I put little to no planning into these rural bus journeys. You got on if you could, hung on if you could, and fell off in a new place. Passengers’ skills to accommodate, got you through the discomfort, but the good fortune of finding a seat would significantly change the ordeal.
In central India, such a pleasure awaited me on a Madhya Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation bus.
On boarding, my eyes quickly scanned the seating situation; it was almost full. Settled in their seats were local villagers and their families, dressed in everyday clothes. The aisle was filling up with boxes, baskets, sacks and cloth, that everyone was expected to climb over. They too would eventually be sat upon.
There was one empty seat, next to a well turned out man in his twenties, dressed in a clean blue and purple checked shirt, worn the Indian way; the tail overlapping a pair of new Levi denims. He was looking thoughtfully out of the window. I sat down. We nodded a short greeting. The seat felt a little lumpy, but it didn’t lessen my gratitude.
Almost at our scheduled departure time, we waited for the last couple of disappointed passengers to find only a spot in the aisle. The engine gently chugged its toxic vapours into the street. Passengers stared out of the window, gently chewing, waiting for the conductor’s bell, and the crunch of the gearbox.
A young boy of about 10 years of age tentatively climbed up the steps into the bus, he was leading an old man carrying a long white stick. They were both raggedly dressed. The old man turned to face the passengers, then he began to sing. He held out a metal bowl towards those seated on the left. Hoping for a better response, he switched to those on the right. The boy put on a piteous look, and the old man rolled the whites of his eyes towards the heavens, as he felt his way along the aisle. They passed the first three rows of seats, when his white stick hit a box of soft drinks in the aisle. They paused. I was yet to hear any chinking sound of metal coin on metal bowl. Perhaps this lack of success was the cue for the voice to become more soulful, which it did, but this passionate change was abruptly disturbed by raucous shouting from the back of the bus. I looked around. There was a toothless old lady sitting in the central position of the back seat. She was fervently waving her arms about, and ardently expressing a view at full volume, in the Marathi language.
I noticed the boy’s plaintive expression change rapidly to one of great concern, and he looked up at the old man, to take his cue. The old man was in no doubt. He gathered his white stick and his begging bowl. He turned immediately to run down the steps of the bus and into the road. He side-stepped pedestrians and other obstacles, like a stand-off half, as he shuffled at pace along the street. The boy looked worried and tearful and made the decision to follow his paymaster. He duly caught up with him by the sugar cane stall. That was the last I saw of the pair of them. The entire bus was in guffaws of laughter, as the pair scarpered in shame.
I looked at my companion in the Levi jeans. He was still chuckling. He looked like an English speaker, so I looked to him for an explanation of what had gone on, although I had a fairly good idea. He was local to the area, but currently studying at a university in the USA. He was fluently trilingual. He explained that the toothless old lady had encountered the ‘blind’ beggar previously, and that she knew him well because they came from the same village, some distance from where we currently stood. She had no qualms in identifying him as a fraud, revealing his name and his village of residence to everyone on the bus. The young student reported that she had referred to him as a scoundrel, and that she had added a few colourful adjectives to his character. A minute or two later, with everyone in a jolly mood after the entertainment, the fully-occupied charabanc finally set off.
On the open road, the bus travelled at a fair lick. Its average speed was aided by the prominent place it held in the hierarchy of the highway, an entitlement that meant that it gave way only to cows, police and army vehicles and any lorry that was superior in size.
To drivers of any other motorised vehicle, and to pedestrians, a bus was a wretched intrusion. There was an exception to this – the village farm labourers, especially the women. To them it was a most welcome sight.
On this particular run, it performed the practical function of threshing the millet.
The crop was piled across the tarmac, and then raked into a fine, even layer, and as a heavy vehicle drove over it, the grain would be separated, sending clouds of dust and pieces of straw into the air. It was a beautiful sight to witness the late sun reflecting from all these particles, producing the most atmospheric golden lustre. Joyful women and young girls would sweep it up at the end of the day, having been spared the back-breaking work of winnowing it, or feeding it through a threshing machine.
The lumpy seat that I had not objected to as I took my place on the bus, was beginning to take its toll on me. I could identify one of the lumps as being a broken bolt that had forced its way through the padding of the seat, but was still concealed beneath the red leatherette covering. Each time the bus hit a pothole or a rough piece of road, not an infrequent event, my coccyx came crashing down on the bolt head. To relieve the pain I would adjust my position, so that my right buttock would take the hit. With my companion probably suspecting me of having a neurological disorder, I would fidget once more, this time onto the left buttock to even out the discomfort. As the journey wore on, I could find no form of cushioning, for my rucksack was tied to the roof. I was beginning to bruise, so my fidgeting cycle would repeat more frequently, as the discomfort intensified.
