The Bus
The bus has a bathroom. Other buses that leave Bengaluru for my hometown don’t have bathrooms. They pull over on the highway when you have to pee, or they stop at a dhaba and the driver asks passengers to go so he won’t have to make extra stops along the way.
The bus is a luxury coach, dark brown from the outside. It has a thirty-two-inch TV and reclining seats and air-conditioning, all of which makes me think: What a good deal. It’s the Diwali weekend and every long-distance coach is full of techies going home. Securing a ticket was impossible, but then I came across a new office at the back of the bus station, a travel company by the name of Alphonso Tours, and they made it happen.
The driver is busy tinkering with a hearing aid as I get on the bus. “Don’t use the bathroom for number two. Only number one,” he says, not bothering to look up.
I feel the air-conditioning already—sweet. The bus is nearly full. I look at my ticket: 20B. An aisle seat next to a bearded man on his phone, music blasting out of his earbuds. I sit down and relax my feet and begin watching the Bollywood film playing on the TV, a film in which the hero shoves the heroine from the roof of a tall building. Nothing like a movie to alleviate the boredom of an overnight bus ride. We’re past the outskirts of the city now, and farmland has started to appear on either side of the road. I haven’t gone home in months, and I’m torn—can you tell, K?
An hour passes. The bearded man takes a selfie and posts it on Instagram. I turn my neck to stretch, and the seat behind me is empty. I remember seeing an old woman with a large nose there, and I can’t tell if she’s moved to a different seat or if I’m confusing her with someone I know from somewhere else. My eyes fall on the bathroom; that’s it. She’s gone to the restroom. But then a passenger in the front, a burly man in 5D, stands up and closes the bathroom door behind him. I turn to my back and count six empty seats in the dark. I don’t remember seeing so many empty seats when I got on. Weird. Must be exhaustion. I continue watching the movie.
Five minutes later my eyes drift toward the bathroom. The burly man still hasn’t come out. 5D is empty and I’m disgusted. This man hasn’t listened to what the driver said. Instead, he’s taking an extraordinary dump. People are like that, I guess.
A lot of passengers are sleeping, some snoring. The bearded man next to me is watching a YouTube video on his phone: a man keeps springing a toy snake in people’s faces and capturing their reactions. My neighbor laughs whenever the prank results in an especially outsized response.
I try sleeping, but the movie is loud.
I take deep breaths, but sleep doesn’t come. I can sleep on the bus only if I’m in a window seat. You know that, K. You must remember the time we went on a school picnic and you took the window seat, not on the way to the orchard but on the way back home. Our bellies were stuffed with mangoes, and I told you the bus would make me puke if I didn’t have the window and you called my bluff and we fought over it. God, the kids we were, it wasn’t a pretty sight. You were stronger than me and you felt that you’d won, but I clutched at my throat and retched hard enough for some phlegm to fall on my shorts. You were sorry; you gave me the window seat and offered the kerchief Mom tucked in your shirt pocket. When I began to feel the mangoes in my throat, you told me to take deep breaths and sleep until the feeling subsided. I remember your face, blank, staring ahead, thinking who knows what, as I sloped against the window, falling asleep. Now you’re dead and I’m stuck on this bus.
It’s nothing new. You’ve been dead for a while, long enough for me to nod when people ask if I’m an only child. Long enough for me to forget that I had a brother. When you’re twenty-three, everything that happened in childhood feels like a lifetime ago. That’s just the way it is. Sorry, K. I don’t think of you often. Except when I’m on a bus and I’m going home, and what home is has changed irrevocably, not because I live and work in Bengaluru now, away from our parents, although I shouldn’t say our parents because they’re not the parents you’d remember, they’re my parents now, and I promise there’s no satisfaction in claiming them for myself. It’s just that people change and they’re not who they were, nobody is, and that’s what I’m trying to say, that life has changed for all of us, and home has too. We no longer live in the one-bedroom apartment on the hill; we fell to the ghetto soon after you died. What home is has changed so much that I don’t even know how to define it, but here I am, just thinking about all the ways it’s changed, and you, K, are on the top of that precipice.
