All Eyez On Me / Bus Stop Of The Living Dead

Having been in the state of Gujarat for a little over 24 hours, I feel I am now qualified to identify the primary difference between it and Rajasthan: while public transportation in Rajasthan seems specifically designed to kill me, Gujarat's public transport takes the more subtle approach of making me want to kill myself.

I was at Mt. Abu bus station, where a white-robed Brahma Kumaris cultist was loitering, using her excellent English to distribute patently false information about bus schedules out of Mt. Abu. So began my day. The ticket salesman was little better. I walked up to his window and said "I'd like a ticket to Palanpur." . "There is bus in eight minutes, yellow bus coming" he replied. "Excellent, one ticket please," I said, expecting to be sold a ticket. "One minute sir," he replied, and turned his attention to a paper bowl of spiced chickpeas siting on his desk. I stood, waiting. He noticed me still standing there."Five minutes, sir, five minutes." Let me get this straight, my bus is leaving now in four minutes and I am to wait five minutes so that this man can finish his peas before selling me a ticket. This is the level of customer service you can expect from Indian government enterprises that offer its employees no prospect of collecting baksheesh.

After five minutes he wiped his mouth, turned to me, and did not sell me a ticket but said, "This green bus here leaves in ten minutes, you buy ticket at that booth."

"How were the peas?" I asked with exaggerated enthusiasm
"Not peas, dal," he said.
"Dal was good?"
"Yes, very good."
"Glad to hear it," I said, clapping, and walked to the green bus. It left in twenty minutes.

The man sitting behind me on the bus was a German professor on sabbatical. I found out some 14 hours later that his name was Jens. It would be. Turns out he also was making the lengthy journey to Bhuj. Usually I have a policy against just talking to the other Westerners I meet on the bus, as I feel that is probably a little racist, and because most tourists I meet are dreadfully boring. It's rarely two minutes before they ask some variant of "Have you been to Agra yet? Isn't the Taj Mahal amazing?" I made an exception on this occasion though as we were both embarking blindly on a 500-kilometer trip through a state with a different language and potentially requiring up to 5 distinct bus transfers, for which we had not a single timetable, and could result in us being stranded in a desert in the wee hours of the night. It was wise to join forces. Though a valuable resource, I soon found his company tiresome, and his terribly German attitude towards disorder almost impossible to placate.

The bus's first stop was at the town of Abu Road. Here the bus stopped in the station for almost an hour before continuing. After this hour, and after the passengers had all squeezed in, the bus started its engine, rolled forwards, and made a left turn directly into the repair yard. Fully loaded with waiting passengers, the bus rolled over a repair pit and workers began hammering on the fuselage and performing maintenance on the gearbox. I heard an electrical humming and saw flashes of light. Though I am mostly inured now to the Indian way of doing things, the realization of what was happening almost made my head explode.

Allow me to make abundantly clear how terribly conceived Indian bus services are: after an hour idle at the station, when all the passengers were finally on the bus, at this very time, and not before, when, let me repeat, the bus was sitting idle for an hour, it was scheduled for the bus to undergo some welding.

We sat and they welded. I spoke to the Indian next to me. "Good thing we didn't miss the bus. We'd have to wait for them to build the next one." This remark was translated into Hindi and spread like wildfire, much to the consternation of the conductor who made his way to my seat to make a very stiff apology. A brief argument about the (in my view) absurdity of the situation ensued and I let slip a number of profanities which made me seem much angrier than I actually was, and resulted in most of the bus staring at me for the remainder of the hour-long ride to Palanpur. Being stared at was to become a recurring feature of the day.

We crossed the border into Gujarat and arrived at Palanpur. I noticed immediately that Gujarat was different from Rajasthan. While Rajasthan has a reputation for general backwardness, Gujarat is one of the most prosperous parts of India. Even in this rather anonymous town the buildings had a bit of a modern shine to them. The roads were superb. All day, even in the remote desert of Kutch, we traveled on divided highways that were almost up to Western standards. Everywhere were the signs of thriving industry, and though busy and chaotic, Gujarat seemed to be moving forwards faster than it was moving back.

