The bus trudged along on the road, as it
twisted, turned, and climbed down the mountain, which never seemed to end. It
was cold and dark and the only thing visible was the 20 metre patch of road
just in front of the bus, which was a good thing since some of the fainthearted
passengers might not have particularly enjoyed the sight outside. The ravine
was deep and a drop was but a single mistake away. Quite frequently, as the
driver manoeuvred the bus on tight hairpins the rear portion of the bus would
actually be driven outside the road and had a passenger sitting in the last row
flashed a torch outside the window, looking for the ground, nothing but
emptiness would have greeted his eyes.
Some of the passengers were simply terrified, some others were
pretending, quite unsuccessfully, to be unperturbed by the road. The handful,
who were sound asleep were mostly locals. I was fighting a losing battle trying
to prevent the remnants of my last meal (something really oily and spicy) from defying
the force of earth’s gravitation.
The journey had begun ten hours earlier at
noon up in the mountains at the Nawabpur bus station, where I had boarded a
state transport bus headed towards the plains. Had it not been for that hideous
buffalo, which had this sudden impulse to take our bus by the horns and get
hurt in the process, I would have already reached my destination, Kharora, a
garbage-ridden, stinking cluster of the most obnoxious looking, brick-walled
buildings (the only reason for the existence of which was the single line railway
that bisected it right in the middle and headed towards the capital, carrying
on it the slowest train on the entire network). It had taken an hour to move
the buffalo out of the way and another to examine the damage caused to the bus.
A few miles ahead on the road our driver had decided to break for lunch and
that wasted another precious hour of daylight. In the mountains the sun
disappears with incredible swiftness, catching the inexperienced traveller by
surprise. One moment I had been squinting my eyes, wishing that the sun would
set and the next moment I was barely able to see. The road wasn’t exactly the
best known in the country for its safety record and travelling on it in the
dark, even with seasoned drivers who knew every square inch of the road, wasn’t
without considerable risk.
I wondered how much longer would this
misery last and closed my eyes in the hope of finding some sleep. The prospects
of some rest, which were never very bright, were extinguished by the man sitting behind me, when he gave my
shoulder a violent jerk. Annoyed, I turned around trying my best to hide how I
really felt about this interruption. I answered his question whether I had a
lighter in the negative and closed my eyes again. Some time later, as the disgusting
smell of cigarette smoke wafted my way, it appeared that he had managed to
obtain what he wanted. Suddenly the bus took a sharp left turn and its cargo,
both living and non-living, was pushed to the right. People sitting to the left
of the aisle were nearly on the aisle. People on the right, like me,
lunged sideways towards the windows. Somebody cried in pain as their head
banged against the window. With a whoosh a rather heavy plastic bag fell
to my left, on the empty seat across the aisle and its contents came bursting
out on to the bus floor. Barely a second later, the turbulence seemed to have
passed and many of us heaved a deep sigh of relief. I surreptitiously stretched
my leg under the seat in front of me and felt my bag. The bag and its precious
contents seemed to be unharmed.
It had been the most eventful year of my
life and I was glad that after months of hard work I had finally in my
possession the piece of paper that would soon change my life forever, of course
for the better. On a foggy February afternoon, I had received a phone call from
Satinder, my childhood friend, who was also one of the most unscrupulous
lawyers of Nawabpur. He had warned me that the doctors hadn’t been very optimistic
and that I had at best a year at my disposal to do something. You see, my
father, a retired schoolmaster, a man of principle (and more importantly the
sole owner of the region’s largest tea estate, which he had inherited after my
grandmother's death, making him the wealthiest schoolmaster the district had ever
seen) had, for a large part of my life as his son, hated me. In spite of his
enviable bank balance, he had always led a simple life. He detested any sort of
extravagance. Caffeinating the
population gave him no pleasure and therefore he had remained a schoolmaster
and would have continued (partially) bringing up yet another generation of
children of Nawabpur, had it not been for that growing mass in his liver.
