Some realizations
With the high pitch screeching sound and rumbling deck the bus halted in the bus stand. A crowd rushed into the bus and I felt squeezed and suffocated, with a cold sweat drop going down my forehead — this wasn’t my first time travelling like this in a bus.
But this time I was on my way back home from my college after a month affected with homesickness. Soon after the last hour bell rang I was relieved and my heart was beating home..home…
I rushed to the Kaithapoyil bus stand in the same uniform with the fragrance of boredom ready to be lifted in air by the wind of ‘sukoon’(peace). After a fifteen minutes of waiting the bus stopped at the bus stop, I read the sign board saying Sulthan Bathery to Kozhikode. At the bus stop a lot of other students, friends, and passengers were waiting too. I got into the bus and occupied a seat near the window. Everything was perfect — window seat, music and the warm mid-summer wind that is waiting to brush through my hair and caress my face swiftly and let my hair dance.
But it didn’t last long….until I was startled by the passenger next to me pointing his finger to an old man who was standing and leaning to one of the seats opposite to ours. I removed my headphones to hear the man. Well then I was standing, leaning to the same seat the old man was leaning before. I was clenching my teeth and was cracking my knuckles and cursing the old man with cuss words but biting my lips in order not to say it out aloud.
The bus was stopped at the Koduvally stand for the past three minutes and I was dripping wet from sweat. It was late in the evening around 4o’clock, normally it was cool and humid but unfortunately today was an exception. The air around me was warm and with occasional blow of hot wind. I was so done by then by the push and pull, especially with those nasty sweaty armpits hovering over my head clearly showing the wet patches of dark colored spots.
I was gasping for air meanwhile my eyes met a middle-aged man outside who was affected by vitiligo. The man was holding something in his hand tightly gripping to it and was walking near the pedestrian pavement beside the stand. It was then my eyes tracked his cheerful and bright eyes and saw a lady seated on the walkway who was indulged in her thoughts and was motioning her hands in a same pattern. She was also affected with vitiligo. I concluded that they were husband and wife.
The man came close to her and opened his hand, it was a red plastic rose which he might have got from somewhere. Slightly old, worn out but perfectly shaped rose. The lady’s face lit with joy and happiness, her eyes with love and tears of excitement. He sat near her. She accepted the rose and embraced his with a side hug.
The air was soo sacred and heart whelming now. Watching all this my mind was stricken with a deep grief and distress for cursing the old man only because of my greed. The humongous banyan tree behind them has started to wiggle and jiggle by a cold wind which came to take my sins and fly to the Western Ghats and pour down as rain to confess. This scene shook my inner-self and changed me and my attitude towards others, making me realize that others have their own problems in their life and no one is a deity but all are men.
