An ordinary bus ride from Trichy to Coimbatore, but Latha Anantharaman has many stories to tell
Whenever my father picks up relatives at Newark airport and brings them home on the New Jersey Turnpike, he waits for them to admire the smooth roads and steady lines of traffic. But what they want to know is, where are all the people?
Give me the intimacy of Indian roads any day, where every kind of life is on parade.
Last week I took a bus from Trichy to Coimbatore. Turning my back on the broad band of blue that ran northwest to Erode and southwest to Coimbatore on my ancient map, I instead chose the thin red line that ran due west through Karur. The line indicated a small road, so this much shorter route was likely to take the same five hours.
I expected to be squashed and miserable, and hungry but unable to pull out my tiffin box with curd rice, or even to nibble the two sweets in my tiny Tupperware. In the event, I landed in what turned out to be a business class seat, just next to the driver. You might also call it the first-through-the-windshield seat, but the views were excellent.
I stretched my feet out on my duffel bag, spread a cloth napkin on my lap, and had lunch. Then it was time for our in-flight movie. This was a new bus, with seamless glass in front, like a wide screen.
We started with a view of a temple on a high rock, then a canal, overlooked by a pied kingfisher on an electric wire. Tiny munias lined the wires on the other side of the road. Pastoral beauty established, it was time for narrative tension. A bus was stalled on the oncoming lane. The conductor and driver stood to one side of it, making circular motions with their hands. The road is blocked and we must turn back, I thought. But they were just requesting the loan of a spare tyre, since one of theirs was flat. We didn’t have one either, our driver announced. No one seemed worried about that.
Cannonball tree, the high walls of a temple, and a woman with three boys, all of them with pilgrim faces, freshly bathed and smeared with sandal paste. A few yards behind them came 50 more pilgrims, in red and yellow, some carrying brass pots filled with mango leaves. A man and his daughter hosed down the road. Was it to cool the path of the pilgrims, or just to lay the dust?
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A few slick heads floated by on the surface of a canal. Upstream, we saw boys jumping into the water off a small bridge.
We slowed behind a Bharat Gas tanker declaring that Sefty Begains at Home.
Near a junction, men held up small bags of jasmine to women at the windows of the bus. Further ahead, a Sumo was parked by a coconut grove and the family belonging to it ate lunch under the trees. Women and girls, hair falling to their waists, bathed in a pond and washed their clothes.
A sign read Men at Works Go Slow. A white-breasted kingfisher swooped in front of our bus and made a perfect-10 landing on a rock in the canal.
Girls and women moulded bricks at a kiln. A man sold palm fruit to three passengers who got out of a Qualis.
A festival under the noon sun on the dusty ground in front of a Mariamman temple, set to furious drumming. Men threw turmeric in the air.
My eyes drooped and I nodded. I would have slept soundly but for two women with high, nasal voices who recited simultaneous monologues to each other. At some point the talk radio turned itself off and I woke up. We were pulling into the bus stand at Coimbatore.
That parade of life was over, and I got on the bus to Palakkad for the next one.
[Latha Anantharaman is a freelance writer and editor based in Palakkad]
