Pankaj Challa
Chandu was in the conductor’s seat by the doorway, clutching a ticket-holder, savoring the weight of the iron rod, cool to the touch, to which the tickets were strung like ribbons. In the distance, the white petals of the Lotus Temple opened up to the sun, and Chandu thought of Neetu―of the afternoon they spent together at the temple, sitting with her on the wide steps, then in the garden, legs stretched out on the grass, shoulders touching, she in her green salwar and white dupatta veil, her lips and tongue red from the Amul colored ice.
From the street beside the bus, a boy’s voice reciting a list of destinations filtered through to him. The shouter’s job was to recruit passengers, fill the bus—but the boy was only fifteen and new to this line of work. Chandu stuck his head out of the window and spat. “Why do you speak soft and shy, like a bride? Pound on the side of the bus, yell—get everybody in.”
On his cell phone, there was a missed call from Hema, a woman he had seen for one month, following his separation from Neetu, trying to erase her from his memory. But he realized that he didn’t like Hema after all, and had abandoned her. Although, there was no logic to it—Hema was pretty, a laborer from Rajasthan who had been making good money as a housemaid in a government official’s home in Delhi. She was kind, and caring—if he hadn’t met Neetu, he probably wouldn’t have had too much to complain about with Hema. But even two months after he’d ended relations with her, she still called him now and then. He always ignored the calls, thinking it kindest not to respond at all. But each time, he felt like an idiot turning her away.
*
Just like the boy, Chandu was a shouter too―but today he was the conductor, with the tempting prospect of making it a permanent fixture if he did well enough. For seven years, he had been working for Bhatia, the owner of the private bus service, “King lines.” Bhatia was a tough Gujjar, with a pointed beard and a habit of summoning his employees to meet with him in his shop, but then ignoring them throughout the meeting, closing his eyes when they talked, or interrupting them to shout at a shop-boy about something completely unrelated. But of course Bhatia heard everything, because he never missed a chance to say no to employee requests. Bhatia sahib, I have faithfully worked for you for seven years—promotion, conductor promotion? How Chandu hated the rattle of the hookah Bhatia smoked! Gurr-gurr-gurr like a shaitan breathing. No. Of course that was Bhatia’s answer to most everything, no matter the question. But Chandu persisted. Finally Bhatia seemed to relent. Bring in ten thousand rupees in one day, then we’ll see.
If he became a real conductor for good, he could afford to leave the hustling and the swearing behind—instead, he’d wear a smart khaki uniform and go about saying, “Tickets, please.” His mother was fond of neat clothes, uniforms with perfect creases. She was disallowed color but she liked color, and she never got used to wearing widow’s white—she was all too young when it happened. His father worked night shift construction because of the higher pay and he was coming home in the early hours one time and someone mistook him for someone else and stabbed him in the street, near the Y-junction. A sweeper found the body in the morning and the news did not reach the family until the next day. A year later, when Chandu was ten, his mother passed away after falling ill during a cold Delhi winter.
“Does this bus go to Safdarjung hospital?”
An old man stood at the doorway, squinting up at Chandu. He wore a blue turban and carried a walking stick, torso wrapped in a black shawl. The bus did not go to Safdarjung, not even close, but the policy in the King bus lines, established by long practice, was that one did not turn away a fare-paying passenger—and besides, Chandu needed all the ticket-money he could muster today for a possible conductor promotion.
Chandu nodded in reply, but without looking at the old man—instead, he frowned and pretended to be busy counting the tickets. “Get in, get in!”
The old man smiled, widening his eyes. “Oh, how long I’ve been waiting here. Bless you, my son, bless you!” He started to climb the steps into the bus, carefully.
“Hurry up, Grandpa.”
The boy was announcing still in a hesitant, feeble voice. “Damn it, boy,” said Chandu, “you want to make me do your job too, is that what you want?”
Chandu got up from the seat, and joined the boy outside.
