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Thursday, July 24, 2008

A Bubble in a Bus


This morning, I saw a miracle.

Actually, what I saw was a man and a woman on a bus. A very crowded, sweaty, smelly bus, full of mostly rustic villagers on their way to the station.

The woman was at least 35. She was fat. She was plain to look at, but she was decidedly urban. She looked educated. And she was married.

The man was scruffy. He was wearing dirty trousers and a five-day old beard. He couldn't have been younger than 40. And because I was sitting next to him, I could distictly smell stale whiskey.

They got on at different stops. They scuffled and shoved till they managed to find seats next to each other. And then, in that moving hell, they proceeded to create a little bubble of intimacy and tenderness, nearly completely oblivious to what the people aroud them were thinking, saying, or doing. In that bubble they held hands, whispered, touched each other, and the woman rested her head on the man's shoulder.

For an entire hour,the bubble remained unbroken. Then the lady got up. The man touched her hand, she looked at him, and then she got off and walked away briskly.

After a while, he got off too, and ambled away. And i sat there, in the little smelly bus, puzzling it all out. Middle aged adulterous lovers meeting secretly in public buses every day?! It seemed too bizzare to be real. Too out of this world. What could I call it except a miracle.


And yes, it makes me blanch to think i live in a city where the only possible rendezvous of clandestine lovers is a crowded public bus.

10 paper boats came floating back to me:

Unknown said...

Strange..!! But probably that is wat is life..

Anik. said...

and this is love , i mean true love ... may be the man waits in the bus stop each and every day for the woman. may be he know that there is nothing more , to hope.......
may be the glimpse of her help him to fly.
may be.....!!!!!!!

Nidhi said...

That is life, that is love, that is mystery, that is everything... Just by looking at what you saw, you or I or anyone else can't come on a conclusion about that relationship... so lets just enjoy one more face of life :) Known yet unknown :)

laddu said...

yaar i never knew jaipur is like dis....cnt even meet in public....but i never noticed anything that u have mentioned in ur posts abt dis on my last visit..or may be i didnt c wats happening....its sad....

Amritorupa Kanjilal said...

i know you are reading this shantanu.

ShantanuDas said...

how lovely!! But I feel it is your writing that created the miracle - this poetry that we are seeing in that incident...

How lovely not the incident but your writing..& way of looking... :-)

ShantanuDas said...

Gosh you made me jump out of my skin!! just imagine! me posting that comment earlier.. and then suddenly someone saying to me "I am watching you Shantanu!" reminded me of my dad when i used to read story books hiding them in my school books at home and he used to come suddenly behind me and pull me ears!!
gosh gosh..!!

Amit Kumar Das said...

May be they r two lost souls..but i feel sorry that they have to meet in the midst of a spiralling cacophony of this maddening crowd....but i should say, i agree with Shantanu...ur writing brought out the emotions and conjured up the image nicely....keep walking!!!

The Sunflower Collective said...

True. Its that something in your style of writing that makes us look at things with a different eye. And the issue is also a thoughtful one. I like your eye of observation. Keep it up

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