Of Buses and Bed Bugs

Lately, I've been traveling a lot. Especially in buses, through tiring overnight journeys between Hyderabad and Chennai. And I learnt that travel enlightens you about the world as it really is - not the proverbial 'bed of roses,' but, to stick to the same metaphor, a vertitable moth-eaten seat filled with vermin.

My first advice to someone traveling between Hyderabad and Chennai. Don't take the overnight bus.
If you must, don't take the non-AC bus.
If you still must, don't take the buses belonging to Omer Travels.
If you still, STILL must, don't expect to sleep at night.

My first reaction when I climbed into the giant four-wheeled wonder that screeched to a halt at the Afzalgunj bus depot was, why in the world did I pay Rs.500 for this joke?

I'm not kidding. The fare was Rs.500. Compare this to a sleeper class train ticket between the same stations at a modest Rs.327. If you take the 3rd AC, it comes to about Rs.750. It's a pity the train gets filled up so quickly, leaving no recourse for the emergency travelers, except our 4 wheeled wonders.

In buses, the base fare is anything between Rs.450 and Rs.500. There is no standard fare chart, so if you want it, you pay what they're asking for. And, as a rule, don't stare at the fancy pictures displayed on the walls (or websites) of these bus guys. Those were taken when the buses were brand new. Could be some 25 or 30 years ago. Check their claims of being in the market for the past so-and-so years. Add another five to it. And you'll arrive at a close approximation of the age of the bus you are going to travel in.

If it's an AC bus, chances are, it has been a little more fortunate, and a little less disheartening to look at. AC fares come costly. The base fare for an AC Volvo bus begins at Rs.700, and it can go up to Rs.1400 or Rs.1500 during peak travel seasons (Deepavali, Pongal, Christmas), when Indians are all traveling from one place to another.

Given the high fares, the public that generally books seats on AC buses is marginally more well-behaved (at least 80% of the public). Usually, they do not litter the buses, fiddle with the window latches and light fixtures, sleep on the floor, or stuff empty bottles in the spaces between seats. And, they usually find other means of employing their boredom than boring holes in the upholstery, or scratching out their love poems behind another's seat.

If they have these habits, the desist when others fix their disgusted stares rather pointedly on them.

But things differ vastly in a non AC surrounding.

Look at the picture below. Then look at the picture further below. If the one above is a normal bedbug, the one further below is the one you find on Omer's non-AC buses.

As I settled into the uncomfortable seat at about 10:30 at night, resigning myself to a noisy journey filled with voluptuous Telegu ladies singing raucously on TV, the lights went off, and I drifted into dreams.

Well, almost drifted, that is. When you are being pierced by mean pincers in the middle of the night, there is no peaceful drifting to anywhere.

To continue, I spent a sleepless night that night. Every ten minutes, I'd wake up from a fitful doze to find a mean bedbug biting into my neck, or my back, or the crook of my elbow, swollen to triple its normal size having drunk a bellyfull of my blood.

It was disgusting to even touch those vermins and rip them off my skin. But I did that, and tossed them to the ground and stamped on them. I grit my teeth for the first few bugs. Then, it became a habit for the rest of the night, and I was weeding the bugs with the deft hand of a primate...

Brought to my mind an episode of some reality show I had seen on TV. A few young people had to survive a night in a tumble-down lodge, which was infested with giant cockroaches. And mind you, I hate cockroaches even more than I hate bedbugs. And their dare was to catch those very cockroaches and stuff them into plastic packets. The team that collected most of the roaches would win eventually.

I shuddered involuntarily to behold those young women grabbing handfuls of squirming, crawling roaches, and stuff them into packets that were already swarming with more....

Looking back, I realize the truth in the saying that experience is what makes us stronger.

Ah well! So much for experiencing the soul-fortifying ordeal of tearing blood-filled bedbugs from one's own neck and arms and razing them to the ground. At least, I had the satisfaction of causing a dent in the bedbug population of Omer's super deluxe buses, albeit a small one...the size of a bedbug itself...

Future Omer travelers! Hear! Hear!! Hear!!! And let's hope we can dream of bedbug-free journeys to our loved ones in the future!

The City Never Forgets

Home away from home

What is this city to someone who has come from another place and has settled here merely due to the necessities of a career? I have often found myself pondering on this and wondering how much has this city accepted me, a stranger, and how much I have accepted this strange city that I suddenly found encroaching upon my lazy Calcuttan consciousness after 22 years of my life.

