Adjustments
Bus journeys where you have ample time to notice people, provided you’re not sleeping, makes you spot interesting things. How people keep fiddling with things right from the beginning till the end. First up is the luggage. If it can’t be stowed in the hold or the overhead rack, it goes under the seat, where it keeps shifting with the bus’ swaying. Then there are minor things like curtains. ‘Oh the sun’s upon my face; push, pull…’ Then the person sitting behind (or in front) gets affected and there’s a long chain of events. The passenger then gets down to the exercise of tilting the recliner back and forth till his back has found that sweet spot, the process which gives more grief to the person sitting behind. There’s the airconditioning vent to content. The jet shouldn’t be directed on to the face or the legs or whereever. Then the person next to our passenger starts snoring away to glory. On this three hour journey there’s no way he can fall asleep now. Our hero picks up a magazine to read, where loud advertisements scream at him from the pages. The articles bore him, and when finally he feels sleepy the destination is here
Yet another bus journey
This is probably the most entertaining bus trip I’ve had to Pune. There’s the bus. Ambling at an amiable pace of sixty kilometres an hour. Some witty pieces by Douglas Adams to read, and there’s no Salmon of a Doubt that this is a great book. Then there are the kids ‘playing’ antakshari, whose English equivalent I believe, doesn’t quite exist. In any case, these children are energetically singing off key, while the bus jerkily tries overtaking, neither having any rhythm. There are the tankers, carrying some random hazardous chemical, which have stalled along the road, making progress a drag. I wonder how it must have been for people years ago travelling along the narrower old highway, that took ages. I never experienced that, having always taken the train. Right now, it does help to have functional airconditioning. That and the book is all that’s keeping my sanity intact. Somewhere along the way, the driver decided that he had enough of the travelling tune(less)smiths and offloaded them in the middle of the highway. I wish this was the desert.
Flying
the airport lights… multicoloured, twinkling like lots of little stars far away, or like psychedelic fireflies.
And before landing, some city lights: its like a light farm. Rows and columns of little lighty points, neatly ordered.
