dev2r

Later in the night, the potholed road took its toll on the bus with a flat tire. He gingerly stepped out of his berth, careful not to wake the woman. Which didn’t work as fumbling in the dark for shoes has never proven to be an easy task, ever. She looked at him with sleepy eyes and asked something in her language. He gestured her to stay put, managed to convey to her everything was ok, and went out to stretch his legs. Their semi-forced cohabitation of the berth for a few hours seemed to have given rise to years of simulated nocturnal comfort and safety in her.

When he re-entered, he found the woman asleep, comfortably and fully stretched on his berth, his backpack and book neatly stowed to the side. True, he had enjoyed her very present presence, but he was determined not to switch places with her. He gently prodded her in the leg, and she woke up startled. Grinning sheepishly, she moved back to her seat and fussily gathered the shawl around her.

When he awoke next morning at the noisy terminus, he found the woman pressed against him as before. Nothing had really changed between him and her, the two strangers. Separated by a thin shawl and cold metal, separated further still by who they were, they had been together for a night, tentatively seeking, and finding from each other something that was either teleologically superior or inferior to the simple act of two physical bodies voluntarily inhabiting a confined space together for an extended period of time; superiority/inferiority being purely subjective.

***

As she left the bus in a hurry, she forgot her shawl. he called out to her and handed it through the window. She smiled her brilliant, toothy smile. He smiled back. He didn’t know her name or anything about her; he didn’t want to.

*

Part 3 | Part 2 | Part 1

There exists an awkward time of the evening in places of communal transit and accommodation (cheap hostels, for example. Also – dorms, trains without private coupes, red-eye flights, weddings of spouse’s friends) when people with inadequate acquaintance between each other make tentative gestures and use phrases that indicate an overwhelming need to retire – e.g.: a yawn slightly louder than necessary, a cursory rifling through a bag at their feet for some mystery-item that never materializes, opening the window and peeking through the rushing air into complete darkness.

As this time approached on the bus, the men seated on his berth had vanished, reaching their destinations at one of the innumerable small towns the bus stopped at. The woman still firmly held her foothold, her two sturdy legs reaching and resting from the other side of a metal pole, almost touching his own feet. Almost.

When it was time to sleep, the woman brought out a threadbare, leaf-patterned, pink shawl, and draped it on her feet. She made sure the edges were tucked under, and that no part of the shawl touched his. She sank down some more on her seat, and closed her eyes. She still didn’t take too much of his space, he reasoned with himself as he drifted off.

Death is the great leveller, but Sleep is one too, in its own literal sense. In a couple more hours, she sagged further down in her seat until they were almost side by side up to their waists; him stretched out as much as he could on the berth, her angled inward and abruptly cut off at the waist by the cold, hard metal. Space had finally run out, and his own legs were resting against hers, through the thin shawl that she had carefully positioned. No harm, no foul.

Close to midnight, the bus stopped at another nameless, sizeless town. He was awakened by the commotion and he saw an old man enter and walk towards them looking for vacant seats at the back of the bus. The old man saw them, torsos in separate seats, but their legs entwined, as if the warning signals of propriety their brains had sent hadn’t traveled all the way down their bodies. The old man didn’t understand the tableaux, but neither did he.

***

next… The Morning After | Part 2 | Part 1

The bus started, and on the way out of the frontier town, it took on the additional services of being a local shuttle – it picked up people at small towns along the way and dropped them off at other seemingly smaller towns. The local townsfolk who entered and departed the bus were decidedly unabashed about finding a place to sit on the crowded bus. Thirty minutes into the journey, he found himself sharing his 5-foot berth with two men who had found enough space to sit next to where he had stretched his legs. He resigned himself to telling these men to get off his berth after 10 pm, even though he knew their only options were either the uncomfortable middle seats between the last berths or the dusty floor.

