From an Improved Height

by Priya John

They say that you don’t really know a city until you know its public transport. Now this could just mean learning the fine art of fare negotiation, the right balance of aggression and supplication, the death grip on the bar, the ability to see and appreciate while being blinded and gagged by smoke and dust that mark the idiosyncratic pleasures of travelling by auto. A little more patience, a lot less worry and a hell of a lot less money can get you the heightened perspective of buses.

From school onwards, I knew a lot of what I knew of Bangalore through bus windows. There’s something about that height, that allows you to look at the traffic from a safe distance above the exhaust fumes, keeps the base of your spine at a safe distance from the ground and lets you see the world in either a moving rush of green and grey or in sudden detailed fragments, intimate viewings of fights, restaurants, houses.

These days the ride itself has become a lot more civilised. Gone are the days when you could only place one foot on the ground, if it was twisted slightly out of joint, during rush hours. Women take the front of the bus and men the back, to avoid any confusion of possession of body parts. There are even attempts to improve the seating and make the handholds available to Indian heights. Apparently nothing can be done about the stampede at the door when the bus arrives.

There are a few basic rules to bus travel that might just re-align your map of the city, a bit. There are three centres to the world: Majestic (Kempegowda Bus Station – a name laboriously re-painted on all the number boards and unused as yet by a single passenger or conductor), K R Market and Shivajinagar. Anywhere you want to go lies somewhere on the way to any of these three places. Each of these terminals has its own network of radiating lines and its own charm.

The tawdry glamour of the name does well to describe Majestic, home to a million touts, travel agencies, hotel signs and a claustrophobic clutch of shops. The bus station itself is alarmingly well-organised and could do with some mapping of its own. To understand the mysteries of its routing and directional sense is too complicated, the safest way to find your way seems to be to ask someone. There’s a cheerful, adventurous quality to Majestic, perhaps because it’s so full of ways and means to get out of the city altogether.

A darker, noisier version is K R Market, where I saw my first gun shop. Early morning travellers would be inclined to point themselves in this direction, along with hundreds of traders in vegetables, fruits, flowers, from the deep outskirts of the city. Shivajinagar, on the other hand, lies closer home, in a figurative sense as well. The blue swirls of St Mary’s Church announce a yearly festival that turns the world to lurid orange, there is the grandmother of markets, Russell Market, there are rows and rows of clothes hung along the streets, there are alleyways and bead shops and lovely kababs off the streets in the evenings during Ramzan.

The station itself has the bland efficiency of all things modernised, though reasonably well disrupted by the instinctive tendencies of bus drivers to block each others’ paths and of potential passengers to block the drivers’ paths. A bit of honking, scrapping and screaming, combined with regular shouts of righteous indignation during the initial stampede, the thunderous revving of idling buses, buses itching to leave, the tremendous hiss from the tyres of a bus that has just completed a long trip... these are the sounds of business as usual.

Now when you’re at the centre, you might find yourself thinking as much of where to go as what you want to see on the way. Outskirts buses (say to obscure villages off Kanakapura) offer you the opportunity to see a glorious mix of the different kind of city inhabitation, from neatly layered suburbs to the wonky lines behind them, from slow roads and empty bus stands to the dense, temperature-raising traffic at the very heart of the city.

You might even get to travel with a goat or two on your way back. Though buses are best suited to the incurable voyeurs, the ones that watch every passing incident, altercation or interestingly dressed person with the same blank obsessiveness. In the five minutes it takes for a bus to pass through Bamboo Bazaar, I see pots steaming through their lids, hair-combing rituals, cars being cleaned, snacks being sold, deep alleyways made of piles of bamboo, all gloriously covered in eternally dappled sunlight.

Travelling in the night doesn’t bring down the choice of sights either. It’s amazing how many festivals there are out there, and how many of them are located within the confines of a single locality.

The movement of local festivals could just make an interesting map of its own. There is the entertaining array of booze shops, shops, outdoor cooking, a gambling parlour I manage to catch from a flyover, and the tired sleepy journey home that has a lullaby quality of its own.
 
It was on one of these dreamy nights that I was standing in Shivajinagar, watching those new zipping neon number boards that you see more and more of these days, adding movement to the existing bus station movement, listening to the slow thrumming heartbeat and feeling the heat coming off the engine next to me, that I felt that great mechanical life of the city, with its grinding wheels and the insouciant heads and hands that guided it all – to enter into the bus lines of the city is not just to see it but also to touch its pulse points.