I drew on my reserves of fortitude, to help overcome the distraction, focussing on each changing scene, through a dust-coated bus window.
At each stop more seats became available, but I was reluctant to take the opportunity to move to a place free of severed bolts. I had been enjoying having conversations in an unbroken English that didn’t rely on me making self-conscious gesticulations to be understood. My companion had translated, and explained much to me. What’s more, he had enjoyed it too.
I did not wish to appear rude by changing seats, just because mine was ‘a bit lumpy’. I feared that’s how I might come across, so, in the knowledge that the discomfort would not last forever, I stayed put.
There was a prolonged period of quiet on the bus. The straight road passed through flat lands on either side, occasionally stopping at the unlikeliest place to let a passenger down.
I could see well into the distance from where I was sitting, and I could not identify any reason why a man might want to get off the bus. Not a building nor a horse, not a plough nor a haystack. He had a walk of indeterminate, but substantial length, across miles of open fields with a plastic hold-all on his head. I could only wonder.
Less than an hour away from its destination, the bus was not far behind schedule, but this eventful trip had more to come.
A faint, but sharp smell entered the bus. I sniffed brusquely several times, but I couldn’t identify it. It grew stronger. It was unpleasant, so I stopped sniffing. I waited for it to go away, assuming that it must be coming from the fields outside.
People sitting in the places three rows ahead were fidgeting amidst faint traces of white smoke. I stretched my neck a little, suspecting that the smoke and the smell might be linked.
In an instant, their seats became obscured by plumes of acrid, thick white smoke. Passengers leapt up, choking and spluttering, directing Marathi expletives towards the driver. I felt the sting of the pungent plumes in my eyes. The driver responded naturally, by quickly slamming his foot on the brakes. They were in good working order, as the bus skidded slightly on the gritty surface, on its way to a well-executed emergency stop. In a blind panic, people yelped as they rushed to where they knew the door to be, and in a cacophony of coughs of varying pitch, I joined the exodus spilling onto the grass verge. I stood well back, expecting the bus to explode, and I imagined the pages of my precious sketchbooks gently raining down on me like confetti.
Outside the bus a few men with furrowed brows, were conversing very quickly. They were in collaboration with an elderly toothless farmer, sporting white stubble, and they seemed to have quickly assessed the situation.
There was neither time nor inclination for retribution. They covered their noses and mouths with the cloth that labourers tend to have slung over their shoulders, and ventured into the thickening clouds inside. I heard them shouting instruction to each other. Then, appearing through the dense pea-souper, came the rear profile of one of the labourers, dragging a heavy weight down the steps of the bus, with his head turned to one side. The heroics and the histrionics completed, the labourers dumped a white, woven-plastic sack onto the verge, as everyone marshalled upwind of the acrid plumes of smoke.
I understood little of this encounter, until I was able to get close enough to the sack, to read the only two words of English that had been available to me during this dramatic episode. Boldly printed in green letters across it, were the words ‘uric acid’.
My student companion strolled over to me once the situation was becalmed, and laughing gently to himself in disbelief, he shook his head. I was grateful that he would offer me one more explanation before this trip completed.
The elderly farmer, now looking rather sheepish, had been the culprit. I had remembered him getting on the bus with the white sack across his shoulder. Pleased to be relieved of his burden, he had slumped the dead weight onto the floor by his seat. He used it as a footrest for the remainder of the journey.
It emerged later that he had taken a beedi from the top pocket of his kulta to help him while away the trip. These small cheroots are made of a rolled-up conical leaf of the Coromandel ebony tree, and they are filled with tobacco flake, and tied with coloured thread at one end. One of their characteristics is that pieces of the tobacco occasionally fall out, and on this day a fateful piece of lighted tobacco had fallen onto the plastic sack. It burned a hole through the plastic, and with enough heat, the pellets of uric acid suddenly, and dramatically, ignited.
I don’t recall how the burning sack was later dealt with. In the close discussions that followed, there was no admonishment for the farmer, everyone just got on matter-of-factly with the business of getting there. The remainder of the journey gave me nothing more to report.
The MPRTC, like all the state corporations, had provided another vital service at a surprisingly low price, and in spite of my bruised coccyx and my sore eyes, I was grateful that my adequate budget had not tempted me into travelling by taxi, and therefore deprive me of inspiring encounters and wondrous memories.