Illustration: Manjil Rijal
It was a ramshackle bathroom in a hill-station hotel: the Indian commode was under a stampede of muddy footprints and the tilted washbasin had an oily mirror thumbed by a host of unknown hands. Water frothed into the sink as a spectacled Kartar Singh stood there, each foot planted square in a tile on the floor. He had already dabbed his face dry with a small towel neatly slung over his shoulder. Now, patting this towel, he dried his wet hands and observed them clean against the washbasin white. After a quick search for his reflection behind the mirror's oily prints, he stroked his black beard peppered with twists of grey, adjusted his red turban and brought this routine to an end. Kartar Singh twisted the tap tight and shouldered through the bathroom door. As he left, the cubicle was swallowed by the same darkness that covered McLeod Ganj Bus Stop outside.
Kartar Singh commandeered Parvati Travels' deluxe bus, numbered HP 82-5285, on its sinuous journey from McLeod Ganj to Delhi every Thursday night, departing at 9:15 pm. With every passing week over the last twenty years, he had carefully curated the route from the bathroom to his wife and son – the objective, whom he collectively called JJ. Kartar Singh measured his prowess as a driver by the execution of this meticulous sequence which he had deciphered over time. By the exclusion of anything new, and a surreal repetition of the past, he was confident he would reach home on time. So, wearing the same grey kurta and carrying his ragged leather suitcase with dignity, Kartar Singh descended the rattling metal staircase of his cheap and carefully chosen hotel. He crossed the road snaking past tall and ominous pine trees in the dark, and then went down a dirt trail into the bus station.
The regular McLeod motley of people was standing about the platform: a Tibetan monk packeted in swirls of red and yellow, other Tibetans dressed casually in jeans and windcheater jackets, and moustachioed Kangri men – two were in Kinnauri caps. Kartar Singh could tell his passengers apart from the crowd because the Delhi youth always had kind of crackle about them, even in silence. They always congregated in a group near the platform's edge, as if by some unknown instinct. Three girls in Lady Shri Ram College jumpers were smiling at the darkness as they gazed into the distance. A couple of men tapped on their phones while ignoring their trolley suitcases which stood with handles extended all the way out. Then there was a lanky foreign man, automatically distinguished from the rest, and not simply because of his skin colour or his rainbow-coloured clothing. Such passengers usually travelled to McLeod Ganj but rarely took the route straight back. Kartar Singh could not figure out his nationality, but he was with a young Indian woman, and Kartar Singh anticipated that the pair would be kissing each other late into the journey.
Kartar Singh was the first from his crew to reach HP 82-5285. He deposited his peeling suitcase between the gearbox and the driver's seat and sat down, his hands absently tracing the steering wheel, his face in shadow and the azure of those nightlights that are peculiar to buses. He thought about JJ as the two remaining members of the Parvati Travels crew boarded the bus. Sanju the conductor, the only Himachali, walked down the bus aisle, his hands gently tapping the headrests as if he was blessing them for their journey ahead. Outside, Rocky from Delhi, the emergency bus driver, his pierced ear glinting under the bus tube lights, collected luggage from the passengers, who had finally located HP 82-5285,. As each passenger boarded the bus, they looked at Kartar Singh, who was encased in a rectangular doorway atop two large steps. But he looked firmly ahead. The passengers showed their tickets to Sanju one after another and sidled into their seats.
Kartar Singh perched his spectacles atop his arched nose bridge as Sanju returned from one last survey down the aisle. Finally, there was a nod of heads at 9:15 pm. Kartar Singh pushed the minar-ish gear stick to his left. The plate-like pedals, too brutish for mere ankles, were coaxed down under the weight of his thighs, and with a final groan, itching for release, the bus lurched into the darkness, trammelling over the bitumen of the road.
It had felt as if the world was ending. As if all language had been lost and only shouts, wails, the clicks of tongues, only primal sounds were permitted.
To the ignorant, all buses are the same. But this was not a Himachal Parivahan specimen, some government-run bus shorn of quality and care. HP 82-5285 did not share the cuboidal morphology of those governmental beasts. Its windows were larger than theirs, and without prison grills to deface them. They appeared as one long swathe of glass stretching from the helm to the rear. HP 82-5285's edges were wilted curves. Its windshield was enormous, tall and wide. It had been hosed with soap-water in the day and wiped spotless, so the bus seemed open and exposed at its front. The invading night swallowed Kartar Singh, who turned the large steering wheel to the rhythm of the road.
The faint figures of passing pines and oaks whisked into a blur. Kartar Singh kept the radio on for night journeys just like other drivers – but, unlike them, at a graceful, minimal volume. So as he lanced through the night, to the tune of Yuhin Kat Jayega Safar, he caught the lone whisper Rocky uttered in the cockpit.
"Beautiful," Rocky said, pressing his palm against the window.