I, his only child, was the exact opposite
of what he wanted me to grow into. He had provided me with all that a growing child needs. But my desire for more,
be it for more food or more toys, had been just insatiable. He would lecture me for hours and hours, for throwing tantrums about not having enough toys to
play with. Not that he was very successful in moulding me along the blueprint
he had in his mind. At twelve, I was already a frequent visitor at the local
police station and had made quite a few acquaintances during my stays there. With
no remorse whatsoever, I would watch my father’s face, dejected, crestfallen,
every time he had to come and rescue me, his disappointment in me growing each time. But the killer blow had to wait till I
was seventeen. It had involved a safe in his study and a missing draft of a
physics paper for the State Board Examination that he had been preparing. The safe, which had
housed the papers in question had no visible signs of damage and naturally, the
police had no clear evidence. But my father (and probably even the police) had always
known the truth and from that day whatever little affection had been left in
his heart for me was drained out. He hadn’t yelled at me as he would usually. It
had just been cold indifference, as if I was no longer his son. Perhaps I had
deserved it, perhaps not. A week later I had hitched a ride down the
mountains, promising myself that I would never return.
But Satinder’s call had ensured that I
would have to break my promise. I just couldn’t help it. I would have gone on
to hate myself had I let this opportunity slip by. I just couldn’t let my
father’s tea estate, our tea estate be auctioned to the highest bidder
and the proceeds distributed to numerous charities spread over the entire
district. I had to do something and
there hadn’t been much time left. I had immediately packed my things and gone straight
to the railway station.
Meeting my father for the first time in
nearly two decades hadn’t been easy, but I had known that what lay ahead was
probably the most difficult thing I had ever tried in my life. He had looked
awful, reduced to a mere shadow of his younger self. If he had felt any emotion
upon seeing my face, whether surprise, anger or joy, he had quite successfully
managed to conceal it behind the same icy mask I had seen on his face when I
had left. Satinder had taken me in and together we had devised a strategy.
Every morning I would visit my father and talk to him, about my childhood,
about all those dreadful episodes that he had to face because of me, about my
family (while reminding him that it was also his family), about my job
(I left out the details of course). I never formally apologized to him,
however. That would have felt artificial. At first he would ignore me,
pretending to be immersed in one of his countless books. But slowly, my
perseverance had paid off and he had begun responding to what I would say. It
had happened first when I had been recounting to him how my four-year old
daughter had marched home one day from school and announced that she wanted to
be a teacher. My heart had missed a beat when I had noticed that there were
tears in his eyes. He had looked at me properly (for the first time in all
those years) and smiled. Very soon, that first smile had given rise to many
more occasional chuckles, which by the end of July had been supplemented by real
conversations, although his contribution to these conversations had mostly
been monosyllables. As his health had declined, his icy mask had melted away to
give rise to a new warmth I had never seen in him earlier. We would talk for hours,
on subjects ranging from his childhood to the Indo-Pak peace process, from how
he hated the tea estate to India’s space programme, him leaning against his
pillow, sipping coffee and me on a stool by his bed.
The doctors would come and go, tweak his
medication a little. But quite clearly, they couldn’t do much, apart from
trying to convince him that his pain could be eased a little. After October he
had gone downhill fast, making me wonder whether it was too late. It had been
early in November, when Satinder and I had decided to make our move. He had
drafted the document ages ago, possibly even before that telephone call in
February. A couple of witnesses were arranged for. After dinner we had gone
into Father's room and got it done. It had
been far quicker than I had ever dreamt. Father had been in no state to make a
conscious decision and he had done what his son, who he just had begun to
trust, had told him to do. Strictly speaking, the validity of such a will could
have been questioned, but Satinder had assured me that there was little that
couldn’t be achieved and few favours that couldn’t be won in the legal circles
of Nawabpur with a couple of gifts exchanging hands. As soon as I had laid hands on
that paper, there had been just one thought on my mind- “I want to run down
this mountain, go away for good.” Satinder had advised caution. “A few more
weeks...”, he had said. But I had seen enough of my father, enough
for one lifetime anyway. The next morning, I had gone to the bus station, only
to learn that the first bus out of Nawabpur was at noon. I had boarded the bus
hoping that I would reach Kharora just in time to catch the lone train (the Sohrabad
Passenger) that served the station. But fate had other plans for me.
