Bus Breakdown in Bangalore

We left Visthar a little before noon. About twenty of us plus all piled into one elephantine blue van strung with wreaths and garlands of sweet-smelling flowers, and headed for Bangalore. Minutes later, we all piled out. Perhaps it was the weight of twenty bodies, but our faithful steed had died, leaving us standing on a sidewalk on the cusp of Bangalore. In America, even in sleepy Saint Peter, this would have been a catastrophe. You’re now running late. Someone is checking their watch, and as each second ticks by, their esteem for you dies like a molting parakeet, their image of you losing all its glamour and then falling off its perch to rot among the clippings of last week’s newspaper, now as irrelevant as your late behind. Not to mention your fellow motorists are now leaning on their horns, baying for your blood. In India, traffic is exactly the opposite. It’s takes away all expectations of when one will arrive, and in what state. Our stationary bus was just one more element. In a way, it’s very Zen, following some bizarre cosmic order all its own. One could seek wisdom in its wild eddies and flows of Indian traffic like a mystic pondering a coil of incense smoke. This the sixteen of us proceeded to do while we waited for a back up van. Men blew past us on motorbikes with women in saris riding side saddle, whilst the rickshaw drivers eyed us like carrion picking birds around the dead carcass of our bus. Three men pushing carts of corn and pots of boiling water passed by, presumably to go divide and conquer the corn market in some park. From the other direction came a man, his bike so laden with coconuts that we couldn’t even tell how they were attached, wearing a benighted expression on his face that said these coconuts were getting where they were going come hell or high water (which, given the recent monsoon season, would be in about an hour). Teenagers, in traffic that knows no reason, had to up the ante and drove in ways that would make anarchists say “now hold on, there have to be some limits.” A rickshaw emerged from the flow because a little girl in a green dress had convinced her mother, who was burka-ed in black from head to toe, that we should take her picture. And all the while, on the other sidewalk, an urban cow is chewing litter and eyeing us with what looks strangely like ennui. Our back up bus arrived to snap us out of our reverie, no garlands or sky-blue paint. Rather, an earthy green and a reliable engine. We all piled in, and rejoined the flow, no longer observers, but part of it all again, but I do wonder if our first big blue bus knew a good spot to break down.