Because the comment was not for Sanju or Kartar Singh, they remained silent. But a memory emerged in Kartar Singh's mind, as if a car had appeared out of the mist of heavy rain on that night sixteen years ago, when he was not averse to light conversation on the job.
He could recall the night in its complete sensory constitution. There was pitter and splatter on the bus roof, and water sheening down the windshield. New drops fell splat on the glass, animating it into a wobbling illusion. Then, brief clarity via squeaking wipers. The yellow headlights of cars in the traffic jam, and the black mountainside emerging, ever so slightly, from an even blacker night. In the yellow beams were the drenched clothes of brave local men, who scrunched up their faces as they figured out the traffic's puzzle. There was the heady scent of rain. Then the wipers froze, for just a split second, like the chronostasis of a clock's second hand, and lightning whipped the chest of the sky. A deluge came pouring out and boulders – impish and jagged, set to slip – rolled down onto the vehicles. People made a wild sprint back up the road, through the rain, and felt the dizzy stirring of tectonic motion. Then they watched, on finally turning back to look, in the short distance, the mountainside peeling off its muddy skin. Added to the rumbling and the groaning of a falling mountain, to the shriek of raindrops, was the delayed explosion of thunder.
It had felt as if the world was ending. As if all language had been lost and only shouts, wails, the clicks of tongues, only primal sounds were permitted. Those who died that night were reduced to the black ink of "11" printed in obscure Hindi newspapers. That night, Kartar Singh acquired new wisdom. He did not forget that words like "beautiful" were inaccurate to describe Himachali mountains, whose mixtures of brown, green and crests of white kept secret the basal smears of red.
Sanju shifted in his seat and Rocky continued to gaze out the window.
***
For nearly three hours the bus had been veering along the road's bends. Kartar Singh had strung together his own landmarks in the early years of his driving, when his grip on the steering wheel's leather was too tight, his knuckles white with an anxiety to control. The freak deodar with an unusually thick trunk indicated that the tunnel was only a few minutes away. The plastic leopard statue atop a short column signalled the arrival of the honeybee bridge painted with yellow and black stripes. But now Kartar Singh was familiar with the landscape, and by his sense of time alone he knew that the dhaba was about to arrive. He switched on the bus lights and the passengers groaned like toddlers in the morning. Kartar Singh smiled as he heard the smacks of tongues and the tuts of teeth and imagined the thick cheese omelettes and butter-smeared parathas his passengers would now eat. And how at least one passenger would be in the cockpit within two, maybe three hours, urgently demanding a plastic bag.
As the bus moved on the road's coil around a mountain, a lone orange rectangle appeared in the distance. It was the signboard of Vaishno Dhaba Pure Veg Only, a haven for travellers passing through Dharamshala on their way to Punjab. Drivers got a concession on food, and their tea was free. But it was the dependable nature of Vaishno Dhaba Pure Veg Only that drew Kartar Singh to it, not the discounted dal and paneer. The dhaba marked precisely the middle of the long road from Mcleod Ganj to JJ and served as an ideal intermediate goal to work towards. Nothing had changed in the restaurant in twenty years, not the menu nor the owner, and Kartar Singh wished for it to be as permanent as his name.
Kartar Singh looked at the bus clock as he parked HP 82-5285 along the road: it was 12:20 am. He was precise to the razor minute. He got up with a muted but secretly delighted gusto, and was the first to alight, even before Sanju had finished his announcement to the passengers, "We will break here for thirty minutes." He was already churning out the plan ahead: must leave by 12:50, Hamirpur now, in Una within two hours, then Rupnagar…
Kartar Singh smiled as he heard the smacks of tongues and the tuts of teeth and imagined the thick cheese omelettes and butter-smeared parathas his passengers would now eat.
He ordered three teas and sat at his table. The passengers ordered their manchurians and samosas. Sanju and Rocky ordered their teas and joined Kartar Singh. Nothing was said but this was not the norm among professionals of the road. Rocky would have talked the entire journey with another driver to keep him awake. At Vaishno Dhaba Pure Veg Only, the chatter would have leapt to a peak. Cheap food, lewd gossip about women, laughter at some past memory, yawns full of afeem-breath and backs slapped in camaraderie – all this did not happen with Kartar Singh, who had ordered three teas extra sweet, all for himself, for the caffeine and sugar rush to keep him awake, and a full bladder to purge before driving again. So when Rocky asked, "Will you smoke a beedi?," Kartar Singh replied, "No," and that was the end of all conversation.