Thinking has never done much good, except when it is followed by action. Here's my act of capturing my idle thoughts about Hyderabad, what it has grown to mean to me, and what images it brings to my mind. So Lights! Camera! and Action!

I came to Hyderabad in June 2005, when I got my first job. Hyderabad. The name has a historical ring to it. In the famous 'Sound and Light' show held everyday in the heart of the windswept Golconda, I learnt, for the first time, about the history of this city. To give a short gist of the story behind the name, here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry on Hyderabad:

"A popular theory suggests that after founding the city, Muhammad Quli fell in love with and married a local Banjara girl known as Bhagamathi. He named this city after her as Bhagyanagaram. Upon her conversion to Islam, Bhagamathi changed her name to Hyder Mahal — and the new city's name was correspondingly changed to match it, resulting in the eponymous name "Hyderabad" (literally, "the city of Hyder")."
(For the full entry, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyderabad,_India)

A city was born from this torrential romance, and now, long long after the lovers are blended into the moth-eaten tapestry of history, it relaxes with its twin in the great peninsula of Deccan. Like a lady married for years now, the novelty and gaudiness of her brocade is now dulled, and age has chiseled out the fine lines around her eyes and her smile. Borne so many children, her girth has expanded to give her a portly appearance of a buxom matron, though still veiled in her feminine coquettry. Her laughter has no more the carefree ring of youth, but is sombre and laden with the weight of years of greiving and loss and suffering. No more a young girl, not yet the peace of plenitude and old age. It's a long life that the city has seen and is yet to see.

But yet, when the nights sparkle with festivities, she brings out her faded bridal finery and adorns herself, staining her eyes with kohl and surma, and her lips with the ancient blood red that her lovers so admired. Her arms are covered in bangles from her Choodi Bazar, golden, silver, copper, lilac, green, shining, shimmering, clinking...

Old men chewing paan hug each other, and young men make steal sly glances under canopies of little twinkling lights, hoping to extract a smile from the becoming new girl in the neighborhood. Her friends gather around her, twittering and chiding, while she, nervous in her new salwar kameez and iridiscent jewelry, hugs her bosom and stares at the starry sky with a knowing smile, knowing that she's the cynosure of the society and the only star in her lover's eyes...

And the city, the buxom matron, watches them all from her balcony, where she relaxes on a wooden armchair, her twin and companion by her side. She chews the paan and replays stories of her own youth, to her listeners, regaling them with anecdotes of how these old, respectable men of today used to gawk at her fifty years past, and pretend to stumble and fall at her feet while she walked on these same narrow streets. These same old men, now stern and austere in their spotless whites, now scolding the smart young lad for being so brazen, and sending him scurrying to the shop for more sweetmeats. Oh men, men! Always incorrigible, always unlearning their lessons. She sighs in contentment.

It's a restless evening and it ends like all other evenings. The matron must return to her repose, for another day awaits, another appointed hour of waking up and worldly woes. The city lives, laughs, then sleeps and wakes up to live some more.

But the city never forgets. For these very shiny lights and iridescent bangles will be sewn into her never-ending tapestry, and visited again on another joyous evening on the balcony, amidst festivities and frolic, when she will yet regale her audience with more stories and more...

The city never forgets.

To Stephen Flanagan, my friend, who made me feel that I can write too...

The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.

With the other masquerades
That times resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.

-Eliot, T.S. 'Preludes'

Eliot talks of the city in lines that leave indelible marks on the imagination. What is this love of the city that makes people write so much about it? About its splendour, about its decay, about the drama of desire and hate played out in every lane and every alley, every moment of the day? Surely, it must be an addiction. For the city dwellers are lotos-eaters too, and they might sojourn into the silences of the suburbs, lose themselves in the raptures of rural pastures, but come back they must. Mason wrote: 'Come I may, but go I must,' but he wrote this of travel, of relinquishing stagnation. To use these very lines to convey an antithetical feeling... I can travel the world for months on end, but I must go back to the city, its roads with their 'insiduous intents', its mazes that lead somewhere all the time but nowhere in the end. It is an addiction.

One crisp and rather overdone Saturday, I walked out into the sun with the intent of going to my Arabic class. Normally, I take an autorickshaw to the lady's house and another back, not walking too much. A hot day in Hyderabad is hot, to say the least. I am assuming the bold font will do the trick. Well, not that there is any other option--even 'scorching' seems like a feeble epithet.

