Faces from journeys

Oftentimes faces persist like snapshots. Usually happens when I travel alone and care to take in more than just the people I chaperon. Oftentimes I want to know why, what, how, but dare not walk up and ask. I view myself as an intruder. Here's a list from a trip to Chennai yesterday.

- 8:30 PM: Electric Train @St. Thomas Mt.: A little girl, around 8 yrs, in school uniform - white salwar, blue kameez, white dupatta. With school backpack. Seemed to have had a long day, but eyes still shining bright. Boarding the train holding her little sister, 5 year old perhaps. They try various empty seats and finally decide to sit by the entrance. Enjoying the wind. So happy. So 'for-the-moment' life of childhood.

- 10 30PM: Central Station: A man of 30 lying on a bed sheet near the Higginbothams stall, sleeping. Just like hundreds of others lying on bedsheets/card boards/floor. Some alone, some in groups. Some happy to be going to some place, some sad at having left place. This man was well dressed, head cleanshaven. Initially put him down as a Tirupati return. A few moments later I found another man kneeling next to him and fanning him with an tattered towel. It was then that I noticed the two catheters on the sleeping man's hands. Perhaps he is a General Hospital return.

- 11:00PM: Platform 4, Yercaud express preparing to leave the station. Important looking person dressed all in white, standing by the AC compartment. A dozen people jostling around him, giving him what looked like petitions. He gave the impression that he was there to solve all their problems.

Knowledge

A breezy, rainy and dark Bangalore night. I was on my way to City Railway station on an auto. Not through any familiar routes. Through streets littered with godowns where rain had stalled loading and unloading activities. Labourers huddled under canvas shacks. Fallen treee trunks everywhere. Names like Dewan Bahadur Royan Road. Paranoia lurks.

Just then the conversation flows with the driver. In urdu and madrasi mixed hindi. Along the way he asked me if Mumbai and Chennai are different places. What could I say? How do I make sense of his question?

Heres a man who has been ferrying countless souls across this city on his auto - perhaps for 30 years now. Perhaps he has fathered three or four children. Circumstances may have made him a husband to more than one woman. And this piece of information he sought seems so basic to me. To think that he could have carried on with life this long without ever stumbling upon the obvious answer to this question. Wouldnt his children know this? Wouldnt the vernacular newspapers he reads shed some light on it?

Now, to look at this the other way. Is it really vital that he know this? He has made a living thus far and exudes a condiserable sense of satisfaction with life. What knowledge is essential? Multiplication tables at the speed of light? States and Capitals? Makes me further ponder the educational system that is manufacturing minds for cubiclcedom.

Majestic

At 10:15 pm, after waiting for 30 minutes, I boarded BMTC Route #2 bound for Majestic. The wait in itself offered a variety which I may have seen, but one that I rarely paused and Observed at close quarters - the sobriety of the waiting traffic policeman having wound up the days duty, the garrulousness of three cell phone flaunting college kids talking movies, a family of four who alighted from an auto and barely able to carry the almost-asleep toddlers and the rest - a book salesman, an elderly couple with suitcases ...all waiting for the Route # 2 bound for Majestic.

All through I was having a surreal feeling... A very long time since I had traveled by bus, unaccompanied, and at so late an hour and so suddenly. And I had never been to Majestic before, about which I have not heard too many pleasnt things. The only consolation was that my destination was not Kalasipalayam.

I had a feeling akin to a villager in a big city when I alighted at Majestic. A thousand buses going a hundred directions. People People...all in a hurry. I did not dare ask anybody the way to platform 15, where my APSRTC bus to Tirupati will depart from. I walked around as non-descriptly as possible in quest for PF15. When I did reach it, a board there said that buses to Wilson Garden and Dairy Circle depart from here. That certainly was not what I wanted to see.

There were scores of pedestrian ramps all of which seemed to lead up to a common higher plane. So I took one of them and reached a foot-over-bridge.Going north on it for ten minutes brough me to the Railway Station. Retracing my steps for ten minutes and surveying the scene revealed another bus stand which was filled with inter-state buses. Climbed down another ramp and entered the melee.

I loved the scene with all its chaos and character...and a few dogs. I reached PF15, with 45 minute to spare. Scanned all the food stores and 'fancy' stores. Finally reached a Newspaper Stall. At this unearthly hour for newpapers the stall offered just two English magazines.Between a publication called Caravan and another called Competition Wiz, I chose the former. And I was much deligthed by this choice. It was not 'current affairs'. It had just a handful of essays on politics and culture.

With this prize catch tucked into my hand bag, I waded through the masses back to PF15, just in time to board my bus with a hope that more of these majestic trips are waiting to happen.