdor at 9am sharp. We had last gone to my aunt’s two years back, and I was waiting impatiently to see my cousins, how they’d grown and everything.

My siblings sat beside me, each happy and smiling, as dad drove the car. For an hour and a half, he drove while mum read her book, and my siblings and I cracked jokes. Suddenly, the sky turned dark. I looked out of the window to see black, clouds shadowing the sky.

“Oh let it not rain! It will only delay our trip,” I moaned, my smile had vanished and my siblings’ too.

But no, it wasn’t going to rain. Huge gusts of wind were blowing now. My neatly-tied ponytail wasn’t neat anymore because of the dust that embraced my hair with the wind. Dad drove on and on, but soon enough the wind grew so strong that I could feel the car swaying. No kidding, seriously! Probably, dad felt so too, because he slowed down the car and looked at mum with a worried expression.

We kept travelling, but at a slower pace now. There was a bunch of five to six cars going the same way as we were. We were now driving through a road fenced by tall trees and were only 15 minutes’ drive away from my aunt’s place.

The car in front of us was a turquoise beauty. It was a magnificent new model, whose sleek metal glinted and sparkled, even without the sun above it. Suddenly one of the gigantic trees fell to the ground and landed on the turquoise beauty. We were missed narrowly, thanks to God!

There was much shattering of glass and the turquoise metal bent with the weight of the tree. We stopped altogether, and my dad immediately stepped out of the car to help the only passenger in the car.  I don’t know what he did, or how he did it, but my father managed to rescue the man from inside his car. Mercifully, the man was safe with a few injuries because the tree had fallen on the bonnet of his car. He had gashes on his face and deep cuts on his arms. It was a dreadful sight!

Dad supported him and brought him to our car. Dad’s hands were scratched and scarred. He phoned the ambulance and the police. However, their arrival took much time, and we spent the time being worried and sullen.

By the time the ambulance and the police had arrived, and the man was taken away to the hospital, dad had phoned my aunt and told her of the emergency. She said, much to our surprise, that it didn’t matter and we could reach her place by tomorrow, if everything got okay.

Thus, we drove back, still at a slow pace, as the wind raged on, to a nearby hotel and spent the night there. The next morning, the windstorm had died down and the tree had been cleared away from the road, so we set off for aunt’s house in Nwengdor, happy again for we were about to see our cousins! 

Published in Dawn, Young World, March 12th, 2015