Hi...this is my space....this is where I'm shifting now... Its been years since I'd started feeling I need a different space to breathe....never ever imagined it would on "cyber-space". Well, I must say the best part about the internet is, (don't boo me) it hasn't got pollution issues...with me around there could have been a serious smog scare... nonetheless, there are no "please-budge-and-make-some-space-for-me!!!" screams... this one's particularly important because for the last five years this "first-you-budge-then-will-I" space constraint has been a part of me everyday.... sounds so much like relationship stuff....hell no! Its the Calcutta public transports... my high school was pretty far away from home...and so, this 'budge-budge' fights was quite a daily affair. However, since I still (okay, now I'm being naive) consider myself a novice in blogging, this post will be about my Calcutta Public Transport experience...I wrote this bit when I joined high school.
Maybe I do not wear my feelings on my visage, but the problem lies when I start to feel the pain that hurts my inside as well as my outside. Let’s take an example for its explanation. One day I happened to have boarded the bus that takes me, and a few hundred more people, to their destinations every morning. I mention a hundred, as you will always find people getting up on buses that are already jam-packed. And it often has happened that I would get up by the front door and by the time it’s my turn to get down, I am belched out of the rear door. Anyways, aboard one such bus I was trying as hard as I could to accommodate, and things were going a bit like being stuck between two lovers who would not keep from anything to meet each other’s arms. But fine, although there were no lovers, instead most of us were having to be in each other’s arms despite hating it (or perhaps otherwise). Even I was okay until a woman the size of a “Mexican beer barrel” decided to give all of us inside a good time. Accompanied with her purse that would very well fit in a healthy human baby, an enormous umbrella, a king-size aluminium Tiffin-carrier and finally to our relief the last item of her combat gear, a duffel bag containing what only she knows, because I could bet it weighed at least eight to ten kilos. Anyways, she got up on the bus one fine day, and I still wonder how she managed to get in! And on started her tantrums…someone was blocking her view…….or someone was standing on her feet…….or else someone was pulling her jewellery case, I mean her purse. But it was she who was actually doing all those single-handedly. From the instance she was on the bus she was shouting at the passengers and pushing and gasping to fit her gigantic frame inside the intimidated bus interior packed with crushed human flesh and bones. I really was a Lilliputian when compared to her and to my horror, she decided to make my feet her footrest; to be honest I was entirely her body rest as she was leaning on me comfortably. Considering the bus and the woman I resolved to keep shut, as there really no space to move, but that was my mistake! The pain showed on my face, I felt my ears going hot as my feet started to get numb beneath the pair of “Ashok-Stambhas”, sweating like a horse I couldn’t stop the occasional “ouch”s and “oof”s when the bus was determined to give us the joy ride. Triggered off by my barely audible cries of help, the man standing or rather dangling beside me gave one look at me and perhaps understanding my situation started addressing the conductor of the bus, “Hey, don’t you ever bother to take a look at the people getting up on your bus? What nerve! Allowing mammoths to get up when there isn’t space to accommodate another ant! You nutcase! We are all getting crushed don’t you see!”. This was instigation enough for the woman to shoot off. Now she started screaming, seething with rage. In the scarcity of space she somehow managed to dash her hands in the direction of the man who commented, continuously calling him “a son of a something” that I couldn’t catch amidst all the hullabaloo that was created inside the bus. The fight was inevitable…………..and the cause being I, I couldn’t flush out the sheer guilt, but I didn’t have to, the sidesplitting conversation inside subsided it. The last thing I heard before the bus gulched me out, was that the man was screaming, “You fat old hag!” and the woman shrieked, “Oh my god! I will kill you, you baboon!”, and the indistinct voice of the conductor trying to bring things under control, “Please be quiet, please do not fight like kids!” Kids to hell… perhaps even the Indo-Pak relations are not so violent. Once out of the firing hole, I sighed, looked back at the bus and started towards my school with pangs of guilt, paining limbs and a sharp pain in my sides…
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