To Wait
This fall, we were stranded between-flights in a large airport which was undergoing big- time remodeling. Together with several plane-loads of transiting multinationals, we were herded into an odd-shaped area that seemed on one side to once have been a windowless corridor, on the far end to have always been a set of restrooms and on the other two undulating sides to never to have been anything more than the roughly carpentered-together sections of dry-wall and plastic sheeting needed to support a layer of undercoat. Two vending machines constituted management’s thinking on dining facilities. A series of four posters repeated themselves around the room, depicting a blue and white Mediterranean somewhere, adding somehow to the anonymity of the space. A maze of silver tubes and piping branched overhead, apparently intended to be hidden behind a number of large television screens which flashed incomprehensible takes on world news, illuminated by subtitles crawling from one language to another. We were welcome to any of the orange, plastic chairs not already occupied by moody businessmen or tourists’ luggage.
People stretched their legs powerfully at intervals and soft-but-sincere moans could be heard like the lowing of a restless herd. When one flight or another was announced, everyone would fall silent, waiting for their own language to know for sure what they suspected from the slumping and gesturing of those who had already learned that their flight was delayed. Occasional panic rushes to the desk took place, when a couple of dozen passengers would find themselves too far up one side or the other of the inverse parabola of the hope/fear chart. It was not a good day for take-offs.
It reminded me of one day in Janakpur, spent at the bus stop, in the bus. There was no need to call it the Janakpur-Sukhawa line because there wasn’t another. Two busses took it in turns to make the journey, ten miles, at a guess. Frequently enough, the bus would have to stop along the road while the driver tinkered under the hood or the conductor sledge-hammered powerfully at slipping leaf-springs beneath the body–convenient rest-stops I’d learned to call them. But this was wonderful– for the first time I had arrived before anyone else except the petty raja who served as conductor, and I was spoiled for choice as to seats.
There was always the problem of seats–if I stood, my head touched the ceiling of the bus, in fact, I could straighten my spine and maintain myself against the unstable bumping and jostling of progress along the dirt road with hands free. Of course, a sudden drop into one of the ruts made by ox-cart wheels and rain could remove hair in patches, so I didn’t rely often on the vertical-wedging trick.
If my sahib status helped me squeeze into some close-to-vertical position inside the bus, I felt desperate enough to get where I was going to accept that. However, there was often someone with a seat who felt that it was unbecoming to my status that I stand while he or, even more likely, some other grizzled low-caste sat on the bench he had been forethoughtful enough to claim. It embarrassed me to take a seat civic pride or class-consciousness, if not callousness or the exercise of some obscure vindictiveness would cause to be vacated. I hope I refused to take the offered chance to sit while cripples and old women stood or crouched on the floor as often as my memory suggests. Such a tricky ally, memory has become on late.
But, praise Bhim Bahadur, on this bright and early afternoon, I had the bus to myself and there was nothing in my moral philosophy to prevent me from taking a flat, wooden seat. Even the conductor was across the road, in the tea shop.
When was the bus scheduled to depart? "Ek chin. Jane ek chin ke bad," I was assured. I knew better than to ask again after only ek chin, but after quite a number of chin had passed, and several other passengers had showed up, I did wonder aloud out the window. The conductor-sah’b was nowhere to be found, but the chai-walla who ran the tea-shop promised that the bus would be leaving, well, "ek chin ke bad." I would have liked a glass of tea, but I knew from experience that, if I vacated my place on the bus, it was entirely possible that two hundred passengers would suddenly appear and crowd into every available spot before I could find my missing chappal, grab my jholla pay up for the chai and cross the way back to the sagging bus. Besides, it was rather a treat to sit quietly alone, my legs up sideways on the seat, enjoying the shade and watching cows and little boys with sticks wind slowly o’re the lea. When the bus would start up, I’d be forced to sit with my knees pressed against the back of the seat in front of me and every jolt would push my knee-caps around like toggle switches on some futuristic device for the mild torment of those who have been neither very bad nor very good. Those two years in Nepal were all it took for me to develop from an average-ish self-image the self-image of a big person, a bruiser..., with bruises to show in proof.
Hours passed thus pleasantly, while I weathered the heat of the afternoon, exerting myself little, among the delights of an empty bus. Thoughts came, thoughts went, and following the advice of meditation masters, I observed their coming and going in tranquillity. There came a time when I observed the other would-be passengers to have packed up and departed, like thoughts, like the sun was preparing to do, and I thought that the day had gone, the bus had not. This was the way of it.How kind everyone had been to spare me the unwelcome news.
I climbed down from the bus to make my way back to the house of the US AID rep, Mike Frame, on the other side of Janakpur, where I could probably beg another night under his roof. "Going tomorrow? Behana janchha?" I asked the chai-walla, like he knew. "Ha-a, behan," he told me, neither a promise nor a threat, but a civility.
Thinking all this, I was startled to be prodded in the elbow by my nearest and dearest, and given the urgent news that our plane was boarding.