Jens and I got off and began making inquiries on how to get to Bhuj. To our relief we discovered that in two hours a bus would take us all the way there, arriving late at night but requiring no transfers in forlorn desert villages. Jens went to buy food and I seated myself near the platform and waited. Huge mistake.

I busied myself attempting to learn Gujarati numbers and alphabet. Though quite similar to Hindi, some of the letters were completely foreign to me, and the numbers were essentially random squiggles. I figured them out, then sank into deep concentration memorizing them from the pages of my notebook. The space around me suddenly seemed full of shadows, and I looked up to discover that I was completely surrounded by a swarm of Indian men. I had about a two foot radius of personal space, beyond which were ranks upon ranks of gawking Gujaratis. Men in the back, five rows deep, stood on benches to get a better view. The faces of short men and children poked out from under the arms and between the torsos of people in the front rows. As usual, those closest to me were the wise-asses, and began asking me all sorts of questions. Hearing me speak caused the audience to grow even larger, until nearly the entire bus station, well over a hundred people were all engrossed in my answers and pressed in a tight circle around me like the audience of a cockfight, causing passersby to become curious as well, until I saw people leaving their business on the street to come see what was so interesting at the bus station. A bus station is the worst place to be a spectacle, because even when some people get bored or catch a bus and leave, there is always a constant stream of replacements.

Few of them spoke English, and my captive conversation with the jokers in front was constantly interrupted by heads forcing their way through the crowd to ask the few questions they could muster. "What is your country? Your name?" and so on, time after time. While most Indian men seem intent on prying into Westerners' sex lives, Gujaratis have another fascination: alcohol. Gujarat, despite its modernity, is a dry state. The only reason Gujarat being trapped in 1919 isn't completely appalling is because the rest of India is trapped in about 1873. Anyways, the predictable result of alcohol being completely forbidden is that everyone seems to be obsessed with it. I have long held that Prohibition is a sure way to pervert the soul. "You are liking English wine?" they kept asking. 'English wine' in India means 'liquor'. It took me a while at first to learn this, and I was initially confused by the number of English Wine Shops I saw around, figuring that only Indians with their self-defeating obsession with all things English would be the only people on Earth capable of swallowing the swill wine produced in England. Then I realized this meant not English wine, but actually Indian whiskey, which I have refused to personally sample, but am told by other travelers is just as bad.

I tried to at least make the attention useful. The more helpful among them offered me travel information which I knew to be misinformed. I tried to steer them into teaching me some basics of the Gujarati language. "You don't speak Gujarati?" They asked, perplexed. "No, I speak Spanish and English. I also am learning some Hindi."

"Hindi language but not Gujarati?" The crowd grew more and more puzzled and made a great stir. "Why don't you speak Gujarati?" they asked in all seriousness. The ever-growing and encroaching crowd had begun to stress me. I had already been a spectacle for over an hour and had gracefully responded to the constant barrage of uninvited interrogation but this was too much.

"BECAUSE NOBODY SPEAKS GUJARATI" I snapped "EVEN INDIAN PEOPLE DON'T SPEAK GUJARATI. DO YOU SPEAK FUCKING NORWEGIAN? NO, AND I DON'T SPEAK GUJARATI. WHY SHOULD I? WHO THE FUCK LEARNS GUJARATI?"
Taken rather aback, "Indian people do speak Gujarati" they insisted.
"No, only you people speak Gujarati, because you are from Gujarat."
One person volunteered "Every Indian person I am knowing speaks Gujarati. Very few people in India speaking full Hindi."
I just grasped my head in my hands.

I assure you, dear reader, that everything in this post, including what I am about to relate, actually happened and has not been the least bit embellished.