“You don’t know how to shout, you got a voice in there, you sister fucker?” Chandu spat out his beedi and bellowed in a booming voice, “Nizamuddin-Bhogal-Kalkaji.” He signaled with his arms. “Come on, get in, get in, the bus is leaving.”
*
Someone was coughing. “Is there a seat?” the old man asked eagerly.
Chandu looked up at him. His face was weather-beaten. The old man coughed again, clutching the railing for support.
“Don’t worry, I’ll get you a seat,” Chandu said, getting up and handing him a ticket. “Twenty rupees.”
“Twenty rupees! I can understand ten rupees, but―”
“When were you in the city last―nineteen eighty-seven?”
Handing out a twenty rupee note from a knot in his dhoti, the old man said, “I used to be a conductor once too, not in the city, but in the villages near Sheikhpur. All my life in fact, I was a conductor, fifty years I ran the buses in Sheikhpur.”
“Why did you stop now?”
“My knees, had to give up conducting―it’s been one full year. I miss the job, although in the summer one gets baked all day under a metal roof, and now that I’m retired I’m able to sit in the shade under a mango tree. It’s a peaceful life, but I get tired of it quickly, and don’t like it. All my life I’d been used to moving, traveling, and now I get sick of sitting on my arse all day, wiping bird-shit off my clothes.”
Chandu called out to the boy outside: “Shout one last time. Loud, loud.”
“Does this go directly to the hospital?” asked the old man.
“Why do you have to go to the hospital anyway?” asked Chandu. “You’re very old. Go to the temple. I’ll take you to the Kalkaji temple.”
“No, no, no, I have to go to the hospital!”
“Alright, go to the hospital. Who’s stopping you?”
“I pick up medicine at the hospital for my grandson,” the old man said. “I get to go only once a year, around this time, as it’s difficult for me to travel in the winter. He’s very young, only a boy, and he has a leg wound that never heals, he fell into a ditch at harvest time. I’m old, and it’s hard for me to make these trips.”
An affectionate grandfather, like in the family for whom Hema worked. She spoke all the time about how the family members cooperated among themselves in running a smooth household. But then it seemed to him as if the sight of a complete and happy family—the parents present, and understanding—were a scene from a movie, and not real.
The bus driver revved up the engine, tempting the people at the bus stop to get in—a man with a beedi in his mouth paused, almost holding the puff of smoke. A few people got on, but the majority, who knew the game, remained outside. The driver continued to work the engine. Then finally, with a jerk, the bus lurched a few inches forward, and stopped. Once again, the engine roared impressively. The horn was sounded, an ear-splitting, high-pitched whistle.
Only the seats and three-fourths of the aisle in the bus were full. Chandu felt insulted to let the bus move unless people spilled out of the doorway. But he had no choice—waiting too long would work against them, people might get off the bus. He whistled, and the bus moved. It was only then that the man smoking the beedi and other stragglers at the bus stop hopped on.
“Come on, move forward, move forward,” Chandu said to the old man.
“But it’s full up in the front.”
“Full? Are you blind? The bus is practically empty.” Chandu indicated the packed aisle. “Move forward.”
The old man squeezed in, clutching the handrail, holding on when the bus stopped and started with jerks. “I can’t see out of the windows from here,” he said. “You should tell me when my stop comes.”
“Hunh, hunh,” Chandu nodded, still actively pursuing tickets. He made an announcement that he kept repeating. “Anybody who doesn’t buy a ticket—you’ll be in trouble. There will be a checkup, and if you don’t have a ticket, I will collect a fine.”
“When will I get a seat?” asked the old man.
“Grandpa, can’t you see I’m busy?” Chandu walked up and down the aisle, counting the number of people, and tallying with the tickets he had sold.
