Waiting — at the crossroads

Once you hit the road, without a personal vehicle, you need enormous patience to move from one point to the other, especially if you are in the rural areas of India. I was not an exception.

First, i waited exactly one hour and 15 minutes in the morning for the one-off bus to my destination. It didn’t arrive, as elusive as it can be. 

Once you hit the road, without a personal vehicle, you have to do a lots of permutations and combinations — something we all were good at as high school maths students but not now. I took a bus on a different route that will drop me at a junction on the highway from where i had to catch another bus to the village where i was headed to. 

Unfortunately, things are different now as the pandemic rules disallowed me to hop on to its roof unlike in the past when my regular bus rides gave me umpteenth opportunities for a 360-degree view — the sal trees bending to touch my forehead with its new-grown leaves, ducking my head to avoid any abrasion with the unevenly trimmed branches or the high-tension electric cables that criss-cross golden paddy fields, and the real wind-in-my-hair feeling. 

The window seat, with the warmth of a mid-morning winter sun, had only a skewed view. The bus carried the label of ‘super’ — means less stops like a superfast express train. But it truly was snail-paced, angering commuters who had to reach workplace on time. But a different day was in store for me. 

On a dusty stretch of the peeled-off-asphalt of the highway, the conductor asked me to get off and wait for another bus. Thus began a solitary wait for that solitary bus — Godot style. 

Once you hit the road, without a personal vehicle, things are about to unfold in a different way. I asked a tuk-tuk/toto driver, who was busy on his cellphone, about the bus. Among otherwise mundane things like untimely rain caused severe crop damage and sudden elephant invasion in his village, he politely told me there is only one bus in a day on this route, and it has already passed this junction. The one seen in this photo will never start! This means, in simple words, you have to walk 20 and odd kilometres amid dense forests. Else, wait for your luck for a hitch ride in a sparsely populated area with hardly any vehicle. 

Should I ask the truck driver who’s stopped to relieve himself by the road? How much distance can this tuk-tuk go on its battery? What about this motorcycle rider with a huge haystack on its pillion? I won’t fit there! Neither would i fit in this motorised van-rickshaw with some trunks of wood headed to a saw mill nearby. Options are minimal and fast diminishing as the sun is getting mild and shadows are growing longer than the tall sal and eucalyptus trees. 

No matter how tough is the day, I’m always optimistic that some magic will happen like the cormorant i spotted a whole afternoon perched on a small rock with its wings spread out before taking a plunge deep into the pond next to our house for its well-deserved lunch. 

And, magic it happened as a group of youngsters with football jerseys appearing from nowhere. They were on their way to play a five-a-side tournament in a neighbouring village. Accompanied by a coach, they were bubbling with confidence — of a victory that would earn them a spot in the semifinal. And, if they win the final, a goat is secured as winner’s trophy. In rural Bengal, such ‘khasi’ tournaments are not uncommon. They woke the drooling driver of tuk-tuk and asked if he can take them  — and, me — to the tournament ground. As I’ve always observed that people are always kind to strangers, and that afternoon was no exception: once you hit the road without a personal vehicle, you are never alone.