Buses and Bus Journeys

I could not conceal my delight and relief when, after six months of Bangalore, I heard the engines of Chennai’s MTC bus splutter and rev up in the Besant Nagar bus terminus.

Madras has one of the most thoroughly organised and efficient governmental public transport systems; after my experiences with public transport conveyances in a few other states like Bangalore, Delhi and Rajasthan, I will allow myself to say that. When I struggled with the public transport in Bangalore (the lack of it in quite a few areas), I realised what we had almost taken for granted in Madras. I realised that I had never nursed a serious misgiving towards the MTC service; of course, the occasional quibbles had always been there. In fact I had always liked the service.

Even as a seven year old boy, I had felt a vague attachment to the PTC buses. Why, the engine of the PTC bus, sounded pleasingly different from the other state buses; it had a rich and regal ring to it. (It was called PTC -- Pallavan Transport Corporation -- those days, named after one of the great dynasties of the legendary tripartite Tamil Nadu of the yore. The name has been changed to MTC -- Metropolitan Transport Corporation -- to remain in consonance with the sophistication in the way of life today; after all, everything in Chennai is professedly metropolitan these days.) Of all the buses that passed the RBI quarters, Besant Nagar, 47A and 21D were my personal favourites. The alphanumeric appellation of 47A sounded a combination worthy of a hero, and 21D, gargantuan. Had there been buses during Mahabharatha, I was pretty sure that 47A would have played Arjuna’s vehicle and 21D, Bheema’s flag-bearing conveyance. Always, my newest and favourite toy bus was always christened 47A. These buses, the very thought of them, transported me to another phantasmagoric world where I remained, fought great wars in buses, took villains to task and did great deeds. Until I was reprimanded and berated by my mother for not doing my homework.

The only other bus that ranks alongside in my sheet is the PTC is the school bus of my kindergarten days. When the final school bell rung, we tiny tots made a dash for the bus, satchels wildly swinging behind like slung pendulums. The bone of contention was the front seat, sitting upon which you would face the driver. A crowd gathered outside the door of the bus and clamoured for the door to open; we were too tiny to reach for the door handle. The conductor then appeared from inside the bus and thundered us into hushed silence. Much the same as rowdy mobs at political meetings; only, there the addressers clamour for seats! When the door opened, dots of tiny bipeds irrupted and made headlong dives for the front seat. Why would we want to scuffle so desperately for the front seats, even as the children that we were; the reader might be prompted to ask. The main allure was this: When, everyday, the bus came to the bridge across the Adayar River, the driver let the steering wheel go, stretched both his hands up skywards, peered through the windscreen with half-closed eyes and sung a throaty refrain. The incredible event was that the bus would cross the bridge exactly when the last line of the refrain was sung. And when the last line was sung, the hands were back on the wheel, eyes fully opened, and countenance sobered, we little spectators to the grand spectacle chuckled in furtive delight. The coincidence never failed on a single day to happen.

With the passage of time, the network of city buses has grown up along with me, as have the bus fares. During my two-month long summer internship program at Lucas TVS, my daily fortunes literally hinged on a couple of buses which sliced right through Madras from Besant Nagar to Padi. If I missed the 5:50 bus from the Besant Nagar terminus, I was sure to reach the place later than 7:15 AM, which was incidentally the stipulated time of arrival, and played the guilty recipient of cold stares and curses of a hundred other groggy-eyed employers, not to speak of the gurkha who wore his topee in the reverse. I day dream and am easy going during the day, but am more obdurate than the Dromedary camel when talks about dawn begin to drift in; I refuse to dream of losing a minute of my sleep at night. With some dogged perseverance, characteristic only of credit-card-offering callers from Citibank, I circumvented the problem. I caught this curious habit of resuming my sleep in the bus, no matter however cramped I was for space. Thus did I vehemently adhere to my early-morning principles of not giving one wink of my sleep to the day. Once, I was executing one of my routine morning siestas (forgive the oxymoron) when I was rudely woken up by a tipsy oldster who almost landed on my left foot when the bus braked and in the process almost spat on my boot all of the red paan he was chewing, early in the morning. After all the bleary-eyed care and intricacy I had employed at half past five in the morning to polish my shoes, I felt like expectorating some red blood on him. But, half shaken out of my sleep, all I managed was a weak muster in the vernacular, “Why, Sir, my foot, when you have all of the Indian roads to yourself?”

My experiences with the moffussil buses have been a little different though. But my experiences with paan haven’t. My friend and I were travelling from Pilani to Sadulpur in one of those crowded rickety state transport buses. We had managed to succeed in our dash for the seat next to the door -- the only seat that had been unoccupied -- and we were pretty ecstatic about it. At one of the stoppings, a lady and a wizened shrivelled old man got in. The lady stood in the crowded bus. The old man neared us and gesticulated to my friend, who was sitting nearer to the aisle, as if to move in a little. And my friend moved a little to find the old man encroaching on his right lap. His stunned reaction, at that point, tickled my ribs no end and I chuckled in kiddish delight. The journey did my spine little good. We were almost within three-quarter of a kilometer within Sadulpur. I recount that because even as I looked out of the window to check the milestone, I thought it must have been raining. When I saw blotches of red on my shirt, I concluded it wasn’t. Apparently, the old man had suffered from an uncontrollable urge to spit out his paan. And I had come into the trajectory! My friend chuckled, in sinisterly delight.

But I must tell you this: if I, in my first standard, had aspired to become anything in life, it was a bus conductor. There was something captivating in the manner that he disposed of tickets; my eyes were often attracted to the differently coloured bundles of tickets between his dextrous fingers and the unerring efficiency and ruthless speed with which he picked the correct tickets without as much a glance at the bundles. Why, Rajnikant, the Black Taj Mahal of Indian cinema, was a bus conductor. If one were a bus-conductor, one could, with aplomb, save one’s mother and younger sister from the machinations of any villain on the face of the earth.

In Bangalore, I saw quite a few lady conductors and felt very proud. I am waiting for the day when Chennai will also broaden its horizon to the good turn. Also, I remember writing -- ranting rather -- after being thrown out of a Bangalore bus after offering Rs. 100 in return for a three-rupee ticket! When I re-enacted it to the Chennai conductor, he reacted differently. I got, in return for a hundred, a ticket for four rupees, six one-rupee coins, ten two-rupee coins, five-rupee coins and notes – two apiece, and five ten rupee notes! I found the change -- I mean, in my fortunes -- too much to take.

Bangalore is a place, my friend quipped, where buses are driven like autos. For that matter, that is true of any vehicle, I added. It is quite common to see dangerously swerving and careening buses. I used to feel terrorised trying to cross the roads of the plateau with the ups and downs making it very difficult for one to judge the momentum of the vehicles.

Hence when I was back in Chennai, I could not conceal my delight and relief when I heard the engines of MTC buses whir and rev up. I was filled with memories.

- posted by Dileepan @ 10:34:00 am

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