*
Chandu got back into his seat. The bus made innumerable stops and got more and more crowded. Each time, Chandu tapped the sliding glass of his window with the coin to signal the driver to stop, and to resume. The driver switched on the shrill bus stereo. Bollywood songs blared out, strangely in tune with the nonstop honking outside and the roar of the engine. Neetu liked movies—and they went whenever they could sneak away. It was in the darkness of a theatre once, knees touching, that she told him of her childhood, how she used to be a gangly kid, all limbs, climbing trees. They were at a matinee of the film Dabangg—and he still remembered the pang of jealousy he’d felt when, in the multiplex lobby before the show, she so much as glanced at a man who’d turned to look at her as she passed.
Ahead on the road, a man in an American Security Guard uniform waited at the bus stop. “Chandu,” the man yelled. “Stop, roko!” Was that Bisram? The bus came to a stop on the side of the road, tires squealing. “Is this going to the Kalkaji temple?” Bisram asked.
Bisram got in and settled down next to Chandu. “I have given the Vespa for servicing. Oiling, washing―got very dirty. Ah, what dust and sand in the roads of Haryana.” Bisram was Neetu’s elder brother, in his late twenties.
The old man said, “He just got on and he’s given a seat. You said the bus will clear out, and I’ll get a seat.” But Chandu didn’t reply.
“These Americans, the way they do things,” Bisram said. He had a shiny badge over his heart and on his sleeve, with eagles on it, and “Larsen Solutions” written in Hindi and more in English. “Royal, very royal. They don’t think twice about throwing away anything. Just the other day, they threw away two bags of rice because it was left over from lunch. Very royal.”
A Sumo van honked as it passed by.
“How’s Neetu?” Chandu asked.
“She’s well.” If she was married, he’d mention it. “She’s getting matches from all over. Even more so now that we’re in a better neighborhood.” And he told him how, because of his new job, they were able to move to a new place near Kalkaji.
Chandu entered ticket numbers on a sheet of paper on a clip-pad. A year ago, he was ordered—forbidden—by her mother to meet Neetu. He had asked for her hand in marriage, and her old mother said no, she wouldn’t allow her girl to marry a shouter. Now he saw a resemblance of Neetu in her brother, in the tilt of the nose he saw her, and it filled him with longing.
He had first met her two years ago at a street corner in the Lajpat Nagar market. He had fallen in love with her because of a look she threw at him over her shoulder as she crossed the road. She was twenty-two years old. She said she liked that he had rooms to himself, not far from Mathura road, and soon they got into the habit of going back home together to his place after a matinee show. Despite the family rituals of matches and arranged marriage then, still he wasn’t her first boyfriend, and there was something forward about her, daring. She was the first one to not always insist on darkness as a pre-condition to be with her. They spent Saturday afternoons at his place when he had a half-day, cooked an early dinner together, and liked to make love on a divan in the light of an open window, breeze on skin, her hair about her bare brown shoulders, her hand on the back of his head, looking into each other’s eyes.
“How far?” asked Bisram.
“What?”
“To the Kalkaji temple?”
“Quite a ways away, end of the route,” Chandu replied. “I’m surprised, I didn’t know you were a devotee.”
“Well, of late, I’ve become one, kind of. Seeing as how I’ve been rewarded. Besides, just because one is working in an American company, one shouldn’t forget one’s culture, you know.”
“Nice uniform.”
“Thank you,” Bisram said. “They wash it in washing machines and get it ironed and everything for me, you know. All the hard work I did in trying to land a job like this―it’s all worthwhile now.” Bisram stretched out his legs in the seat. “Persistence―one must keep at it, that’s the most important thing, I have learned.”
He did not know this about Bisram, that he had staying power, patience, perseverance. As the girl’s brother was called saala, the same word as the curse, Bisram seemed to fit the epithet―a noxious nuisance. The loveliest girls always had the most repellent brothers. Chandu himself showed no patience at that most important time in his life, and one or two insults from Neetu’s mother were enough. And again he thought of her words—no way I’m sending my daughter to an orphan street-shouter she’d said, and he got into a huff, saying he didn’t need to set foot in her house again. Good riddance, she’d said—a man who worked on the streets, with every bad habit, smoking, playing cards, drinking. Sure, I used to do those things much more in the past he’d replied, but now only sometimes―and she threw a leather chappal at him, she with the burly arms, this pukka Haryanvi lady, and the heel hit him in the face, giving him a black eye that embarrassed him for days afterwards in the bus. He saw Neetu the next day, she said sorry about my mother, he said no matter, asked if she’d elope with him, she replied no, her family was important to her after all, and he then lost his temper and left―to hell with you and your family.
