Bus 9

Shalom Gauri
Sim - Simply
Published in
8 min readOct 10, 2015

They stand gathered around the crossroads, sipping chai from small plastic cups, their talk peppered with short bursts of laughter. Laxmi adjusts her dark green coat — the kind they are all wearing, and walks up to the man handing out thick yellow gloves. Beside her, a lady with flowers in her hair picks up a broom and thumps the handle end onto her palm to align its numerous brown sticks. Laxmi starts across the road towards her green trolley, pausing when she sees the girl in khaki trousers and a maroon T-shirt. The girl carries a bag over one shoulder, the sleeves of her jacket rolled back to her elbows. Laxmi smiles as she does every morning, and the girl smiles and waves back.

The girl continues up the road, past the group of BBMP workers that Laxmi is a part of. Past the newspaper distributors bending over bundles of The Times Of India and The Hindu. She pauses on the bridge over the railway track, watching the 7:04 a.m. train to Erode as it curves away from East Railway Station. Past the wide footpath outside French Loaf where the fruit sellers set up their mini market, where one day she had tried and failed with her brother, to bargain for just one orange from the stern lady who sold only in Kilos. Around Richards Park, and there she sees Bus 9, slowing to a halt at her stop.

Some people believe that God watches over each one of us. Perhaps, like the leader in V for Vendetta, God sits in a room filled wall-to-wall with a million T.V. screens, each one playing short episodes of our lives. Have you ever wondered what it must be like to see so many lives in little bits and pieces? In fleeting snapshots and floating fragments of conversation? To see these lives, (as you speed through a city just stretching itself awake,) pass by your window in complete, blissful oblivion of your watching?

Bus 9 heads towards Lingarajapuram. Up the flyover, over the narrow roads that squeeze between the peach, blue, yellow and brown buildings that taper out into the horizon like three-3 dimensional patchwork. The girl in maroon sits in the very last right-hand side window seat, looking up at the billowing billboards as they throw out their proud chests and advertise for everything from Jockey underwear and Big Basket Bombaat offers, to the iPhone 6 and Sunburn Arena’s latest concerts.
On the terrace of one bright purple building, a man in shorts and a banian pulls clothes down from a clothesline that runs parallel to the flyover, and beneath a billboard with Shah Rukh Khan’s plastic face beaming out of it. He pauses briefly to stare as a neon- clad cyclist flashes past. The cyclist glides down onto flat ground as the flyover slips to an end, his feet beginning to work furiously as he zooms past pedestrians. Leaning heavily to the right, he shadows Bus 9 onto Nehru Road, but is left behind at Bright Public School, as the bus begins to pick up speed.

The girl in maroon slides off her shoes to pull her feet up and fold them beneath her. Her backpack lies beside the shoes, and she lets the convenience of leaving it there overpower the thought of all the dust and mud on the floor. In front of her, a girl from ISC sleeps soundly, head rolling each time the bus swerves. Across the aisle, a group of 10th grade boys laugh out loud as one of them attempts to pull the other off his seat. The rest of the bus is lost in their earphones, and soon the girl turns back to her window.

I don’t know what it is about little kids but they always stare at me. They fix their beady black eyes on me, unblinking, with the kind of determination that ought to be declared utterly unacceptable for social beings of their age and size. Yet for some reason, sitting in that very last right-hand side window seat of Bus 9, I find myself less apprehensive of these creatures. Though I suspect the vertical distance that keeps me safely above their eye level may have something to do with it.

Bus 9 slows to a stop beside the footpath. From her seat at the back the girl cannot see the junior school teacher get on the bus, but she can see the two people who dropped her there. The man standing with his hands deep in the pockets of his loose track pants, and two steps ahead of him, a little kid. The height of his knee. The little kid watches intently as the teacher gets on the bus, his eyes unblinking until she waves to him from inside. Then he takes two small steps back, his eyes still fixed on the bus, his mouth a tight line, and moves slightly behind the man’s leg, half hiding himself as Bus 9 begins to move. Years ago, the girl used to go with her father to drop her Amma off at the Vidhana Soudha bus stop. She wonders if someone from that school bus watched her wave every morning, glad as she is now for the distance between them.

Bus 9 continues on towards Jal Vayu Vihar, past the chai shops where men stand smoking their morning cigarettes. Past Sathya Hospital and the temple just next to it, outside which, just 6 months ago, a large Peepal tree had spread it’s magnificent branches out to embrace the sky. The tree had fallen during the rains, uprooted right out off the footpath and thrown across the road to be stared at in horror by the students of Bus 9 the next morning. But now the footpath has been repaved, the battered tree shifted away, and there is no sign of it ever having lived there.

