Night Bus to Vijayawada
On the overnight bus home, a woman shares murukulu and her regrets with the old man in seat fifteen. The conductor says it was empty.
The bus was supposed to leave the big station at half past ten, and at a quarter to eleven it was still standing in its bay with the engine running and the driver eating a banana on the steps.
Harika had taken the window seat. Fourteen. She had booked it at four in the afternoon, from her office in Madhapur, between two meetings, after her mother’s phone call. She had not cried during the call, or in the meeting afterwards, or in the auto to the bus station, and now she sat with her laptop bag on her knees, watching the other buses come and go under the yellow lights, their destinations glowing above the windscreens in Telugu and English. Guntur. Kurnool. Tirupati. A boy walked past the windows selling water bottles and peanut chikki, calling it out in a voice already hoarse.
“Is this fifteen?”
She turned. An old man was standing in the aisle with a cloth bag in one hand, looking at the number above the seat beside hers. He was thin and very upright, in a cream half-sleeved shirt and a white veshti, with a folded towel over one shoulder and spectacles with thick black frames. He smelled of sandalwood soap and, faintly, of camphor, as though he had come from a temple.
“Fifteen,” Harika said, and moved her bag.
“Good. I always ask for fifteen. Over the wheel, so you feel all the roads, but near the front, so you don’t feel too many.” He sat down slowly, and put the cloth bag on his lap, and let out a long breath that seemed to have been waiting a long time. “Vijayawada?”
“Vijayawada.”
“Home?”
She hesitated. “It was.”
He nodded, as though that were a perfectly ordinary answer, and did not ask anything more.
The bus pulled out at five past eleven, past the shuttered shops of Dilsukhnagar and the late-night biryani places, and then the city thinned, and the dark came in from both sides, and they were on the highway.
The old man took a packet folded from newspaper out of his cloth bag and held it open to her. Murukulu, the spiral kind, golden and crisp and smelling of ajwain.
“My wife’s,” he said. “She makes them every Sankranti. Too many. Always too many. Take.”
Harika took one. She had not eaten since lunch. The murukku broke with a sound like a small branch, and the taste was so exactly the taste of her mother’s kitchen at Sankranti that she had to look out of the window for a while.
“Good?”
“Very good.”
“Too much salt,” he said, with satisfaction. “I tell her every year. Forty years, she has never once listened.”
The highway went on. The lights of trucks came towards them and swelled and passed. At Choutuppal there were still people sitting outside a tea stall under a tube light, and a dog asleep on the divider with its legs in the air. The bus rocked over a speed breaker, and the old man rocked with it, and said, “There. That one’s been there since 1974,” and Harika laughed for the first time that day.
“You know this road.”
“I’ve done it more times than I’ve eaten rice,” he said. “Every month for years. Hyderabad, Vijayawada. Vijayawada, Hyderabad.”
“For work?”
“For my son.” He folded the murukulu packet closed. “He lived in Hyderabad. I lived in Vijayawada. We had a fight. A big fight, the kind that becomes a wall. He wanted to do one thing with his life, I wanted another, we both said what we said.” He looked at his hands, which were long and spotted and very still. “And then every month I took this bus. Got down at the big station in the morning, took a city bus to where he worked, and stood outside on the road across from his office. Half an hour, one hour. Then I took the night bus back.”
“You never went in?”
“Not once.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “I was proud. I was waiting for him to look out of the window. Fathers are very stupid. We think if we stand somewhere long enough, the other person will feel it.”
Somewhere after Narketpally the lights in the bus went off, all except a small blue one above the driver, and the other passengers pulled their shawls up to their chins. The air-conditioning hummed. Somebody’s phone played a devotional song very quietly and then stopped.
Harika found she was talking.
She did not know why. Perhaps because it was dark and he could not see her face properly, or because the bus made everything feel temporary, as if words spoken at seventy kilometres an hour would blow away behind them on the highway. She told him about her father. How he had chosen the boy for her when she was twenty-six, a good boy from a good family, an engineer in America. How she had said yes, because everyone said yes. How it had gone wrong almost at once, quietly, in a way that was nobody’s fault and everybody’s, and how after two years she had come home with two suitcases and her father had stood in the doorway and said, in front of the neighbours, “If you leave a marriage, don’t come back to this house.”
“So I didn’t,” she said. “I went to Hyderabad. I got a job. I got a better job. Three years. I send my mother money and she sends me pickles and we talk on the phone when he is at the temple. That’s it. That’s all.”
“And now?”
“And now he had a heart attack this morning, in the vegetable market. He’s in a hospital near Benz Circle. My mother says he’s stable. She says he asked for me.” She pressed her palm flat against the cold window. “I don’t know what I’ll say. I don’t know if I’ll go in.”
The old man was quiet for a long time. The bus slowed for a toll gate and the orange light of it slid over his face and away again.
“Can I tell you what I think he meant?” he said. “Your father. In the doorway.”
