Journey down the memory-lane–on buses.

*Long, rambling post warning*

Even as a child I used to treasure the most inanimate and bizzarely mundane objects. Like buses. I mean when I look back its both intriguing and oddly embarassing that I could be obsessed by an ugly rectangle of iron on wheels.

But I just was. Paying homage to another one of my weird hobbies in this random post, I’d like to thank Jedi for his well felt article on a bus ride.

The School Bus:

As a kid, the word bus was synonymous with taking a bath, getting ready quickly, and running off lugging a 20 kg bag. Yes, I used to love my school bus. And given that I was about 10-12 kms far out from the BHEL industrial town where my school DPS was, my bus stop usually was the second one (Notice the use of the word “my” hehe). Freshly scrubbed and neatly combed with water bottle hanging down my neck, I used to religiously sit with my bag neatly sat on my thighs and from the open window, enjoy the trees and houses whiz past.

After 8 hours of playing in the sun, poem recitals, drawing and sums in a typical school day, I still remember the way our class teacher used to form 3 queues for 3 different school buses which used to leave all non BHEL kids to various neighbourhoods in Hardwar. Now the Green Bus, (which was my bus) was, to me, the most insignificant of them all. It had only three stops, all in close vicinity, but the part that made it most boring was that it was the only bus owned by the school. So the seats were standard metal bar-atop-hard cushion stuff. And when it was hot, we really had a hard time for the whole half hour it took for the bus to reach home.

Compared to our Green Bus, the kids travelling by Yellow and the Brown buses really seemed to have it all–the buses each took an hour long trip around Hardwar taking them everywhere from Har-Ki-Pauri (famous bathing ghat on Ganges) to Jwalapur (a hustling bustling market) through atleast 5 over-Ganges bridges and 3 over-railway bridges. On top of the sightseeing, since the school had given the contracts of both the bus routes to private coach companies, the kids had luxury coaches with television sets and individual bucket seats which were foamed so generously, the kids practically sat in them and not on them.

But to my utter dismay, concepts as complex as “softer seats and movies on TV” were lost on my fellow mates back then. Like sheep getting herded, they used to lug themselves obediently to their own buses with their colour coded bus passes safety-pinned to their shirts, day in and day out. And I remember reluctantly following them to my Green Bus as all my attempts to use my Camel crayons to turn green into yellow or brown were in vain.

My only hope of getting on those luxury buses was if I wanted to go to my daadi’s (grandma’s-god bless her soul) place, who used to live in proper, old, ashram-infested part of Hardwar. At this point it must be said that my mom-dad had separated from my daadi and decidedly wicked buas and the only way I’d ever get to go to daadi’s place is if mom stomped her way out on an argument (always thanks to my buas and co. let me add) with dad to a friend’s place. So even though my heart bled when my parents fought over some family problem, secretly a part of me was glad that a trip on the Yellow Bus was very close. So yea, I was that mad for travelling on buses even back then.

I also quite clearly remember how I was rebuked quite hard by my mom as I was smugly reciting to her an incident where I had raced with one of my sworn bus-enemies to loot a seat. She actually was quite surprised that I used the word “loot” and behaved bandit-like when it came to getting seats on the bus. And then went a long lecture on the lines of “you don’t own the seat” and so on, none of which had any effect on me back then. All that mattered was “my seat” in “my school bus” and I made sure I had it every morning and every afternoon. What really was so special about this seat was that firstly, it really was housed atop the rear-wheel arch, which meant that standing atop the arch I could get a high view with the elbow neatly rested on the window’s perimeter. Also, it was the only seat perfectly aligned with the window’s start and end which made the seating position just a tad more special.

The bus-drivers we had for school buses were also more like rally drivers in the making and in the not-so-common co-incidence of two buses exiting the school at the same time, the race that ensued after that was the stuff lovers of truck racing would give an eye and a tooth for. There were bets, there was cheering and there was booing and every roundabout, every common bus stop became the place where destinies were changed. The winning bus would suddenly lose it at the last bus stop if a 6 year old girl forgot her water bottle on her seat and had to go back to get it.

