Busses II

After filling up the entire bus to impossible numbers, the driver and his ‘mirror man’ decided to shove even more people inside, regardless of whether or not they fit in. Yelling the destination(s) in the faces of all the people on the side of the road, they managed to get many more people on the bus, either standing or being held up by all the others, acting like a huge untamed ocean wave; children flew around from one set of hands to the next, feet were trampled just to make room for oversized rubicund females and meager, pointy male limbs, and bags were plopped around in the unwelcomed laps of the fortunate sitting travelers.

This rolling circus got under way with no concern for the general verticality of its wobbling composing parts – that is, the driver wanted to demonstrate his Schumacher-ish abilities, all the while experimenting with G-forces through unexpected brakes and consequent accelerations that repositioned some stomachs in their respective throats. Naturally, this mechanism only shortened the way to the all to obvious inelegant release of nourishment (i.e. vomiting) of some less prepared participants: a teenage girl and a young boy both lost the battle with emancipated stomach contents, which, with the help of countless curves and hairpin bends, found their way on the steps of the bus (notwithstanding the traces left at several windows).

Crowded as it may have been, people still could fall around, so the obvious solution was to get some more people in, so that none could move a muscle more than the trajectory induced by the road. At least the smoking stopped when the breastfeeding mother got on! This is to say partially stopped, as this bus in particular seems to have been quite different. Also, the fact that the journey took place at night did not in any way mean that you could for one second close your eyes.

There are 360 km only (Indian phrasing) from Jammu to Srinagar, yet the first 50, to the place where the extra people (read: three thirds of the standing people) got off, took little under 3 hours, so no wonder that the estimated time for the entire journey would be somewhere at 13 hours!

It was going to be a lovely next 10 hours because the driver was in obvious need for some good music, so he switched off the lights and turned the volume higher to some Hindi wailing, happy, sad, troubling, all at the same time.

Alas, all stopped abruptly in just a few minutes and everybody got off: flat tire. Flat. Out of the blue, because driving like a maniac on both sides of the road, regardless of pot holes and trenches or, for that matter, the mere existence of asphalt tends to cause such misfortunes to one who is gentle and kind to machines and his peers (about 50 men and 3 women – the permanent travelers on the bus).

It took more attempts to fix the flat tire, mainly because using old, sun scorched rubber to mend the holes in your current tire is like trying to save a drowning man by giving him some water. Still, while all this was painstakingly going on and because the ‘repair shoppe’ was conveniently placed next to some food serving cottages, some tea was served (the kind that gives you indigestion – true story!), some words were exchanged (the kind that imply some getting to know each other), and some good reading material was offered (the kind with light, optimistic subjects: The Divine Eye – a tiny insight on Hinduism’s beliefs, ending on a happier note, presenting Wisdom Bytes, such as ‘Belief in fate and God’s grace do not coexist’, ‘If life is a working day, then death is a holiday’ and an all-time classic ‘If the snake of suspicion raises its head, it kills the relationship’).

Things did not get a whole lot better after the tire was fixed and the bus was on its way because:

• -       there was the same (the same!) music;
• -    there was little to almost inexistent space caused mainly by the end board in front of seats number 4 and 5 (the worst seats on the entire bus) and by the backpack under the seat, which resulted in inevitable bruises on both knees constantly hitting the board;
• -     there was the fat companion who kept searching for a good position to rest, thus further limiting the possibilities for normal breathing
• -     and, last but not least, there were frequent stops in order to relieve Indian gall bladders or let the goat herds pass on the freakishly narrow motorway, as they had no other possibility of going neither left – high rocky walls, nor right – sheer drops hundreds of meters into the valley.

The odyssey ended in the late hours of morning (about two hours later than expected) in the beautiful bus stop 7 km far from Srinagar, a place where pilgrims bow and kiss the earth under their feet once they get there because they got there.