They drank tea amid the din of tourists. Sanju finished and dutifully said, "I'll check the bus," while Rocky, muttering about old men, went behind the vehicle and smoked his beedi alone, a blooming full stop of amber in the dark. Kartar Singh's third tea arrived alongside the second, just as he preferred. While he sipped the second, the third lost its scalding temperature and assumed a utilitarian warmth, to be consumed quickly but without the revulsion of a cold and abandoned liquid. After standing up, he finished with a quick glass of water and then rushed to the bathroom. Excess liquid dispensed, hands washed, waiter thanked, and the storied driver climbed up into HP 82-5285. 12:40 am: Sanju went into the dhaba to alert the passengers – return now or be abandoned. Group after group brought with them the crepitation of chips packets. 12:46 am: Sanju walked down the bus aisle to do a final check. 12:48 am: Kartar Singh shifted in his seat and adjusted his spectacles. His tea-addled brain boiled with thoughts of JJ.
12:50 am. "Two are missing," said Sanju.
"What?"
"21A and 21B. Tanaya Kapoor and…" Sanju showed him the odd name he was hesitant to speak. It could only be that lanky foreigner and his Indian girlfriend. Kartar Singh sat staring at the clock. Its red numerals soon displayed 1:00 am. Sanju and Rocky were searching the dhaba for the missing couple when they emerged, tousled and dishevelled, at 1:02 am. When they entered the bus Kartar Singh wanted to scold them, tell them that they could have continued to lap their tongues at each other in the bus itself, he did not care. Now he would have to drive faster than he preferred.
The bus growled at his command, its headlights flooding the dark with light and revealing dust particles twirling as if to get out of the way. The bus lunged into action and the passengers gasped as they were tossed about.
But he saw the man's mirth-tinted face, the city girl on his arm, his white skin, blonde hair in thick dreadlocks. They moved past him on their way to 21A and 21B. On a day when the clocks made sense, Kartar Singh would have had the time for outrage at such a casual insult. But there was no time. He was seventeen minutes late.
In the conductor's chair, Sanju let out a long sigh pulled from the depths of his pahadi lungs. Both he and Rocky buckled their seatbelts: there would be no sleep for some time now. Kartar Singh smacked a hand on the steering wheel and twisted the keys. The bus growled at his command, its headlights flooding the dark with light and revealing dust particles twirling as if to get out of the way. The bus lunged into action and the passengers gasped as they were tossed about.
Kartar Singh wrested back his seventeen minutes with a walloping elegance of skill and violence. Potholes and craters were slammed over; shocked sedans wavered aside under the roaring blast of the horn; mountain bends were traced to their very edges. About an hour and a half later the foreigner lumbered into the cockpit, shaking Sanju's shoulder, his mouth full of nausea and reduced to the "mmm" sound, to ask for a plastic bag.
By the time they approached Una and the mountains were stretched into flatter lands, Kartar Singh eased his pressure on the pedals, and the steering wheel no longer needed to be grappled with. It was as if the bus was a ship careening away from the dense waves of a stormy sea. Full calm was restored, and the passengers drifted into sleep, their mouths open, heads limp on alternating shoulders as dictated by the wrists of Kartar Singh.
Not a minute owed to JJ had been lost and Kartar Singh was on time again.
***
4:05 am and everyone was still asleep – except for Sanju and Kartar Singh. The bus had been stationed on a short off-shoot along the national highway, and Kartar Singh was standing up, his tattered suitcase in one hand, the other patting his kurta straight. Sanju stood up too and shook Kartar Singh's hand with a quick shrug of the face. Rocky was dozing.
"Next Wednesday," Sanju said.
Kartar Singh nodded. Outside, he was greeted by the handlebar-moustachioed and freshly rested Furti Singh Sodhi, who would drive the remaining four hours to Delhi and then make the journey back to this spot.
"Good drive?"
"Not perfect."
Furti Singh Sodhi smiled but Kartar Singh only handed him the keys. They nodded and Kartar Singh watched the back of the bus, a large square minimising into the distance, and he smiled now because HP 82-5285 had a rear mudguard that looked like a smiling lip. Drive it well, he thought, and turned to his regular autorickshaw driver, who took him to his village – Sheeshgarh, in Punjab. Kartar Singh critiqued his driving along the way.
It was still dark when he entered his home, and he moved with the quiet of a black cat's tail brushing a wall at night. It was 4:30 AM but his journey was not over. He went into his little room and looked down on his bed to see JJ: his wife Akaljeet, with her long nose and equine face, which Kartar Singh thought was the hallmark of Punjabi women; and their nine-year-old son Noor, incisors peeking out of his mouth, cheek caressed by a cool bedsheet. Like two Js they lay next to each other, the latter's legs tucked underneath the former's hip. Kartar Singh looked at them from above and rumbled in mute delight. For yet another week, his journey was complete in time. He changed his clothes and laid himself on the bed, placing a gentle hand on Akaljeet's shoulder. She quietly pulled it to her cheek and left it there. Kartar Singh thought about how he would spend the next day like an idle king, and began to flit into sleep, the world no longer moving between parallel bars of elongated blur. Motion no more, he was coming to a still low, more slow, and then his eyelids finally closed like horizontal curtains of black.
***