“You don’t know him.”
“No. But I know the doorway.” He turned the cloth bag a little on his knees. “When a father says don’t come back, he means don’t go. He means, I am frightened, and I don’t know what to do, and the neighbours are watching, and I am too old to learn new sentences. It comes out wrong. It always comes out wrong. We spend thirty years being the one who knows things, and then one day we don’t know anything, and we have nothing to say except the old words, and the old words are terrible.” He took off his spectacles and cleaned them on the end of his towel. “I said something like that to my son. Worse, maybe. And then I spent eleven years standing on a road outside his office.”
“Did he ever look out of the window?”
“He didn’t know I was there,” the old man said. “How could he? I never told him.” He put his spectacles back on. “Go in, amma. Even if you don’t know what to say. Go in and sit down near the bed. He’ll be lying there practising the old words. Let him see your face before he gets them out.”
At Suryapet the bus stopped at a hotel by the highway for twenty minutes. It was nearly one in the morning. The place was a long open shed with steel tables and a television showing an old film with the sound off, and outside, under a single bulb, a man was frying mirchi bajji in a huge black kadai, and the smell of chilli and gram flour and hot oil hung in the cool air like a blanket.
“Tea?” Harika said.
“I’ll stay,” said the old man. “My knees don’t like the steps. You go.”
She bought two teas in small paper cups and carried them back to the bus, and he took his from her with both hands and held it under his nose for a long time before he drank.
“Suryapet tea,” he said. “Always too sweet. Always too hot. Every time I come through here I burn my tongue, and I’m grateful.”
The bus went on. She did not remember falling asleep, but she must have, because she dreamt of the house in Vijayawada, the courtyard with the tulasi plant in its raised pot, the swing on its iron chains in the front room that squeaked on the forward stroke and not the back. In the dream her father was sitting on the swing, and he was much younger, and he was laughing at something she could not see.
When she woke, it was almost light. The bus was crossing the Krishna on the long bridge into the city, and the river was grey and enormous on both sides, and on the far bank the hill with the Durga temple on top was just catching the first pink. Her neck hurt. The murukulu packet lay on her lap, folded neatly.
The seat beside her was empty.
At the bus station she waited at the front while the other passengers climbed down with their bags and their sleepy children. The conductor was a broad man with a moustache and a leather bag of tickets across his chest, writing something in a register.
“The old man,” Harika said. “In fifteen. Did he get down before the bridge? He left his packet.”
The conductor looked up at her, and then at the register.
“Fifteen?” He ran his pen down the page. “Fifteen was empty, madam. Booked, but no-show. I checked at Hyderabad itself.”
“No. There was an old man. White veshti. Spectacles. He was there the whole night. He talked to me.”
The conductor looked at her the way people look at someone who has had a long night. Kindly. “Madam, I came down the aisle at Suryapet to count heads. Fifteen was empty. You were sleeping with your head on the glass.” He shrugged. “Night buses. Sometimes the road talks.”
She stood on the platform with the murukulu packet in her hand while the buses roared and backed around her, and the loudspeaker announced a departure for Machilipatnam, and a man went past selling the morning’s newspapers. Then, because her hands needed something to do, she unfolded the packet.
The murukulu were gone. She did not remember eating them all. The newspaper inside was soft and yellow and old, very old, the print gone brown. A Telugu daily. The date at the top of the page said the eleventh of March, 1998.
The hospital near Benz Circle smelled of phenyl and filter coffee. Her mother met her in the corridor and held her for a long time without saying anything, and then pushed her gently through a door.
Her father was lying in the bed by the window with a drip in his arm and his chest full of wires. He had become small. That was the first thing. He had always been a big man, filling doorways, and now he was small, and grey around the mouth, and his eyes, when they opened and found her, filled up immediately.
She saw him gathering himself. She saw the old words coming, the doorway words, she could almost hear them forming.
She pulled the plastic chair close and sat down, and took his hand, the one without the drip.
“Nanna,” she said.
He looked at her for a long time. Then he looked away at the window, at the morning coming up over the city, and when he spoke his voice was very quiet and not at all the voice from the doorway.
“I dreamt of my father last night,” he said. “First time in so many years. Since he died. He was on a bus, can you imagine, eating murukulu. He said you were coming.” He laughed, weakly, and it turned into a cough. “We fought, you know, he and I. When I went to Hyderabad for that first job. I never told you. He never came to see me, not once, in eleven years. Then he was gone.”
Harika held his hand. In her other hand, in her lap, she was still holding the folded square of old newspaper. It smelled, very faintly, of ajwain and sandalwood soap.
“He came,” she said. “He just never went in.”
Her father looked at her, not understanding. She did not explain. There would be time. She sat beside the bed and held his hand while the drip ticked and the nurse came and went, and outside the window the city woke up, the autos and the temple bells and the milk vans, and somewhere on the highway behind her, the night bus was already turning round for the long road back.