The situation I was sitting in was like being in the eye of a hurricane, I thought. My own mostly calm demeanor only served to highlight the great tempest around me. At least I have my two feet of empty space, I thought, though I neglected to consider the consequences of having what I thought was the benefit of open air above me. As I mentioned, there were over a hundred people forming rings around me, rendering me not unlike a bulls-eye, which I was about to become. As I responded to some inane question or another (I believe it may have been from some smartass trying to be funny by asking if I shave my pubic hair), I noticed a chunky yellow something appear on my backpack. I looked up just in time to see a group of birds in the ceiling fan above me, and a second lump of bird shit fall directly onto my shoulder.

If a bird had shat on me, I would have been annoyed, but to have a bird shit on me and only me at this moment as I was surrounded by a hundred other viable targets tipped me over the edge. Struggling to contain my fury, I got up, and made my way over to Jens (who had returned largely unnoticed due to the attention centered on me) to consult about our escape. We had another hour to endure. The crowd followed me, and Jens proved less capable of coping than I was. He started gesticulating at at the crowd with his hands. "Please open ze window", he pleaded while making a parting gesture. "OPEN ZE WINDOW PLEASE". Two or three Indians would grasp his meaning and oblige, only to have the gap filled by others in a matter or moments. "WINDOW. HELLO. YES. ZE WINDOW OPEN. OPEN WINDOW." I just started laughing at Jens and at how hopeless it was as I also began to seriously question if I could take another hour of this myself without completely cracking.

Just then a man in a sweater barged his way through the crowd and identified himself as being in charge, and ordered us to follow him. At first I thought he was another person trying to help us with mistaken information, but Jens immediately followed. I slowly gathered my luggage and followed as well. Ahead of me I saw Jens in a small office down a dark hallway, and two Indian men pushing a crowd of gawking Indians out the door. They held it a sliver open, and began shouting at me to come as well, waving urgently as I noticed the crowd slowly start to regroup, focus, and shuffle in my direction. I know this scene. I have watched many zombie movies, and this is the part where I have to fight my way into the door at the last second without getting bitten, lest my erstwhile companions give me up for lost and board the door shut, leaving me to my fate among the living dead. As soon as I squeezed my pack through the entrance, the station master and his deputies dead-bolted the door shut. This seemed to finally deter the crowd, who figured they would see no more of us before their buses came.

The station master apologized profusely and offered us the most services and comfort he could muster, placing phone calls around Gujarat and ordering bus conductors and ticket officials across the state to see to it personally that we had a comfortable ride to Bhuj. One deputy braved the zombies to bring us chai. A few undead gathered behind the station to gaze at us through the barred window, but I felt secure in the knowledge that they couldn't get in and would easily be repulsed by a sharp metal object through the brain if they started trying to pull the bars out.

When our bus finally arrived in the afternoon, the entire station staff assembled to form a protective cordon and escort us out of the station master's office. The one image that flashed through my mind now was not from a zombie movie, but rather the infamous photo of Lee Harvey Oswald under police escort from the Dallas police station. I scanned about nervously for an Indian Jack Ruby.

They were waiting for us but we were successfully loaded onto the bus, where two men were guarding spaces for us to sit and place our luggage. Finally, I thought, now all we have to do is sit for eight hours until we get there. If only this were so.

For most of the eight hours I did actually just sit there. There were no close brushes with death, as the wide, well-paved, divided Gujarati highways were quite safe. The exception was whenever the bus needed to make a right turn. Indian bus drivers have not yet come to terms with the concept of highway exit ramps and underpasses. "Exit on the left? But we are turning right," they say to themselves, bringing the bus to a halt not at the actual exit but at a gap in the highway divider and steering the bus carefully through the narrow space so that they might drive headlong the wrong way through traffic on the expressway until they can exit on the right and go the wrong way down the on-ramp. Nevertheless, the ride was generally quite boring and very long. The terrain grew flatter and flatter, sandier and sandier, and I questioned why I was choosing to go into a desert again. We carried on well through the night.

