BUS JOURNEYS AND EMOTIONS

An extremely damaged and worn-out foot board, an equally tired driver and an irritated-by-the-mundane-affairs and detached conductor. All this, plus a sitting junta, who throw these expressions ranging from pity to frustration and happiness, looking at the standing junta, for whom right then, right there, getting a seat is the sole purpose of life. All this and much more on a simple routine journey by the city bus irrespective of which part of India you live in and which place. Leaving alone the fact whether it is a village, town or a city, these experiences would be common among the entire fraction of the Indian population that have traveled, and continue to do so, by the great Indian mode of transport-Public buses. All of you will relate to this one thing, this one common race.

Now, the days when you are drained out of all the energy you embraced the day with, in the morning, traveling by the city bus can become very painful and emotionally torturing. That very day, all the unlucky stars in the cosmos, that belong to your horoscope, will look down on you and smile saying a NO to all your desires of having a comfortable seat to sit on, for the journey ahead. You stand there with all the hope (although there is an abyss down the hourglass of hope) that some one will get off soon and you can land your body there. This very magnitude of hope, which if invested in various other realms of life, wouldn’t get wasted this colossally. Anyway, you continue to stand there, sleep wades its way through your senses, and you start thinking about whom you got irritated with, in the college and which lecturer did something funny today to grant you your daily dose of mass-laughter with the rest of the class. Who said something funny, what would Mom say as soon as you enter the house, what food would be waiting for you at the dining table, how you would spend that evening, which song you’ll play and listen to and so on. First, you ran out of energy, then you ran out of hope and now it is the “thoughts’” that should possibly perish, because that is the only entity left.

Thoughts cease to run out. They are always there in abundance in your head and they continue to replenish themselves. Thoughts, nice thoughts, bitter thoughts, happy thoughts, short thoughts, endless thoughts, appalling thoughts, strange thoughts, scary thoughts, dreamy thoughts, beautiful thoughts, disgusting thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, thoughts…… And then, clinking of metal. You smell sweat, a day’s accumulated dirt, and Khakis. In a moment, you come out of the sea of thoughts and feel the ground. The conductor asks you where you are heading. End of exchange-cash and a few words. Thoughts have been interrupted. The bus stops and a stream of people rush in, not letting the ones who want to get off, get off. The conductor screams at the top of his voice, but no avail, it is just another human voice that will be killed in the sea of a hundred others. And then you see it- a seat- a short intense surge of bliss. You rush there and catch it. It feels elated.

Then comes the main part of the journey. Outside, you have a view of the other half of the world, that which does not belong to the population that is traveling with you in the bus, the world that belongs to the pedestrians, vendors, general men and women and finally movie posters that survive without purpose, on dilapidated compound walls. The objects near your sight and perish where your eyes taper, after succumbing to a blur. Everything is just the same as it was before. The semblance of the world creates the same air of nonchalance in you, every single day and the journey has to go on anyway. Some of us like to read during this time, while some prefer music, the kind of music that soothes the irregularities in emotions that you undergo over the time. Both these activities, as they will seem to you, tend to have this ability of dissolving the duration of the journey into them, so that you feel as if the entire thing was not a big ordeal at all. Nothing all that trouble-giving has happened just yet, and there is a lot more this life has in store besides insignificant bus journeys and the mood-swing-inductions entwined in them. Then your destination shows up and you feel that you had just started the travel a couple of minutes back. You pack yourself up and bid goodbye to the bus to which you are just another human being, just another one in a hundred thousand that it has carried over the years, with a plethora of ambitions, desires, dissatisfactions and woes. Home at last.

A day will come, and then some, many days. They will come endlessly. And there will be the same buses, bliss, emotions and music.