TO SCHOOL AND BACK AGAINA SHORT, SWEET AND SLIGHTLY EXAGGERATED STORY-BALAJI.S

As I write this story, I must ask all of you readers out there to laugh out loud whenever you get the opportunity, for that is one of the most integral parts of our great Bangalore.

Last week was every student’s most dreaded nightmare: the Hindi exam, or at least that is what they call it when two hundred students are massacred in about two hours with nothing but a piece of paper. I use the BMTC bus system to commute to school, and today was no exception. As I stepped into a rickety old bus, the female conductor shot at me a look of pure loathe, the likes of which are used by jailors in movies while throwing food at the prisoners. “Ticket?”, she shrieked, nearly jabbing my eye with those murder weapons called ball-point pens. ”Pass”, I said, struggling valiantly to dodge her mightier-than-the-sword pen. She wanted to see my bus-pass, so she motioned with the aforementioned pen. Upon finding nothing reason enough to throw me out of the bus, she threw it back at me, again using my eyes for target practice…she evidently was supposed to be at the war-games in Pokharan, thought I. By the time I got out into the pleasant Bangalore drizzle, I had already suffered several scratches, the fruits of several ‘accidents’ with the conductor’s bag.

I had to get another bus to school, so I waited. To kill time, I kicked stones at a puddle. Soon, the puddle was full of stones. Time check:8.12 a.m. 18 minutes to the school bell.
More time flew. 8.19 a.m. 11 minutes to bell.8.22. “Providence favours the brave”. 8.24. ”The supernatural being will help”. 8.25. “Curse the BMTC!”. 8.25, 43 sec. The Messiah in the form of a shining blue-white wheeled chariot! “All is not yet lost, my dear Bala!”. The divine messenger almost hit me, but who was I to care? I stepped in to its roomy, dry comfort. The conductor was a man, and more importantly, he didn’t bother to even look at me.
We were moving at hypersonic speed, with agility that an SU-30MKI wouldn’t be able to match. We wove around traffic like a dogfighting aircraft. At breakneck speed, we were almost at my school gates. 8.29 a.m. and 19 sec. out of the bus, running into the school as if for my life. The eagle had landed. Hats off and collars up to this divine intervention.

The exam, as usual, was like what the Chinese troops did to the thousands of protesters at Tiananmen Square. At long last, we battle-hardened soldiers evacuated ourselves and the casualties from enemy territory.

Back to the bus stop. A bus. Going back home. At the intersection between Chord Rd and Magadi Rd. A violent jolt woke me from my musings on the past couple of hours. It was the bus moving through the rain-created slush near the Underpass That Wasn’t. This was no underpass, no magic box, it was always going to be a to-be-completed-in so-and-so date project. Traffic jam. No signal. Chaos. Ashen-faced cop trying his very best to control it all. No B-Tracs system for this guy-just old fashioned hand signals. Moving on. At the connecting stop. Waiting relentlessly. Still waiting. A figure clad in a raincoat approaches me like the villain in TV soaps. Turns out it is just my uncle, happening to be in this part of town. Good man, kindly offers me a ride home.

At this moment, bus number innumerable pulls into the stop. It’s a direct bus.

Debate rages in my head. Uncle or bus. Bus or uncle. A car with just me and him or a bus with forty other guys?

In the end, independence wins over. I say, ”No thanks, but you must visit sometime soon”. Why did I make that choice? I’ll leave that for you to guess, because I myself am not that sure. Another brutally tough question: who is the protagonist in my yarn? Well, I’d say it isn’t a ‘who’ but a ‘what’- the BMTC, Bangalore and, more importantly, its culture…
Bala