Kamran Hamid Bhat
This story belongs to the final chapter of my degree the days of my internship when I had only been working from a short period of time as an intern in the one of famous corporate hospitals in Bangalore it was one of those Bangalore evenings that was slowly surrendering to the night, and I stood at the bus stop, waiting for my usual route, carrying the heavy burden of a scolding I had received earlier that day. Sometimes, the evening falls in such a peculiar way; it feels as though a scorching heat and a bitter scorn are smouldering slowly within our hearts. It matters little whether that heat comes from the exhaustion of the day or the insults people have hurled at us.
In either case, it is we who must burn whether we crumble into ash or dissolve into the smoke that rises from within us.
That dying evening felt exactly like that. The sun was on the last moments of setting, yet its final, dying rays seemed determined to wring the sweat from every single pore of my body.
As usual, my bus arrived shortly. I boarded the bus and sat on a vacant seat, then resting my forehead against my hands on the metal grill in front of me. I drifted into a haze of thoughts, consumed by the jeering and the cruel strikes of human nature i went through that day I don’t understand Why are these memories and thoughts always so embroidered with cruelty?
every time they strike back again and again to peel the scabs off wounds that had only just begun to heal?
Why are they so ruthless?
Earlier that day, while I was doing a routine task at the hospital, my HOD summoned me and he rained down his fury unprovoked. It was as if comets and asteroids, swaddled in a celestial fire, were falling from the sky right down on top of me. When I brought myself to ask what my fault was his temper reached the sky. “You make a mistake and then you have the effrontery to ask me what I did?”
In that particular department, a staff and patients stared at me, whispering into each other’s ears. The order that I had received from someone was simply to sort some files but the humiliation raining down on me was the complete opposite. The task I was being scolded for wasn’t even my task, it was given to my classmate. She was there standing right there and saw it all.
I remained silent. After all, this scorn, this behaviour, this humiliation – it was nothing new to me. By this time, I had accepted it as normal. Throughout my travel from school to college I had been punished dozens of times for sins I did not do. In college, I recalled an instance where a professor punished me with remedial work and late leave for attendance problems even though my name was on the fine list but allowed students with much lower attendance problems to leave. That injustice dragged on for a month. My classmates, who could clearly see the difference between right and wrong, were pressing me: “Why are you silently enduring this punishment when you are innocent?” Why don’t you complain to the higher authorities?”
However, the true cause of my shock today came when the HOD pointed at her and said, “Look at her, she is also your classmate. See how quietly and correctly she does her work? And then there is you a fool.”
The minute my classmate nodded in agree with the HOD, it was like- someone threw the stinging smoke of burning chilies right in my eyes. I stood there stunned and silent watching this spectacle. What else could I do? From childhood to the threshold of my youth, I had come to misunderstand these incidents, accepting them as the black ink of a misfortune written into my destiny.
I was still tangled in these dark thoughts when a sharp female voice echoed in my ears: “Do the acting of sleeping later, buy a ticket first!”
I raised my head and looked upwards. There was a young woman standing there, spectacles resting on her nose and a ticketing machine hanging around her neck like a necklace. She again asked, “Where to, friend?”
I pulled my phone from my pant pocket to pay and said, “Give me a ticket to the last stop of this bus
As she handed me the ticket, she paused. “Why are you so sad? What happened to your eyes? It looks as though you haven’t slept in days.” I looked at her in real amazement. In this fast paced, crowded city, since when does one stranger care for another? Perhaps my eyes could not conceal the storm raging in my heart. The heart can live anywhere, but when the eyes are weeping without tears, then that dry weeping is the most painful, the most agonizing torture of all. The bus moved forward, stopping at different points.
Passengers, whose lives were tethered to this route, climbed aboard. The bus conductor had a temperament that was uniquely different. Whenever she spoke to a passenger under the pretext of issuing a ticket, she wore a distinct, humorous smile so wide that it revealed her gums.
So many different kinds of travellers were on that bus. There was a mother, with her little girl’s school bag slung on her shoulder, maybe as
every day she was on the way to drop her child at school or bring her back. There was a dwarf-like man, who had tuck his physical weakness somewhere deep and joined the crowd to fight his battles in this ruthless, nature-driven world. There was a Nepali man, returning to his rented roof in this city just like me, a poor soul working in the same hospital.
Then, speaking in Kannada, the bus conductor began to joke with the little girl beside her mother. She was laughing with a playful demand for a ticket from the child. Watching this scene I don’t know why I was overcome with laughter and laughter escaped my lips all of a sudden. In that moment, it was like someone came along and took away the heavy suffocating dust storm inside my heart and with the power of that one smile, swept it all away.
“Perhaps, at times, our circumstances are not at war with our destiny, but rather arrive like a curated offering of unexpected grace. We often console ourselves that ‘this too shall pass,’ that the bad times will fade and things will mend. But we always forget a cruel truth for things to get better, there must remain a fragment of ‘good’ to build upon.
It is usually said that time sutures every wound, no matter how jagged, stuck or deep. And yet, there are souls who spend an entire lifetime withering away, waiting for nothing more than a single, fleeting glimpse of the one they desire.
and then, there are moments when a stranger’s face a solitary smile sweeps away the suffocating dust of grief from our hearts. In my story, it was that bus conductor. His playful wit and genuine smile took the jagged edges of my broken, desolate evening and softened them into a night of unexpected peace.”
Written By Kamran Hamid Bhat
Kamranbhatt029@gmail.com