Now Chandu pursed his lips and held a stack of rupee notes in his left hand. Bisram asked, “How much is the count today?”
“Eight hundred rupees,” Chandu said quickly. Before he could stop him, Bisram snatched the money from him and was counting it, slowly, saying the numbers out loud. Every passenger in their vicinity leaned over to watch, including the old man. Some passengers counted silently too, their lips moving.
“Give it here,” said Chandu, snatching the thick stack of bills, crumpled and creased twenties and tens among them.
Bisram laughed. “I think that’s fifteen hundred rupees. What a goddamn racket you’re running. You must be overcharging your customers like hell to get this much, you always were a goddamn swindler!”
“At least I’m not selling my soul to the firengis,” Chandu said. “Besides, don’t put on airs, I know your salary isn’t more than what an experienced shouter like me makes.”
“So what, it’s nicer out there. You’re just jealous I make an honorable living in neat clothes and you go around in second hand rags.”
Chandu pushed Bisram and the two wrestled in the seat.
“Don’t fight, children,” said the old man.
“Hey, Grandpa, you want a seat?” Chandu said, amidst trying to get the upper hand over the stronger Bisram. “This seat is getting empty right now.” Chandu succeeded in pushing Bisram out by leaning against the wall of the bus and shoving with his legs.
Bisram stood up. The old man sat down beside Chandu. Bisram said, “Come outside and wrestle like a man, then we’ll see.”
“Such things are beneath me—I’m a conductor now.”
“You?” Bisram said, widening his eyes. “I thought you were filling in for the regular conductor. When did they promote you? How come I never heard of it?”
Chandu took out his cell phone. “Owner’s instructions―full freedom to call police anytime, report troublemakers.”
*
At the next stop, the driver took a break, and got off the bus, leaving the engine idling. Fifteen hundred rupees, Bisram had said. Chandu had been avoiding counting or estimating the tally so far―but now there was no escaping. There it was, the number dropped like a rock. The target was out of the question. He’d be lucky if he ended up with four thousand rupees. Bhatia was lying through his teeth―ten thousand, he’d said, and Chandu fell for it.
Chandu was an excellent shouter, that was his skill, he had been a shouter from the age of sixteen―he moved among various bus lines, picked up odd work in intervals between jobs, but always came back to the buses, because he felt this was the only thing he knew well, hustling. Although he got pay raises, Bhatia never made him a conductor because he was too good a shouter—he could see it now, same reason why nobody promoted him before in other bus lines. Tears gathered in his eyes and he blinked them away. What was the point in deceiving the old man now? He’d tell him to get down a couple of stops down the road, and would refund his money.
A tug on his sleeve then from outside the window, and down below, a familiar face—Hema, in a sari. “I have something for you—your favorite sweet, kheer.”
With Bisram watching, Chandu said to her, “I never said it’s my favorite.”
“I could never forget,” she said, “how you said there was nobody to make it for you, even as a boy.”
He saw again why he didn’t like her—the pity in her voice for his home background, or lack of it, too much unsolicited pity. There was something about her apparent kindness that he distrusted, something manipulative. He felt then that even if it hadn’t been for Neetu, she’d never do. “Please give it to any of the street kids—they’re far more in need of such kindness than me, an uncouth, brash, foul-mouthed hustler, who does not perform prayers.”
She said, “Lord Krishna will forgive you, if you ask forgiveness.”
He joined his hands together then, in a namaste. “Goddess, please leave me alone.”
To his surprise, she didn’t sob, as he’d expected, but the pity left her, and there was anger in her face. He almost hoped she’d throw something at him, spit in his face or even on the bus, and he might like her better. But with a smug expression, she turned away, as if to say, I’m the housemaid of a genteel home, while after all you’re a nobody.