I had just entered that state exactly
midway between being awake and being asleep, when a loud commotion made me
jump. Our bus seemed to have come to a standstill. Brilliant white light was
shining into the bus through the windscreen. For a moment I thought of fairies
but quickly realised that a more parsimonious explanation involved another
vehicle facing ours. It was a state transport bus and it was less than fifteen
feet away from ours. It was exactly this sort of a thing I had been worrying
about. I looked to my left and realised that the mountainside and the side of
our bus were just a couple of feet apart. I peered out of the window on the
right and understood what the commotion was all about. There was hardly five
feet of land between us and a sudden drop and no car, let alone a bus, was going
to pass through. Outside the bus, a fierce argument was being raged as to which
bus, theirs or ours, would have to be reversed till we reached a point broad enough
for two buses to pass safely. No party seemed willing to concede any ground.
The other driver seemed to be arguing that it would be much safer to reverse
uphill and therefore it had to be our bus. Our driver countered back claiming
that if they did that then this cat and mouse game would have to go on for a
much longer distance than if the other bus were to reverse. Meanwhile, I moved
closer to the window. Any moment I would have to thrust my head out to deposit
the contents of my stomach on the road. I had placed a polythene bag somewhere
in the pouch attached to the seat in from of me, but in time of dire need, it seemed
to have disappeared. I rested my head on the window and tried to take a couple
of deep breaths. I tried to imagine that I was somewhere else, leading a life
that I had only dreamt about so far. I tried to imagine, that those disgusting
diesel fumes reaching my nostrils and telling my brain to throw up were not
there. It seemed to have worked a bit, since I was no longer as close to the brink
as I was a few minutes ago.
There was a loud cry and suddenly the
engine of our bus burst to life. We were moving at last! With a very worrying
noise the driver managed to shift the bus into reverse and inch by inch we
started moving backwards. The conductor (and many passengers who probably
considered it too risky to be in the bus) were walking alongside the bus and
instructing the driver all at the same time. But somehow the driver appeared to
be doing in his job properly. So far there were no free falls. Many of my
co-passengers were holding their breath, lest the sound of their respiration
break the driver’s concentration. I wondered who was concentrating harder- the driver,
trying to keep us all alive or me, trying to keep myself from vomiting? The other
driver patiently waited for us to cover a good distance and then followed us,
only to wait for some more time. Our progress was slow. (It had to be!) Turn
after turn, our bus reversed up the incline, retracing our path. Very quickly I
lost track of time. After what might have been five minutes, fifteen minutes or
even an hour, our conductor banged loudly on the side of the bus and there was
a loud cheer. The bus turned one last time and came to a halt and the driver jumped out.
I had no time to waste. I almost leaped out
of my seat, pushed an elderly lady who was trying to move to the front of the
bus out of my way and clambered out of the bus. There was much more space than
I had expected and I even managed to go a couple of yards away from the bus.
Down on all fours I puked my horrible lunch. A couple of minutes later, feeling slightly
better but very weak, I tried to get my bearings. The other bus had joined us
and the two buses were parked side by side. The place was very big and unexpectedly
flat. In fact, it occurred to me upon closer inspection that we were on a
mountain pass. The place offered spectacular views on both sides of the pass
and for the first time in the evening I realised that I had forgotten how
breathtaking the night sky on a new moon night up in the mountains can look! An
abandoned Indo-Tibetan Border Police chowki was the only building there
and I started walking towards it when both the buses sounded their horns at the
same time. I cursed. For one brief moment, I had deleted from my mind the simple fact that the horrible journey
was nowhere near complete. There was still hours and hours of treacherous road
to go. As soon as my brain registered this reality my nausea returned. I
dragged my reluctant feet towards the buses. I was between the two buses, whose
engines were already rumbling, when my mobile phone, which was in my shirt’s
pocket, started vibrating. I took the phone out and saw that the caller was
Satinder. I wondered why he was calling me now. Maybe he still wanted to make
one last attempt to convince me to return to Nawabpur. But I never found out.