So, there I was in an auto again, winding my way through the ghostly 'hills' of Banjara Hills (I wonder how it would have been when there were real hills here) into one of its deepest recesses, where, in a large, airy, but decrepit house, a bespectacled, going-on-50-something lady reads out the holy Quran and teaches her students to translate the text. I dont do anything of the sort. I have just managed to learn how to recognize and pronounce (the latter being the more difficult task) the arabic alphabets. Arabic and Sanskrit, I remember reading during my undergrad years (four years back), are among the oldest and most cumbersome languages in the world, given their grammatical and phonetical intricacies. I had always wanted to learn arabic and this chance was a godsend.

The house stands in the middle of an old colony of conservative looking houses, a colony named Hyder Manzil. What greets you when you enter the collosal, corrugated iron gates is a feeling that you have gone back in time...way, way back. There are trees as old and as tall as Jack's Beanstalk - monstrous crows and ravens perch at their tops, cawing raucously in the stillness. My teacher's house stands at the end of a rickety lane that slopes upward and culminates on their front yard where the sunshine falls lazily, bouncing off their red-tiled roof. A huge car coated in dust slumbers in the yard. I have often wondered if they ever take it out. Now, I am quite used to its comforting presence, an oddity that has merged into the larger picture after years of effort by standing immobile through rain and shine. Not that I have been going there for years... I'm a newbie. But it feels like a long time in that aged house...even the air and the sunshine seem to talk of many many years of silence and the chanting of the Quran.

I digress... to come back to my little story of the road, I left the grand old house by 1:00 p.m. and walked upto the road. It was still. 1:00 p.m. is a time when the city sleeps, lulled by the heat. Old people take their noon naps at home, dogs curl up in ditches or under shady trees and dream of succulent cuts of meat... Offices whirr lifelessly to the tunes of keyboards and air conditioners. The occasional bus roars on the road with its windows like the hollows of sunken eyes. The road. I had a long arduous walk till the road. Hyder Manzil is snuggled deep in a recess in Banjara Hills. To get back to civilization, I decided to walk. Not out of choice but rather out of necessity since there were no auto rickshaws available.

It was a long walk I had on that crisp, overdone Saturday afternoon. The road sloped up from Hyder Manzil, towards the next intersection. From there, a right turn opened out into the main road. The incline was gentle, flanked on both sides by small shops and tumbledown shacks. There were no trees lining the road... only occasional thorny bushes and stumps. The sun beat down on the road directly, and upon my head. The first five minutes had me heaving and puffing. I could hear my heart thumping with every step that I forged ahead. It was loud, loud in the stillness that surrounded me. For everything else was silent. Asleep. Closed for the afternoon. Deserted. Discarded.

I wanted some water. There was not even a single tap on that road that seemed to stretch for ever and ever. It seemed to me the longest climb I had undertaken. Not that it was long in reality. I had been walking only five minutes. Maybe ten. I still had another five minutes to go.

But the road seemed to melt and seethe with tar under my feet. I felt trapped, as if I was treading over a humongous jam-covered toast. I felt old in my limbs...as if the senility of Hyder Manzil had crept in unawares and accelerated my age by some twenty years. Or, as if the ghosts of that place wanted to drag me back with their long yet invisible, withered fingers, threading them more closely about with every step I took that led me away. The road looked on unmoved into the skies like an Indian mystic looking at the hot coals upon which he must walk. I looked resolutely at the intersection. For me, it was the only hope, the pitstop that I must make it to before I collapsed.

Some ten metres short of the intersection, I spied an auto standing ahead. It was empty. But I wanted to sit inside its shady interiors for a bit before I trudged on. But I discovered that I could not walk straight anymore. I staggered a couple of steps. Behind, I heard a volley of shouts and a host of motorcyclists passed by. Hooligans. A couple stopped to ask me if I needed some help. Their leers were unmasked. I prayed that they would pass without threat. Thankfully, they did.

I remember wondering how it felt in a desert. This pain compounded milliontimes. And the hope of respite diminished by another million...Better to die by poison than by this pain.

How I got home is unimportant and I do not want to write it. I did get home, since I am alive to pen this account. But what matters to me is the walk. Does it have a meaning beyond itself? After all, it is just a walk. On a hot day, on a dry road, without a handy bottle of water. A fifteen-minute climb upon a gradual slope to the main road. Something that everyone must have done, one time or the other...