Bisram said, “One of your girlfriends, eh?”
Chandu wanted to punch him in the face. When the driver returned, to signal the bus to move, Chandu tapped the window-glass sharply with his coin, and the glass broke. “Behen-choot,” Chandu said, escaping the shards of glass that dropped onto his seat. He stood up and smashed the rest of the glass with his ticket-rod, effectively clearing out the entire window.
“Easy, easy,” said Bisram.
“How far away is Safdarjung from here?” the old man asked. “It seems to be taking a long time.”
“Safdarjung?” said Bisram. “Get down, get down here! This bus does not go to Safdarjung.” The old man stared at him with wide eyes. “Got cheated, eh, Grandpa? What else can you expect from the great swindler here.”
The old man started to cry. “Oh, God! It’ll soon be dusk. When will I get there, how will I get there?”
Chandu said, “Alright, alright, I’ll take you—just sit tight.”
“I should reach the hospital door before seven or they won’t allow me in.”
“For God’s sake, don’t cry—I’m telling you, it’s my responsibility to get you there on time.”
Bisram said, “Oye, what kind of a conductor are you, making an old man cry.”
“You shut up and let me do my job. Oye, Chotu,” Chandu yelled to the shouter. “Tell the driver to take the Safdarjung road, I have some work there.”
“He’ll do that?” the shouter asked. “You can make the driver do that?”
“The bus goes wherever the conductor wants it to go.”
The bus took a right at the Lajpat Nagar junction instead of a left. There were shouts and protests from the passengers. “Where are you taking us?” someone said. “I’m supposed to get down at the theatre. This is going in the other direction.”
“Relax, everyone,” Chandu said. “This is a shortcut.”
“Shortcut? This is the other direction, the other direction!”
“I sold you a ticket to the theatre. Did I tell you how I’m going to take you there? Relax. We’ll get there on the loop.”
A bunch of passengers ganged up against Chandu. A burly man clutched him by the collar.
“Let go of me, you ape!” said Chandu, getting up from his seat. “This old man needs to get medicine from the hospital.”
Everybody looked at the old man in his shawl, who sat there hunched up in the seat. The old man wisely kept quiet, and Chandu gave him his money back, saying, “We’ll get there soon.” The bus moved on without any intermediate stops, and then screeched to a halt at the Safdarjung Hospital. The old man got off and stood on the street, clasping his hands in namaste to Chandu.
*
From Neetu’s neighborhood you could see the Lotus Temple in the distance, the petals orange in the evening sun. Her house was the last one in the lane, with a small front yard. They rented two rooms upstairs soon after Bisram got his job, where brother and sister and their old mother lived. Neetu was descending the outdoor steps from the terrace, carrying a winnowing-fan of wheat, her delicate pink dupatta blowing in the wind. She saw him standing in the front yard and came down the steps slowly, all the while looking at him. She wore loose churidar trousers, and he thought of the time he and Neetu went shopping together in Lajpat Nagar.
“How’re you, Neetu, kaisi ho?”
“Sab thik-thak,” she said, still watching him. Looking at her, the memory of her had been so close in his consciousness all this while that he felt as if it had only been a day or two since they’d seen each other last, when in fact it had been almost thirteen months.
“Heard you’re getting good matches,” he said.
“A new one every day.” She looked at him, and then poured the wheat into a gunny sack, tying it with rope.
“If you get a good one,” he said, “please don’t hesitate, marry.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
He smiled. “I missed you.”
“I didn’t. All I had to do was get on a bus and I’d hear all the bad language I wanted.”
“Neetu,” her mother was calling from upstairs. “Bring me another tub of cool water, this one is warm already.”
“Of course it’s warm, you hardly move or take your feet out of the water, what do you expect? Bisram bhaiyya will bring you a tub of ice from the market soon, sit tight.” She turned to Chandu. “She’s even worse than usual.”
