The Bus journey

This was written at around 10:00pm, 14th February, 2010, sitting in a bus seat with no backrest, staring at a highway. Excuse the political incorrectness.

This has to be the most ridiculous thing I have seen in a bus. You think south Malabar is a conservative bastion, think again, think deep. I am at Coimbatore, and luckily for me, fast running away from it in a bus that looks like a cross between the wagon they used in 1921 to transport and in the process killed the revolutionaries of the Malabar rebellion and the oriental express. Throw in a bit of that train in 3.10 to Yuma, and you get what this bus looks like. Hold on, you might be wondering what the fuck I am doing in this bus. Well I had come home to attend a wedding. And me being me, the most well organized person around, did not care to book a ticket back to Bangalore. Well, I had done this before. Reach Coimbatore, get a ticket for almost thrice the amount the ticket actually costs, and get back to Bangalore. Things had worked fine for me. Until today that is.


As usual, I reached here, bought a ticket to Bangalore, got into the bus, saw that there was a seat near a very average looking lady(sorry for putting down something that might turn out to be not so politically correct, I could not help it. This damn story is going to be so bloody ridiculous that such trivial political in-correctness will go well with this story. Just like meat and red wine, or was that white wine? Don't ask me, I would not know. ) I decided not to sit alongside her, made my way to the back side, where I found a seat. But once I tried to get into it, I soon came to appreciate the 1921 wagon-ish qualities of this bus. I could not get in, as the space between the seats were non-existent. I sat there, trying hard to mimic the little girls from1960's Soviet bloc countries in Eastern Europe, hard at gymnastics practice.(Nadiya Komanechi, anyone?)

I know this story is skirting the horizons of ridiculousness  with frequencies that would give A R Rahman hits a run for their money. I can't help. 

 But I can't take it anymore, so I wriggle out(no sarcasm in there, folks, I literally did that), go to the front row, and sit in the seat next to this very average-ish looking not so young lady. You see, my rating of her beauty and age is going down drastically like Hull City's form in the second half of last season. And then, all hell break loose. This lady tells the conductor this guy is sitting in the ladies seat, the conductor comes around and asks me to note from the seat. I go "What the ....." but quickly stop as I realize that the guy will not understand anything I am trying to tell him. So I tell him in my very broken Tamil that I can't get in that seat, because my legs are too long for the space between the seats and I am not so insistent on sitting near this not so pretty looking not very young lady if I can get another seat.

So the conductor asks another guy whom he managed to single out as the one with the shortest legs in the group to move to the seat I was supposed to occupy. The poor guy wont agree, and a mini fight ensues between the conductor and the guy. While this is happening, I point out to the very average looking not so young lady this would all be solved if she is okay with me sitting next to her. Her reply to that suggestion delivered in the most gentlemanly and decent tone and language known to me is still echoing me in my ears, while I type this out, even as Amr Diab is  singing 'Aletly Oul' from my earphones.    

Continued.....