#road-accident

#road-accident

It was a cold November morning, and I had travelled with my family to our ancestral temple in a village in Tamil Nadu. My sister's 11-month-old baby was to be tonsured for the first time a religious head-shaving that in Hinduism is a way of discarding the evil eye and removing any negativity from past lives; a new start. My wife drove, but asked me to park the car while she went inside with our son and her parents.

"As we came round the bend we just saw this tree, literally falling in front of us. My instinct was that if I was to brake heavily I would hit the main parts of the tree, so in that split second I decided to accelerate. "I was doing maybe 45mph when we hit the tree," Mr Williams said, describing the weather as "damp, but not windy". "I couldn't see the tree or the branches, the windscreen shattered so badly. All I saw was a white light."