Missing a bus

Ok. So here I am going to Mandi for Mr. Vaidya’s marriage. I have left it to the discretion of the party arriving from Chandigarh to get his gift. So all I had to do was to get to the place. Its the 2nd of Feb.

I board a bus that is headed from Shimla to Manali, and Mandi being more or less the center, I would get off midway. Accompanying me is my W900i walkman phone, with my trusted vacuum headphones.

Now where was I… ah! The bus….

So I board the bus and thanks to the BST-33, Lithium Polymer 3.6 volts, 900 mili-ampere hour CBA battery (Heck! I should’ve written it as mAH), in the phone, it will last a full 29 hours even if I played continuous music, talked on the phone or smsed someone. Also, I forgot to mention, that apart from the usual diversion of the music, I’m very much in love. (Which I will realize ten days later, is only one-sided). So I keep listening to “Two less lonely people in the world” by Air Supply. (Again, the song will change to something on entirely different lines about two weeks later.)

My seat number is 15 and the number of the bus is 6066, (yeah, if what happened to me happened to you too, you would also remember the statistics). I keep my luggage (a small black suitcase) on the top shelf, sit coyly on the seat in the cold bus and let the drums roll !! With a 2GB media phone, I’ve got all I’ll ever need.

I don’t fall asleep. People call up. People who have talked to people call up. And people who have been talked to, call up too. I make everyone laugh and everyone is happy. I wish someone was there with me to attend this wedding too. (But little did I know, that I would stop attending weddings altogether, later on.)

And then the bus takes a halt. The place is Bharari Ghat. And Mandi is 120 kms away. The bus is parked coolly at the side of the road. The engine is killed and although I don’t hear anyone say it (thank you SONY, for that excellent music quality), my subconscious decision taking machine decides that the bus has stopped for lunch and I get down. I am not really hungry and go to a nearby (around the bend in the road) tea-stall to have a cup of cardamom tea, ideal on a cold winter afternoon. And then the tea vendor shows his sixth sense. He tells me that he would gimme the tea in a Styrofoam cup rather than a crockery glass, so that I might not miss my bus. I couldn’t care less.

As I finish my tea and pay the vendor I look in the direction of my bus. It isn’t there. It was parked in a corner around the bend. So I start to move in the direction it was parked in and it still isn’t there. Now being an avid reader of Scientific American, I know that wormholes haven’t exactly been discovered yet, time travel is not really a fashion thing these days, and so the only explanation was that it had taken off.

I don’t panic. I look up into the sky and do that thing I do. (U)

Then, I spring into action. I go to the driver of another bus, who is having lunch in a nearby kiosk and ask him to call up the next chauki to make them stop the bus for me. He does. Now I catch a bus going in the same direction that mine went. This one drops me at Brahmpukhar simply because it is at that place that my bus and this one part ways. Apparently either the chauki was never called at or the bus didn’t heed their orders. It’s about 1 pm. I call up my friends at my destination and tell them that bus number 6066 (now I realise that its the sign of EVIL), will reach Mandi at around 3pm and that they should send someone to collect my luggage from seat number 15. I give an accurate description of my luggage. If the luggage reaches where the bus is going, I’m done for. From where I get down, I hire a cab (the bugger doesn’t let me drive) and tell him that I have missed my bus and we have to catch up with it. The driver finally manages to catch up with it at Jukhala, and I am 200 bucks short. (I saw Jab We Met, around 4 months after this incident, and now I know exactly how Kareena Kapoor felt when she missed her train. And ironically, when she got ditched too. )

And guess what? As soon as I board my dear departed, the FUCKING conductor has the FUCKING AUDACITY to ask me :”Ticket please”!! Arrggghhhh! Now where did that smiley go? The one in Yahoo Messenger ripping his hair off his scalp?? Anyways.

The conductor listens to all I have to say to him. And he says “Well, had you kept your luggage on the seat, we would have known someone was missing…”

Ya sure !! I forgot to put confetti and festoons on my suitcase and failed to decorate it with a neon sign saying “UNACCOMPANIED FUCKING LUGGAGE” . Completely understandable. My fault. I call up my friends in Mandi saying that they needn’t send anyone to collect my luggage from this Satan-bus, driven by a deranged conductor-driver pair.

And then I look up at the sky (through the windshield, my window-seat has been encroached by someone else) and do that thing I do. (U)

I spend the rest of the days at the wedding answering friends curiosities. They have the WHY-ONLY-YOU-SYNDROME. Well that’s what I am here for, isn’t it?