Driving through Kammanahalli Main Road at night is like entering psychedelic tunnel of spinning lights. Lined with shops and restaurants, the road is alive with the buzz of pedestrians, with the clamour of impatient cars, and sitting in those cars are always people with their noses pressed up against the windows, mesmerised by the glow of beckoning signage. People like the girl in maroon, on her way home from their weekly Sunday evening drop-in at her grandfather’s house. But now, staring out from Bus 9 at 7:30 in the morning in a city that really wakes only at 11:00, what she sees is a ghost town. The signage switched off, the footpath suddenly visible, and stray bags of plastic strewn around tree stumps. Dark lifeless halls and frozen mannequins behind sheets of glass. Corrugated metal shutters drawn halfway down across shopfronts, the frozen faces of models mid-gasp, mid-laugh, mid-pout. At the CMR Road intersection she glances up at a building to see that the billboard advertising Painless Waxing at YLG has crashed back onto the terrace. The model probably left smiling at the sky.

To take a photograph is to seize a beautiful moment and freeze it. To stop it right there and wrap your arms all the way around — so tight that time itself may never take it away from you. But sometimes, you come across a moment that you just can’t capture. Perhaps it’s too fleeting, perhaps it caught you by surprise, perhaps the lighting was too low, or perhaps… you’re just not a very good photographer.

Bus 9 turns at last onto the Outer Ring Road; down the underpass and out onto the fast lane. It picks up speed, zipping alongside the service road where the girl in maroon sees morning walkers (in snapshots between trees) striding forth, preoccupied with their strange arm-whirling exercises. Past Nagavara flyover and onto the next one. The girl struggles to keep from breaking out into a ridiculous grin as she thanks God over and over for whoever it was who invented Flyovers. She looks down for a moment and thinking of Kangana Ranaut staring out of her window as the plane takes off for Paris in Queen, selects a playlist on her phone. A playlist with songs that start out slow and pick up along the way, building to a wonderful arms-spread-open-wide sort of climax. Songs that would, under any other circumstances, feel a little too optimistic.

If you could see eternity, it would be the view from the elevated expressway. To one side, the airstrip streaks out into a horizon defined by the uneven high-rise of cityscape, to the other lies the whole of Sahakarnagar and further along the way, vast breaths of green. Overhead the sky opens up, like an overarching dome of softly floating clouds and beautiful blue. Bus 9 passes NCC Urban Windsor and the girl in maroon can see it’s reflection ripple across the building’s large glass front. She wants to one day enter that building, climb up to it’s 7th floor and turn towards the expressway, watching for buses.
Below, Sahakarnagar unfolds — a network of intersecting roads. The girl in maroon used to have friends who stayed there and she remembers a plot owned by Hindustan Coca-Cola Distributors that had tall sheets of corrugated metal all around it. She remembers wanting to know what lay within. Now, from up above on the expressway, sheets of metal are mere lines on a blueprint, no wall can keep her out anymore. Terrace gardens, people with newspapers on balconies, the large, empty parking lot outside More supermarket, each detail rushes at her from ahead, swings into focus and blurs out again like the black and yellow stripes on the flyover parapet.

Here, in what was once the outskirts of the city, tall blocks of apartment buildings rise into view. Most are still under construction, the slender but powerful metal cranes forming striking silhouettes above their towering grey skeletons. During monsoon and winter, the entire landscape is cloaked in mist; the sun fading behind layer after layer of cool morning air until it could be mistaken for the moon. The girl thinks of Batman.

There are about 10 minutes left before Bus 9 reaches school. It turns off towards Yelahanka at the Splash and Shine so called ‘touchless’ car-wash, rumbling past a group of men playing volleyball in an empty plot of land, and lighting up faces with false hope as it passes by the public bus stands. Torn posters on the walls declare a “Grand 50 days” of the blockbuster movie Bahubali. The girl sinks into her seat, wishing the ride would never end.

When I decided to write about my morning bus ride to school, the most frustrating bit was having to choose which of those billion beautiful moments to write about. It was like seeing a bunch of puppies on the road, each as ridiculously lovable as the other, and wanting to just scoop them all up at once.

Photography by Sana Jazeer.
An edited version of this piece has also been posted on the Aditi Spectrum website at http://aditispectrum.com/index.php/2015/10/10/bus-9/

Originally published at www.shalomgauri.in on October 10, 2015.

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