The first thing anyone sees at home is a garlanded photo taken on your tenth birthday. You’re grinning stupidly and making a victory sign. It might be the only photo of you that doesn’t include me. Did you know that Mom doesn’t make beef curry anymore because she can’t stop herself from bringing up the fact that you used to gnaw at the shin like a dog? Or that Dad carries a passport photograph of you in his wallet to remind himself that if he’d had enough money, he’d have been able to afford the surgery for your head injury? After you died, I became the center of attention. Not right away, of course, but with time, which is what I’d always wanted, but not like that. You were always their favorite, you could make them laugh, make them feel like parents. I just make them feel like needy children now. I send them money, but I never answer their calls or tell them about my life in the city. What’s there to tell? I don’t go home except when Mom pleads and pleads. When I’m home, how can I ignore your stupid grin? How can I take their attention all for myself? I never have this problem in the city. There, people just see me as me; they don’t think of me as a stand-in for the other.
I open my eyes. 5D is still empty. Has the burly man passed out on the toilet and hurt himself? Then the bathroom door slides open, as though the person who last used it failed to latch it properly. The room is empty. Where has he gone?
I walk to 5D and find a jute bag with some clothes tucked underneath the man’s seat. The old man in 5C looks at me questioningly, as if I’m trying to steal 5D’s belongings.
“Where is he?” I point at the empty seat.
“What?” 5C says, straining to hear me over the film score.
“The man who was sitting here, where did he go?”
“Toilet,” 5C says, his eyes traveling to the half-open bathroom door. He stands up. “Babu?” He looks up and down the aisle. “Where did Babu go?”
“Are you two related?”
“He’s my son.” 5C steps into the aisle, using his cane. “Babu?”
I feel bad for worrying him. “He’s probably just chatting with the driver. I can check.”
“The toilet,” he says, as if he must pee first.
On the TV, the hero is dancing with the heroine in the Alps. The heroine is not wearing a lot of clothing but the hero has a down coat. I watch them gyrate. The movie is old; I’ve seen it before. I sit in 5D and wait for the old man to return. I’m used to waiting. It’s what I do for work. I spend hours on call providing technical support for Bank of America’s internal ticketing system. I sit in meetings all night listening to the front-end team onshore and pick up phrases like “have a good weekend,” “knock on wood,” “tell me about it.”
The song ends and the couple jumps from dancing in the Alps to the confines of an apartment in Mumbai. Remember when we joked about that, K? You said that only ghosts can travel that quickly, and you made creepy whistling noises. I asked you to stop, but you wouldn’t. I said I’d tell Mom if you didn’t stop, but you kept doing it. I was angry with you; I said I’d cut your tongue off when you were sleeping. There are a lot of things I wish I hadn’t said.
Do you remember too the time we played hide-and-seek behind the portico and you crouched down in the well and covered yourself with coconut leaves? We were all so worried, and when we called your name, you wouldn’t answer, and it took a long time for you to emerge, and when you did, you were oddly quiet, not really celebrating the fact that you’d won. Mom abandoned the peanuts she was roasting to fret over you, to check for bruises, and you smiled and brushed her away, but now I wonder if you knew something back then, something unexplainable. And when it was my time to hide, I ran away to the next street, aiming to do one better than you. When I came back twenty minutes later, you and Mom were striking the TV, trying to make it work. Even after I announced I was back, Mom did nothing, she just said, “Good,” and went into the kitchen. You casually asked where I’d been, as if you were trying to be nice, but you were more excited to see a flash of Tom and Jerry than you were to talk to me. I unplugged the TV and ran to Mom, sure that you’d chase me, and when you did chase, it was me who smiled from behind Mom’s saree this time. Maybe I too knew something back then. I don’t think I did, but it’s too eerie, the way we were smiling. It’s almost as if we both knew where we were headed, as if we both had a sense of what was waiting for us, as if we were practicing our futures, you under the ground, and me far away, hiding from what you’d do to me. Is there a better definition of home than that?