There was a man on the bus with a serious physical abnormality. He was extremely short, not quite a dwarf, but only chest-high, and he walked with great difficulty. He also had a strange squinting expression from his tiny, recessed eyes which I took to be evidence of some genetic disorder. At about 8 o'clock, he began stumbling up the bus aisle and seated himself next to me. He settled a bit, then spoke to me in English. "I am one hundred percent blind" was the first thing he said. Then how did he find me??? Good God, I thought, he can find white people by scent. He then asked the first two customary questions (where are you from? what's your name?) before rolling up his trousers. My goodness. This man - a kind and gentle man, I must say - this man's soul may have been created by Almighty God, but his legs were created by M.C. Escher. They looked more like question marks than limbs. He spoke his fifth sentence "thirty six fractures." Jesus fucking Christ. By now the entire bus was staring aghast as the foreigner and the 'freak' spoke to each other. I did my utmost to be gracious and friendly while the man's young helper (a relative?) came over to take photographs of the two of us sitting together. Even the Indians clearly thought that something deeply strange was happening and looked on, literally with their mouths hanging, as I held a pleasant conversation with this friendly man as he wiggled his crooked legs about, very glad that he was too blind to see that I was deeply nervous about my own conduct as everyone watched. More photographs were taken and one passenger took it upon himself to translate our conversation for the rest of the bus. There was much whispering and I believe that ultimately people were impressed by my handling of the situation, and were especially relieved that I discussed his legs to the man's satisfaction until he rolled his trousers back down.

Eventually, the blind man exhausted his English and we couldn't talk any more. He began fumbling with his phone, turned the volume all the way up, and began playing a song. As a blind man perhaps he had greater developed his hearing and enjoyed music a lot I thought. The song sounded very Indian until I recognized it was Western, Danish in fact. This song is the most popular Western song in India because if the lyrics (which the Indians seem to enjoy greatly) were in Hindi it would be indistinguishable sonically from mainstream Hindi pop. That song (and remember, I have sworn I am not making any of this up) was Barbie Girl.

Though he had lost interest, nobody else had, and the rest of the bus continued to stare at me for a long time, perhaps to see how I would react at having the cripple continue to sit next to me for an extended period playing Barbie Girl. Eventually, most of them turned away, leaving only a very attractive girl in the seat ahead and across from me continuing to shamelessly stare. Very well, I thought, two can play that game. Me and the girl stared directly at each other for over three hours.

I don't think I've ever been so sexually frustrated in my entire life, and yes, I do remember middle school.

Late, late at night we suddenly came across a huge number of Tata trucks coming the other way out of the desert. A few minutes later I realized we were stopping by Kandla, which despite being in the middle of a wasteland is the busiest port in India. At the station we picked up an entire work shift of men in woolen hats and sweaters, with fat guts but muscular arms, dignified graying mustaches and weary eyes. They were, and could only be, dockworkers; stevedores. I too was tired and desperately wanted to get off the bus. I figured I could easily book a room in one of its many hotels and finish my trip in the morning. Then I saw the hotels, with their shoddy construction along the highway and neon signs advertising names like "The Grand" and "Hotel Flamingo", the sort of places that, if entered, I would leave the next morning with guilt and a rash.

The rest of the ride was punctuated by dark and dreary towns in the desert where the working men of Kandla made their abodes amongst piles of concrete blocks and a handful of chai stalls catering to workers going to and from the port every day. Finally we arrived in Bhuj at I forget what ungodly hour, and I learned that Jens was named Jens (not Hanselkraut, as I had been secretly thinking of him), and after some dispute between ourselves and then with an incompetent rickshaw-wallah we settled on a guesthouse. We booked rooms. I was hungry and tired, so much so that I willingly agreed to pay 42 rupees for five slices of bread and a package of sliced 'American' cheese from the hotel fridge. The rooms (to be fair, they cost about $2.15 a night) were like prison cells, but I was happy to accept. I locked myself in and slept in my solitary prison, nobody watching.