“Maybe I should go before she sees me.”
“No danger of that―she’s sitting far from the window and won’t be getting up. She’s been relegating all housework to me on the pretext of giving me practice, seeing as I’m a bridal candidate and all. Now she has boils on her feet from all the oily food and the idleness, and she soaks her feet all day in cool water.”
Her mother shrieked then from the top of the stairs, pointing at him, and Chandu ran into the street. When he crept back in along the wall through the side gate, Neetu was gone. In the distance, the Lotus Temple was now in lights. It had looked better in daylight.
*
A week later, once again Chandu was filling in for the conductor, when someone slipped into the seat beside him, and started speaking about how glad he was that the bus was going to Janakpuri, that he was headed to the city on his annual trip, and that the town had changed so much already, the prices had gone up since last year, and that he needed to get medicine for his grandson from a clinic before they closed. And then Chandu saw that it was the old man. Recognizing that he was found out, the old man did not get up but slapped his thigh and said, Dhat tere ki. “I never mess up like this. I didn’t recognize you when I got on the bus!” He shook his head.
The bus rolled through scrub-land to the west of the city. The old man took off his turban and his hair flew in the breeze, and he kept shaking his head. “I should stop coming to the city so often. There are some decent card-playing groups in the village too these days.” It occurred to Chandu then, he must have always got on the King line buses, always deliberately on the wrong route, knowing that they never turned away a fare-paying passenger—no conductor would ever tell him he’s on the wrong route. And later, when he told them his story, they’d feel ashamed of having misled him, and would take him where he needed to go, for free.
“I’m usually better at changing my stories,” the old man said. “I’ve not been well lately.” He blew his nose into a hand-kerchief.
It was the last trip of the day, and the bus was already emptying out. They were in the city outskirts—ahead, the mud-brown outline of buildings, a tall tower or a dome here and there. The old man rolled a piece of tobacco leaf into a chutta and lit it, resting an ankle on his knee, puffing away.
“There’s a hunger in your eyes,” he said. “You’re a good shouter, I should have remembered you.” He shook his head again. It seemed to Chandu that the old man was bothered more by that little mistake of his, of getting into a bus with the same conductor only a week apart, and telling him the same story from before, than any sense of shame. Although what right did he have, Chandu, he who had cheated hundreds of passengers over the years.
“Let me look over the ticket tally,” the old man said, taking the clip-pad from Chandu’s lap, examining his handwriting. “Not bad if you’re new to the job, but still a lot of letters getting fudged. Yes, it’s difficult writing in a moving bus.”
Chandu said, “Oh, you do speak truth sometimes then for a change—the conductor part.”
“I’d never lie about that.” The old man looked at him, dead serious.
The old man then bent his head down again, squinting at the small figures on the clip-pad—and something about his forehead, the way the hair fell across it, reminded Chandu of himself, and he felt then as if he were looking at a version of himself years from now. If he stayed on this bus he would also become like this old man, and at the end of a long life, only the intricacies of the game would engage him—how deftly one manipulated people, how one doctored accounts to a nicety, for this was the lot of a life on the buses. He felt as if, as the bus hurtled along, his and Neetu’s paths were growing ever more divergent. No, he would not live like this anymore, and he stood up so violently he hit the top of his head against the luggage rack. He pulled at the clip-pad, but the old man wouldn’t let go, still squinting at the numbers, fingers like claws, and Chandu snatched it from him with such force the man almost fell off the seat. Then Chandu picked up the rod of ticket-ribbons, and the day’s bundle of cash, went over to the driver’s cubicle, and placed them in the glove compartment.“Please hand over today’s totals and tallies to Bhatia,” he said. The driver nodded, as conductors often got off early on the last trip, although of course he could not know that this one would never return. The junior shouter was sleeping in front on the floor, back against the gear shaft, murmuring something, talking in his sleep. Chandu tapped the railing with a coin when they got to the stop, and got down. As he came out on to the Mathura road, he felt that the hardest part started now, the task of beginning anew.