‘Please don’t trouble yourself,’ said Rasheed.
A sudden look of more than ordinary concern, even anxiety, crossed the sober features of the old man.
‘Rasheed, I am worried that –’ he began, then stopped.
Rasheed, who respected his father-in-law, had unburdened himself to him about his visit to the patwari, but he knew that that was not the source of the old man’s concern.
‘Please don’t worry, Haji Sahib,’ said Rasheed, his face also reflecting momentary pain. Then he busied himself with their bags and tins and canisters and they all set off for the road that led past the outskirts of the village. Here there was a small tea-stall where the bus to the town and the railway station stopped. A little crowd of passengers had gathered, together with a larger crowd of those who had come to see them off.
The bus clattered to a halt.
Haji Sahib was in tears as he embraced first his daughter, then his son-in-law. When he took Meher up in his arms, she followed one of his tears with her finger, frowning. The baby slept through all this, even though she was passed from arm to arm.
With a great deal of bustle everyone got onto the bus except for two passengers; a young woman in an orange sari and a little girl of about eight, obviously her daughter.
The woman was embracing a middle-aged woman – presumably her mother, whom she had come to visit, or perhaps her sister – and weeping in a loud voice. They hugged and clutched each other with theatrical abandon, wailing and keening.
The younger woman gasped with grief and cried: ‘Do you remember the time when I fell down and hurt my knee…’
The other woman wailed: ‘You are my only one, my only one…’
The little girl, who was dressed in mauve with one pink ribbon around her single plait, was looking profoundly bored.
‘You fed me food – you gave me everything…’ continued her mother.
‘What will I do without you… Oh God! Oh God!’
This went on for a few minutes despite the desperate honks of the driver’s horn. But to drive off without them would have been unthinkable. The other passengers, though the spectacle had palled and they were now getting impatient, would never have allowed it.
‘What is happening?’ said Rasheed’s wife in a low, troubled voice to Rasheed.
‘Nothing, nothing. They are just Hindus.’
Finally, the young woman and her daughter came aboard. She leaned out of the window and continued to wail. With a sneeze and a growl the bus jolted forward. Within seconds, the woman stopped wailing and turned her attention to eating a laddu, which she took out of a packet, broke into two equal ‘hemispheres and shared with her daughter.
10.11
THE bus was so ill that it kept collapsing every few minutes. It belonged to a potter who had made a spectacular change of profession – so spectacular in fact that he had got himself ostracized by his local caste-brethren until they found his bus indispensable for getting to the station. The potter drove it and tended it, fed and watered it, diagnosed its sneezes and false death-rattles, and coaxed its carcass along the road. Clouds of grey-blue smoke rose from the engine, raw oil leaked from its sump, the smell of burning rubber seared the air whenever it braked, and it punctured or blew a tyre every hour or two. The road, made of vertically laid bricks and little else, was cratered with holes, and the wheels had lost all memory of their shock absorbers. Rasheed felt he was in danger of castration every few minutes. His knees kept knocking the man in front of him because the back boards of the seat were missing.
None of the regular passengers, however, thought that there was any cause for complaint. This was far better and more convenient than a journey of two hours in a bullock-cart. Whenever the bus stopped involuntarily somewhere, the conductor leaned out of the window and looked at the wheels. Another man then jumped out with a pair of pliers and climbed under the bus. Sometimes the bus stopped because the driver wanted to chat to a friend along the route – or simply because he felt like stopping. Nor did the driver have any compunctions about pressing his customers into service.
Whenever he needed the bus push-started he would turn around and yell in the powerfully vocalic local dialect: ‘Aré, du-char jané utari aauu. Dhakka lagaauu!’
And when the bus was about to move, he would summon them with a battlecry of: ‘Aai jao bhaiyya, aai jao. Chalo ho!’
The driver took particular pride in the signs (in standard Hindi) displayed in the bus. Above his seat for instance, it said Officer Seat and Don’t talk to the driver when the bus is in motion. Above the door it said: Only disembark when the bus has come to a halt. Along one wall of the bus, the following message was painted in a murderous scarlet: Do not travel when drunk or with a loaded gun. But it said nothing about goats, and there were several in the bus.