It was this day when three years ago we set to return home for the first vacations being declared on the occasion of Diwali. Around fifteen days and we all felt as if we spent years together in the hostel. With a bit of heaviness somewhere in the corner of heart, we all packed up. 1st November, 2007. It was a very special day for me since it was the housewarming ceremony of our new duplex and I was supposed to reach as early as possible.
As I already told somewhere in previous posts that our college was quiet far from the main city and so it took us almost an hour and a half in reaching the place where we could get a bus for our home, Bhopal. The taxi cabs charged us anything they wanted for taking us those 25-30 kilometers and we had to pay whatever they demanded. Finally, we came to the bus stand only to find no AC buses being scheduled up till the noon. It was around 8 am and I couldn't afford waiting in order to reach the holy 'Vaastu-Pooja' ceremony at my home. So I decided to set for the journey alone in the non-AC bus and leave Manu and other friends to take the girls later in the AC bus. But ultimately all of us set in the same non-AC bus thinking it would be fine when we all were together.
One of my pretty HS (High Society) friends sat beside me in the 2x2 seater bus. I wondered why she offered me to sit with her. The journey started with all sorts of nuisance created by the vendors both inside and outside the bus. I don't know how people tolerate those shrills that sound both comic and tragic. On the other hand I wonder how much would those vendors earn by selling a few 5-rupee items per day. Only God knows how they feed their families. Here, by my side, she put on her expensive-looking goggles and took out 'Femina' from her bag to read. I had seen people applying glasses for reading, but never the goggle-ones. I controlled my laughter by suppressing it into an idiotic grin. In between turning the magazine pages, she kept on making weird faces looking at the other passengers of the bus. (I tried to make out what made her make those faces, was that the journey or the magazine that contained models more prettier than her...?)
I was too tired of packing up the luggage and setting things quiet right and safe in the room the whole night before the journey. There I found the answer of how do people sleep in such buses? I fell fast asleep hugging the tiny soft toy, a small cow or something, that Hardik handed me up when we left from the hostel (Hardik had told me to bring it back to him from home as it was just to remind me of him in the vacations that followed.) I would have woken up around an hour later to see the bus over-packed with passengers. Manu told me that they were the passengers of some other bus that failed somehow on the way and so we all were left together to choke and boil in the same bus on that pink cold day. I felt like jumping away out of the bus. But I kept calm in order to pretend as if it mattered the least to me. My co-passenger was apparently annoyed by my comfortable naps I was able to manage in such adversities, but I couldn't help it. (Probably because she had kept on telling me just before the journey that she had never travelled in a non-AC bus and had taken some medicine for motion-sickness due to which she could fall asleep any time, and it was me, not her, who was sleeping like a monster who had never ever slept for the past 200 years together). The journey that started from our hostel, boys and girls all singing, travelling together for the very first time, ended up like being fried up in a non-stick pan.
Finally, we got down at Bhopal in around five hours and Manu's father took us to my new home so that all of us attended the final part of the ceremony, the 'Poornahuti'. The first journey seemed to be average, in terms of adventure, until one of my friends called me up to ask for the travel agency's contact number, since he had left his briefcase in the overcrowded bus that contained all his original academic documents. I thanked God for I didn't throw the ticket before his call, to forget that messy journey.
Thereafter, I threw that ticket and forgot all the discomfort we experienced that day. But still I remember those goggles 'on' to read Femina and that anti-motion sickness drug taken by my co-passenger, as a side effect of which, I slept cozy...
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