Among those who entered the bus and found the middle seats suitable enough were two women – the kind of woman who lent this parched western land much needed color – women brightly arrayed in red, pink and purple sarees, with white plastic bracelets that came up to their shoulders, and a veil demurely held over their faces with their teeth. He had spent enough time there to recognize the archetypical Westland Woman if he ever met one anywhere else – their almost full-moon-shaped faces, their large and direct eyes and their ever-present smile that never broke into a titter or a giggle. Seated next to him on the straight-backed middle seat was the younger of the two women, squeezed on the other side by her companion of considerable heft, seemingly destined for an uncomfortable night of travel.

8PM : time for dinner. Consuming any food on the tail-end of a bus is even harder than riding at the aforementioned coach-coccyx. Morsels of food brought up to the mouth computed their own trajectories to get there; a slight miscalculation would end with a smear of almost-always-yellow gravy dribbling down your chin.

She brought out her tidily wrapped dinner, but had no place to rest it. She turned toward him and tentatively placed the plastic dish on his berth, to see how he would react. With two men already on his berth, he didn’t think another minor encroachment of his domain mattered. He let her eat without complaint.

After eating her food, seemingly emboldened by his passivity and the general desire to stretch out after a good meal, the woman decided to rest her legs on his berth. Now the lower portion of what used to be his berth had a grand total of two pairs of legs and two human behinds perched comfortably. Come 10PM, and they were history, he declared to himself…

***

next… Strangers in the Night | Part 1

By Brad Stone, (of the non-porn variety), a piece in the NYTimes about LMB.

Anyone in Jersey City/Harrison? I’m looking for some information, please email me or post a comment if you can help.

Via Sepia Mutiny and Metafilter: Tamil in a Stand-up Comic act. Not *very* funny, but it involves a highly obscure south-east asian language…

I completed my first GoogleMaps hack. I feel so proud.
*sniffle*

Another birthday passed by. The ones who remembered, remembered out of habit. This year, I wanted it this way.

I got news from my friend who moved to Canada. The youth there were just as drunk and rowdy as those in any US college town. I wonder how the weekend booze-bingeing, foul-mouthed youth of America will turn out. I sometimes feel I should’ve done things like that when I was in college. And that’s when I begin to feel old.

Anti did a round-up of racism against desis, and teenagers figured prominently in the demographic (at least Canadian teenagers seem to be non-prejudiced for now…). Living in a Christian state has its advantages — people are much more tolerant, if you can get past their church talk. I’ve had strange glances once in a while, but an explicit instance of prejudice hasn’t happened to me yet.

But take a quick mental survey — how many desis you know have voiced opinions generalizing all african-americans as people with lesser morals? In the racist ladder, we happen to be in the middle rung, and crying foul will not change anything.

When I joined my job a year ago, a big,black man walked into my cube, introduced himself and started talking. He was the janitor, and he said the mandatory office ‘Hi, how are you?’ with genuine warmth. Since I stayed in the office after everybody had left, I met him several times when he was doing his evening rounds.

When I was ‘promoted’ from 1/4th of a cube to my own room, he popped in and said, “I’m really happy to see you moving forward fast, man”. His idea of spending a relaxing weekend was playing with his grandchildren.

Two weeks ago, we crossed each other once again, when I was leaving the office late. He said he needed to be more careful, and he needed all the prayer he could get. (That I don’t ‘pray’ was something I didn’t tell him.) He had a weak heart and the doctor had advised him to stay off junk food and pop. He declared he was going to make changes and stop drinking a lot of Coke. In short, he was looking forward to making amends and living some more.

He didn’t. He died two days ago, but not of a weak heart.

Konard was a real human. Konard was a good man.

Thanks to AOL (now that’s not something you hear everyday), I could listen to Pink Floyd’s reunion at Live8. Gilmour’s still got his chops, Waters seemed to be singing off key. ‘Comfortably Numb’ still sends shivers down my spine.

Bjork isn’t too bad either.