So what made it so powerful as to leave such an impression upon my memory? What made the image of the road so crystal clear that I can still see it when I close my eyes? The sharpness will diminish and the image will merge into the past as my arabic teacher's car...but it gives me comfort, just like the car did. Comfort and a sense of survival. A sense that I made it through that journey till the end. Isn't that what every road brings us? To our destination. To the welcoming comforts of a home and a loved one. To news that we have been waiting for. To the conclusion.

And when we reach, we forget the road. We forget the journey and delve into the comforts of the conclusion. Like the comfort of a conclusion, had I written how I found and auto and went home to drink ice-cold lemonade in front of the TV. But I eschew this forgetfulness, no matter how much bliss it brings. I relive the sense of survival everytime the image of the road flashes in front of my eyes. Daffodils on a shore could not have given the poet more satisfaction than that journey gave to me. Saturdays come and Saturdays go. And yet, I relive my memory of the road.

The Primrose Path to the Everlasting Bonfire: Roads in Hyderabad.

A major problem afflicting this city is the problem of traffic. This problem, which haunts city dwellers everywhere, is more acute here given its small size. Hyderabad is a rather small city as compared to other metropolitan cities in India. The city has developed and expanded rather rapidly in the last five years, given the IT boom. A sudden increase in investment from foreign companies has resulted in a large section of people finding they have a lot of money to spend. Hence the chains of Reebok and other name brand showrooms, hotels, clubs and pubs, and a lot of privately owned vehicles. However, the rate at which the roadways and traffic organization are expanding, is not at par with the rate of social change. This disparity is best evident in the confusion on the roads morning, noon and night.

The roads of Hyderabad seem to have been suddenly overwhelmed by the deluge of drivers rushing post haste to all these new places of interest and entertainment, not to mention the offices in the IT hubs on the outskirts of the city. People reminisce about the times that their lanes and alleys were unclogged with parked cars and motorcycles, when a visit to areas like Madhapur was a small trek of sorts through vast expanses of unpeopled wildernesses. People in these places even remember seeing wolves and foxes at night, even three years back. With the onslaught of this Industrial Revolution, all wild animals have been forced to evacuate their hitherto peaceful abodes and seek refuge in clumps of intractable stony land that constructors have skirted around, wandering out by chance only to scare drunk partygoers and unwitting labourers and to make a meagre headline in the dailies.

Lucky animals them, since the plight of the average city dweller is a sorrier one. Everyone everywhere seems to be in a hurry. They cannot be blamed, since they will not get anywhere on time if they are not in a hurry. Whether owners of small cars, or larger ones, of motorcycles, bicycles or just two legs, the road is a scene of daily riots.

Add to it a bewildering array of drivers of rental cars, auto rickshaws and the occasional horse carriages, and we have a grand carnival of stuntmen and stuntwomen with death wishes on the roads of Hyderabad.

There is no peak hour - every hour is a peak hour. The roads have no respite from the constant flood of traffic. Plus, the most interesting phenomenon is the total apathy to the neatly drawn white lines that divide the road and seem to say something by being there. Possibly the need to look ahead is taken rather literally by the drivers and pedestrians as implying “Do not look left or right or even down, just look ahead”. The bad road sense largely results from this indifference to the concept of driving in lanes. On the whole, it is a problem of discipline – a problem that is characteristic of most cities in this country. The idea of driving in lanes is bypassed by the ingenuous concept of squeezing into gaps, which seems to be the only applicable concept on the roads of Hyderabad. Lacking adequate supervision from Traffice police, every individual assumes the title of ‘King of the Road’ and seeks to make full use of the benefits of his royal status.

The remedy to this affliction, as can be said of every other affliction in general, lies in the hands of the people. Firstly, one has to acknowledge that the other person beside us, in some other (maybe larger and better looking) car, is a human being with some feelings and commitments. He or she too has a family to look after, a train to catch, a meeting to attend, or a surgery to undergo. In this city, it is wonderful to notice how the normal pedestrian too contributes his fair bit to the increasing confusion by walking as if the whole road is (a) empty, or (b) his garden. White lines on the roads are not mere designs and pavements are not merely to enhance the look of the city. The Traffic system has to change too. Traffic rules have to be imposed with more stringency. Fines ought to be levied at every instance of misconduct around the year, not merely during the end of the month periods when the Traffic Police are roused out of their sluggishness to detain and book a few miscreants to show their superiors that they have been working. Fines ought to be made more than empty threats. And posters such as ‘No Dunken Driving’ must be corrected. Every man on the road has to become aware of his responsibility, rather than just his rights. And when this awareness does not come from within, it has to be imposed from without, at least till the time the circumstances change for the better.