Because the moment I pressed the “accept call” button, the phone flew out of my
hand I fell flat on my face. It was a football-sized rock that I had missed. It
had jarred my right toe, which was most probably bleeding profusely. There was
no time to think. Both buses seemed to be leaving. Blinded by pain (it was too
dark to see clearly anyway). I groped along the ground and felt no sign of
either the phone or the battery which would inevitable have separated from the phone.
The buses started moving. I cried aloud in desperation, waving my arms
violently ( and quite uselessly). Our
bus slowed down. I dived one last time on the ground, an effort that cost me a
few more precious seconds and started running after our bus. Out of breath and
almost on the brink of passing out I managed to jump on the rear footboard and
entered the bus. I was glad to find that nobody had stolen my seat or the seat
across the aisle to my left and the smoker who had been sitting behind me
seemed to have found another seat; he was nowhere to be seen. I collapsed into
my seat and lay as flat as it was possible to be in a bus. I closed my eyes and
wondered how many more hours...
It is not every day that you find yourself
in an empty bus at a bus station when you wake up. The first few moments after
I woke up were sheer panic. But I recovered fairly fast. Last night’s journey
seemed like a dream. In fact, the whole of the past year or so felt like a
story. It just couldn’t be true. I stretched myself and reached for my bag
under the seat in front of me. It wasn’t there. Within a fraction of a
second, I was lying flat on the floor of the bus and scanning the entire bus. I
looked under every seat, then on every seat, in the gaps between adjacent
seats, in the overhead luggage compartments. But it was nowhere to be seen. It
had been stolen. But by whom? Who would steal a battered old bag, unless of
course they knew what it contained and for some weird reason wanted to trouble me?
Absolutely devastated, I got down from the bus. My only hope was that the bag
had been deposited with the bus station authorities as unclaimed luggage. I looked
around. The place wore a deserted look. A bored looking man sitting on a tickets
counter was probably the only human being around. Something about the place did
not look quite right. There was a large board above the window of the tickets
counter displaying fares for bus journeys to various places from – and my
visceral organs did a couple of somersaults as I read the name- Nawabpur!
I ran out of the main entrance to the bus station onto the street outside.
There it was! The main market of Nawabpur. Satinder’s house was just a couple
of hundred metres to the left. And if I walked a kilometre in the other
direction, I could be face to face with my father!
I had this mad urge to throw myself off a
cliff. I had just committed the stupidest mistake of my life. I had got on the wrong
bus at the pass! I sat myself down on a bench and thought about the entire
episode. The departing buses, Satinder’s phone call, the desperate search for
parts of my phone, the chase and finally the wrong bus... Of course the smoker
was nowhere to be seen. He was on the other bus, headed the right way! And here
I was, back in Nawabpur. There was a bright side though, to this entirely
depressing chain of events. If I had boarded the wrong bus, then my bag had
probably reached Kharora safely. I would have to reach Kharora, as fast as
possible. But first I had to check when the bus would depart from Kharora on
its return journey.
I walked towards the tickets counter and
explained to the man there that a friend wanted to board the bus from Kharora
to Nawabpur. (I was too embarrassed to describe the truth) “When does the next bus leave Kharora?”, I asked.
He looked at me in a strange way and said, “That
bus isn’t going to run today,”
“What do you mean it isn’t going to run
today?”, I asked rudely.
“Didn’t you hear? There was a big fire in
the bus yesterday. They were halfway down the mountain. It was running late.
Fortunately, nothing serious happened”
“Nothing serious? You mean, there was no
damage to the bus?” I asked.
“Oh no. There was no way they could have
brought the fire under control. The interior was completely incinerated. I
heard, no trace of even one seat cover is to be found. Curtains, bags all gutted.
I meant, no one was seriously hurt...some minor burns.”
Ten minutes later I found myself on the
road to Satinder’s house. If this fire story was true, and there was no reason
to believe otherwise, then there was one in a billion chance that the bag had
survived the fire. There was another way, of course. We would have to do it again,
get it signed by my father. We had done it yesterday and we could do it again
today.
I rang Satinder’s doorbell. He opened the
door a few seconds later.
“How did you hear? “ he asked, unable to
hide the surprise in his voice.
“How did I hear what?”
“I tried calling you so many times. Couldn’t
reach you. You father died last night.”
THE
END
