Inheritance

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