And then, during the rains, when the sides of roads were filled with shallow puddles, there was something bizarrely hypnotic about the bus splashing through every one of these. This, and the tyres sending a trail of dust on the more drier days–I just wouldn’t tire out of finding such mundane stuff fascinating.

The Toys and the Games:

The Hot Wheels buses I used to play with (ditto these)

From Hot Wheels to clunky wood to plastic Leo, I was always adamant on getting only the bus and truck models. And not the keyed or remote-controlled ones which used to bug me with the mind of their own, flashy artificial lights and monotonous sounds. I remember keeping it always real and simple with my playthings. They were all manually draggable models and I used to stage full blown traffic scenarios of dangerous over-takes and traffic jams by humming the throttle sounds and mouthing peep peep, pom-pom for horns.

From verandahs, to porches, to beds, to parapets on roofs, to balustrades in balconies, almost every place in the house was a life-like simulation for the real roads. Especially the balconies, where a single hard hit or brush with my own sleeve ended some swanky new cars in the open drain two floors below. Almost like a bus falling in an avalanche.

The public transport:

Since the first few years we were living on rent, we had to move our house every couple of years within the town. Now in a place like Hardwar, there were only two “real” roads, one–the main road which used to run along the town’s midway and the other, a no-speed-barred national highway running on the other side of the river. Both were connected supremely well with bridges and streets and kutcha roads and galis. But being the only two roads, bus-sighting could only be done if you lived anywhere near these two roads. And sure enough, I was in for a treat when we moved just off the main road when I was about 8-9 years. Here, I developed a new hobby of observing the public transport buses in my free time and reading where they went. And I used to love the logic behind it all. Each bus with a specific destination had its own time. And its own unique personality. Like the buses going to Rajasthan were always Ashok Leyland models with sharp grunting exhaust than the ubiquituous TATA models which had a balmier, low pitched gruff to them. And then there were the Punjab and Haryana buses which besides being coloured all funny (grey on the whole with multi-coloured stripes on window bars) used to be driven with such godspeed that I would never used to make out the destination. Mostly they were written in Gurmukhi anyway. There were also the regular Delhi buses always painted in white and always stating out their status in red paint “semi-deluxe coach” or “super-deluxe coach”.

Other than the state-by-state classification, one could easily deduce the en-route conditions (atleast I thought I could) just by looking at the state of the buses. The ones travelling to towns like Muzaffarnagar, Chutmulpur, Etawah, Nazibabad, Saharanpur had their sides stained with streams and streams of dried vomit and paan stains. And their wheel arches clogged with tons and tons of mud. Even the windows tended to be cloudiest in such buses (proof of people lying about with their thickly oiled heads on the panes). Every bus had a story to tell, and I used to enjoy every minute of fly-past inspection of mine.

Although I myself had travelled to Delhi innumerable times by DTC’s semi-deluxe and deluxe coaches, the memory of one incident circa 1995 still sends shivers down my spine. It was mid-August and my family had taken a night-bus from New Delhi at about 8 PM. Now, by schedule we should have been home by 1 or 2 AM, but given the rainy season, we had to traverse through many semi-flooded (2-3 feet deep in water) towns and villages, so we added 2 hours more to the equation. But halfway through the journey, we entered a jam that extended to as far as we could see. Given that our national highways are never ever lit, cars and buses standing one behind the other revealed precious little about the cause of the jam.

Half an hour and some voluntary enquiries later, it was revealed that a newly built bridge had been burst by a big monsoon river (apparently a sight of every monsoon thanks to the ever-corrupt thekedaars) and that we’d have to wait till morning before the flow subsided. Cut to 10:30 AM the next morning and our bus was crawling along with the traffic ahead as we finally entered the point where the road abruptly led to a river bed. The bridge was nowhere in sight and it was quite a horrific sight on the right side as some of the brave ones who had tried to rush it during the night time had their Marutis and Ambassadors smashed and upturned brutally on the river bank. Amidst this sight, our driver began the slow march into the river bed. Within a matter of hours, the river had visibly reduced from a muddy monster to a deceptively innocuous, clear-watered, shallow (albeit still broad) river. Upon entering a relatively muddier patch, our driver did the unthinkable. He pressed on the gas pedal to gallop past the crawling traffic and the one thing we all were dreading, occurred. Yes, you guessed it–in the middle of that river-we got stuck. Given the luggage (both human and otherwise) that everyone carried, I remember everyone deciding against getting off the bus and the conductor finally getting two tractors from a nearby field to tow us out of the quicksandy bed to the road. What a trip that was and to sit in the bus while its been towed from the front (risen from front) was quite something.

