It was supposed to be just another short bus journey; except it was in Kerala. And as I have realized after a couple of trips to that wonderous land of contradictions, there’s never a just-another-thing there. For example, you can’t go to just another temple there, because each of them are quite unique with different, elaborate customs of their own. You can’t go to just another town there, because, well for one, you wouldn’t know where one town ends and another begins. You can’t just drive through the highway there, because, the highways are nothing but a labyrinth passing through an unending town. You can’t go to just another… well, you get the drift.
So, as it turned out, the supposed short journey in the Kerala RTC bus took me down a long memory lane that was set in about 1500KMs from the said bus’ location. The bus had no vacant seats available, so, I found myself leaning my back against a pole and my hand holding one of those hanging, well for the lack of better word, hand-holders, to avoid falling on my fellow humsafars. And then I spotted something, whose existence I had almost forgotten, which, once upon a time, I picked up from anywhere I could get them, (my father’s shirt pocket for example)— good old set of colorful bus tickets!
The long forgotten and long unseen coloruful tickets filled me with memories of a time marked with unencumbered existence with little innocence and much ignorance. You see, the colored tickets were the only articles that I ever collected as a hobby. Because they helped me roleplay my then dream job — a bus condutor! Growing up in a village that saw vehicular movement as frequently as Hrithik Roshan’s movies, spotting a big red bus was an exciting phenomenon. Being in one was an exhilerating adventure. And, the man who could bring it to a screeching halt with a blow of a whistle, naturally appeared as someone very important and all powerful.
Pushing myself against the pole, stretching my free hand to hold a nearby seat’s grabrail, I kept analysing my wannabe-bus-conductor eight-ten years old self and I could think of few a reasons why being a bus conductor would appear so alluring to a young, impressionable mind. You see, back in the good old days, they had a certain swag about them. Their appearance exuded importance — shirts with collars standing upright and unbottoned at the top, money filled bags hanging by the shoulder, a pen sitting snuggly over an ear, a box — containing bundles of little colored papers with numbers written in two columns — in one hand and a hole puncher in another; the numbers on the ticket symbolised the source on the left and destinations on the right column and a hole was to be punched on them to indicate the source and destination of a passenger, I learnt later. And to top it all, they had the license to do something that was generally scoffed at when one does it in public — blow a whistle! The power and the appeal of a whistle to a eight year old cannot be overstated. I mean, hand him a plastic one and he’ll do nothing but blow it for hours. Teach him how to whistle through one’s mouth and he’ll be as happy as a software engineer finding a match on Tinder! I have personally experienced the power of a whistle when I blew it in moving a bus, while ruturning from the town nearby. The bus came to a sudden halt to find the crowd bemused and my parents embarrassed!
I was shaken out of this nostalgic trip by bustling people, who’d gotten up from their seats and were preparing to rush towards to the exit door as the bus was pulling into our destination’s bus station. I got ready to disembark, pulling my lungi up to tie, with a beaming, cheerful smile on my face - perhaps not too different from that of an eight year old!