Bengaluru!!

Ok, I owe this to Roopam. I wanted to say something good about Bangalore to her today, but suddenly remembered this.

Well I ve been to B'lore only once, in the winter of '92, with my family. My dad had availed an LTC( sons and daughters of middle class parents would understand that) and we had this nice little trip to Blore, Mysore, Ooty, Madras, Kanyakumari and Thiruvananthpuram. Phew!!!

B'lore would always be dear to me becuase of a certain incident. We spent about 2 days in Blore. Arrived on a certain night and roamed around the city for the next 2 days. We were putting up in papa's bank's guest house, which was pretty luxurious from what i remember of it.

Anyways, the public transport we used the most were the buses. Bow, B'lore had this interesting system in which the men climbed from the back entry while the women boarded the bus from the front door. So there was a kind of an unofficial demarcation within the bus itself.

Since I was small I used to stick to my mom and sis, while poor dad had to board the bus from behind, all by himself.

So, the third morning we were waiting at the bus stop to catch the bus to the railway station. I was wearing a yellow T-shirt, black shorts and had a camera around my neck( mind you, I was only 7).

After a long wait, three buses came one after the other. I remember DAd saying this was the correct bus. And they all hurried along.

Now, this time around I decided to board the bus on the men'S side, but lo, here i found myself amidst a large no. of women.

I looked around for mummy and sis, but couldn't find them. Then i looked behind for papa but couldn't trace him either. Since the bus was full, I thought they would be tucked away in some corner.

What actually happened was that I had boarded from the front side of the bus which was standing behind the correct bus.

SO, I kept sitting there till the conductor asked me to step down, about an hour later.

I'll go on to mom's version of the story. Well, when my parents found out that I was missing, Papa got down on the next stop , caught an auto and went back to the bus stop to look for me. The bus I was in was now moving in front of mom's bus. She suddenly realised what might have happened. She asked the conductor about the other bus, and was told that it went to some place called Shivaji Nagar, but the routes of the two buses was common for some distance. Then mummy described me to te driver, asked him to follow the other bus and somehow convey the message to the other driver. After about an hour, the conductor got down at a red-light, spoke to my conductor, who came to me, asked me if I was from Haryana, and then asked me to get down. I saw mummy get down from the bus behind me, and i hugged her. I was too innocent to know why was she crying.

A similar thing happened on another LTC trip, this time in 96. We were coming back from Puri on a super-long distance train to Delhi. I got down at the Gwalior station with a sardar uncle( a fellow pessengger i had befriended) and another kid travelling with him. We were peacefully drinking milk badam with our backs to the train when it started moving without a warning. Apparently, the train was running very late and didn't stop at Gwalior for the stipulated 10 minutes.

We caught the train when it was runnning at a fairly high speed, atleast 20 coaches behind our compartment. The train had 34 coaches in all. We were in the general dabba now. As usual, mom was hysterical and thought the sardar had kidnapped me( poor man, he was a philanthropist who ran an orphanage).

The train stopped in the middle of nowhere for some crossing after around 2 hours. So we got down and boarded our compartment(remember AC and general dabbas are separated, the partition cannot be opened).

To date, my parents remind me of Shivaji nagar and the fact that "main kahin bartan dho raha hota"!!