My head hurts. The old man hasn’t returned yet. I’m about to get up and knock on the bathroom door to ask if he’s okay when it slides open. The bathroom looks empty. I approach gingerly, as though it holds a ghost, and I see the toilet and a sink the size of cupped palms. The bathroom is windowless and smaller than my cubicle. I don’t have to step inside to know that the old man isn’t there.
I go back to seat 5D. I find the old man’s Aadhaar card and medication inside his jute bag. His name is Pulliah; he’s seventy-six years old, has a mole on his right cheek, is five feet eight inches tall, and lives in Kadapa. That’s him in the photo. I pinch myself and wince in pain. Everything is real and two men have gone missing.
I’m about to walk up to the driver when I see a woman in a red saree, 7B, moving toward the bathroom. Oh fuck.
I stop her. “Madam, please don’t use this bathroom.”
She looks at me like I’m a creep. “It’s empty.”
“An old man went in there—” I start to say.
“Disgusting.”
She walks to her seat, pauses for a minute, and heads back to the bathroom.
“Madam, trust me, please don’t go,” I say.
“I have to go, move.”
The bald man in 5B stands up. He’s been watching us. “Is there a problem?”
“He’s telling me not to go to the bathroom,” the woman says.
“You have a problem with ladies using the bathroom?”
“Sir, it’s not like that. It’s not safe,” I say, turning toward the bald man.
“Oh,” the bald man exclaims. “Safe for men, but not safe for women?”
The woman tries to go to the bathroom, but I stick my hand out, blocking her path.
“What are you doing?” the woman says.
“I’ll call the police,” the bald man says.
“No, sir, listen to me.”
He slaps my arm down and says to the woman, “Madam, you can go. I’ll deal with this rascal.”
“Please don’t go,” I say when 5B shoves me, and I fall into the empty seat of 5D. The woman locks the bathroom door behind her.
A different movie has begun playing on the TV. In this one, the hero comes from an affectionate family. Everyone loves him, which can only mean something will go wrong. But the few people who are awake are watching me and 5B instead of the movie. “Sir, please listen to me,” I say.
“Sure, you tell me. Which police station do you want to go to?” He takes out his phone.
“The old man who was sitting in this seat here went to the bathroom and didn’t come out again.”
“What?” he says.
“Yes, sir, I saw him go inside, but he never came out.”
“How can he hide in the bathroom?”
5B’s eyes light up. He turns to the guy next to him in 5A and says, “Mental.”
They soften, urge me to go back to my seat.
I grab 5C’s Aadhaar card and say, “This old man is missing. He was sitting there.”
They look at me like I’m in the business of stealing Aadhaar cards. “Go to your seat. If you so much as move, we’ll call the police.”
I don’t know what to say; I trudge back to my seat. As soon as I sit, the bearded man wakes up. He looks at the TV and shakes his head: “This movie is terrible.”
I agree and introduce myself. His name is Deepak, and he works at Accenture; the bus won’t reach his town until four in the morning. We talk a little about our projects, about how crazy our clients are. Deepak says one client made him move a button from one corner of the screen to another three times. “And we had a meeting each time to review the button change!”
I tell him how a white colleague keeps asking me, whenever there’s a meeting and no one knows what to say in the beginning, if I know a certain Alex who worked out of Bengaluru. When I tell him that I don’t, he says, “Yes, of course not, over a billionpeople there!”
Deepak laughs and opens WhatsApp. I look away.
5B is hovering by the bathroom. The bathroom door has slid open and there’s no trace of the woman. I feel relieved but also guilty. Before I have a chance to say anything, 5B walks inside the bathroom and begins examining the hinges. The door bolts shut.
I’m not surprised when it slides open a minute later and 5B is gone. Next to me, Deepak takes a phone call. He says he’ll reach home at four in the morning. I’m tempted to say, How can you be so sure, brother?
—
The bus moves on the highway as though it’s floating— there’s hardly a lurch. The TV’s off now; people are sleeping. Deepak is hugging himself, yawning. “It’s very cold,” he says. The air-conditioning has been working well, maybe too well. I’m beginning to feel my bladder, like I could pee. My town, ...
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