A sharp turn in the matter of bus rides!

So, I revise my opinion of a bus ride – I’ll do a 180.
I love buses, especially when I manage to snag a seat. After I “saw” an editor at a newspaper for a job, I took a ride back home, and the bus, for all its inefficiencies, was really a microcosm of the city.
Now, bear in mind that I’m able to say all this simply because I got a seat to sit on. I made another trip that made my blood boil, and my leg, incidentally, because my foot was right on the vent near the gear box.
But I digress. I reached the bus stop, after visiting the parents of a friend of mine. They regaled me with stories from my college days (most of which I had forgotten either because I was drunk, or I had a bad memory, or they were making things up), and I was merrily on my way back home. I had been forewarned though: It was 4:50 p.m., and peak traffic was, literally around the corner.
I got on a fairly empty bus, a Deluxe bus no less, and the politics of gender immediately came into play. Many women were seated one to a seat, and because of the unwritten rule that men cannot solicit the empty seats next to women on a bus, there were several men standing. I always, always, make an effort and sit next to a woman in that case, so that two men may be allowed to sit.
I did that, and moved closer to a woman occupying a seat, and lo! The woman placed her handbag next to her, and gestured to the back of the bus. "Friend," was all she said, and I had to forget that seat! When I turned back to look at the seat I had given up, that had gone too! So much for chivalry!
Thank God I got a seat next to the door, really squeezed in, but that was the only empty seat, and we had reached the dreaded LIC Bus Stop – where half of Chennai apparently boarded buses. Now LIC is to Chennai what Sears Tower is to Chicago – our pride and joy, our architectural wonder, standing all of 14 floors tall.
In any case, there entered a crowd that, if melted, could not fit the bus even in liquid form. A couple of stops down the line, another huge crowd entered, and the fate of the bus ride was sealed – it was to be a rough one indeed. A young girl (apparently returning home from office), stood next to me, and I felt almost guilty sitting, the way she was hanging on for dear life.
An older vendor woman was seated on the seat behind me, and her humungous basket was lying around somewhere near her. The woman next to her was irritated at having to sit next to this vendor, which would have left this other leaner woman with nearly no space on the seat indeed. When the time came to alight, the lean woman had a tough time negotiating the basket, and grumbled in English all the way to the door. It had no effect on the vendor woman, clearly, and I smiled at the leaner woman, as I recognized that everybody’s fuse was getting shorter, as the bus made its journey across the city, slowly.
Every couple of minutes, the conductor shouted, “Ulla po ma (Go inside), edam irukku (There is place),” when, in reality(true story), a two-rupee coin that was dropped did not make it to the floor.
In the meantime, another woman got the seat left vacant by the exit of the leaner woman, and she then started telling the standees (actual term), “Idikkadhey ma. Thalli nillu (Don’t keep pushing against me, stand away).”
The girl standing near me exclaimed, “Oh, so now that you have a place to sit, you are ordering us standees around? Weren’t you just standing here, being pushed around?”
Yeah, I guess once a person gets a “seat,” her whole perception undergoes a paradigm shift.
After that came another colorful character on board, the 60-year-old woman who could not but think she was a victim of sexual harassment. In a jam-packed bus, paati suddenly started shouting at some guy, “Don’t keep touching. Stand away.”
The guy might have mumbled something, but paati did not let it rest. The rest of the bus might have been snickering, and there is no telling that she was over-reacting, but it was impossible to tell whether the guy was up to mischief or not.
After a while, he must have said something that suggested that paati was, after all, not all that touch-worthy, and she resumed her salvo with greater gusto, “All you guys need is a sari. Wrap a sari around a stick and you will misbehave,” she went on.
Meanwhile, tickets were being passed around, cell phones were ringing and calls were being answered, somehow.
Near the end of its journey, the bus began to thin out. It was still really crowded, but you could move your elbow, and could at least rotate on an axis.
I got off a stop further away from home, and decided to walk it. As the bus left, I couldn’t help thinking this one hour was better than any soap I’d ever get to watch on television!
Of course, it helped that I got a seat.