Many moons later, around 2001, when I was doing my 11th Std. at school, we had moved to Rishikesh (30 kms from Hardwar) in 1999 but I had never changed my school. This meant that I had to catch a public transport bus at 5 in the morning to get 13 kms closer to Hardwar at a huge army cantonment in Raiwala from where an Army Bus carrying all the kids from the Army families went all the way to school. Now, Rishikesh being a smaller and less developed town had a single bus stop to its credit. And the only bus to start that early in the morning was a Punjab transport one. Now, to get to the bus stop alone, I had to catch a motorised three-wheeler (also called Vikram) and after 15 minutes of loud hollering of “Tum to Thehre Pardesi” by godawful Altaf Raja first thing in the morning, I was subjected to a drive of my life. The Sardar drivers with their newly-oiled-and-pinned beards pushed the accelerator so hard, that it hardly ever took them more than 9 minutes to manuvere through 13 kms of potholes, scooters, rickshaws, Vikrams, oncoming lorries and stray cows. I vaguely remember the thrill ride, sitting on the edge of my seat watching through the front windscreen in case we hit something.

A view of downtown Rishikesh with Vikrams and its lone main-road which doubles up as the gateway to Himalayas.

In the Jan of 2001, there actually was a bomb-blast on the Republic Day night at the bus depot the remains of which, some two days later, I remember seeing. To see a bus so completely blown-up (I remember its roof curved all the way to the sky with the blast’s impact) with cloth, suitcase tatters and glass pieces all spread around it–there really is nothing more sombre a sight than to see such a scene.

London:

Cut to 2002, and its been more than four years that I have relied on the buses for commuting.

The No.25–the bus to my uni.

The double deckers, the bendy ones, the short ones, the old ones with TCs–you name it. Given my lax time-management skills, I have pleaded drivers to open doors at traffic lights, have had my breakfast, lunch and dinner more than once atop one of these, have done a full change of clothes atleast 2-3 times getting ready for rowing straight after a lecture at uni with more than 20 people on-board. Yea, its been fun and games alright, but the four things that make the london buses what they are, for me would be:

1. The Fares: From a tolerable 70p a commute (can be anywhere between 1 stop ahead to the last bus stop) four years ago, to a steep £1.50, the bus tickets are a rip-off. The one-day and weekly bus passes are still a bargain. But the way the fares are managed on the new bendy buses—the drivers don’t check whether your bus pass is valid and you get through any of the doors–means its easier than ever to hop on and off free of cost than ever before. Which pisses the regular fare payers like me no end.

2. The Bus-Stops: Given that you live in London, you are never more than a few yards away from one. It infiltrates every imaginable street and minor road, the connections are impossible to find fault with and in just every way, bus routes are tailor-made for the local people to get to anywhere and everywhere they’d like.

3. The Buses: One really does feel well looked after amidst 4 CCTVs (2 if its a single decker), reasonably comfy chairs for seating and always enough space to stand or hang from one hand. The automated platform-lowering and a wheelchair-wide space inside for prams and wheelchairs are design benchmarks for accessibility. Even after all these years, I still quite like touching my Oyster card on the ticket-checking machine which sits with the driver or pushing the Stop button on any pole to stop at the next stop. That, and the heaters running longitudinally all through the bus are a blessing in the winters. The plasma screens now been fitted in buses city-wide for advertising and what’s on is quite classy indeed.

4. The Cliches: They are most impunctual when you need them the most. You-wait-for-one-for-an-hour-and-then-three-come-along kind of thing which really does one’s head in. This, and the fact that there are no windows (just flip-open ventilators) mean inside temperatures can go upto 51 deg C (like it did today).

So, there you have it– my memories with buses as small as the Hot Wheels drag bus to the London double decker. Now let me get some sleep to be ready for an early morning commute tomorrow to my workplace by bus in what’s reported to be London’s hottest day in years.