Waiting on the top of a hill to catch a bus to Agra, we saw vehicles below fleeing from traffic lights. Then: deceleration, swerving, horns bleating, collisions narrowly avoided, vehicles creeping around something on the road fifty meters from the lights.
Seconds later, another metal spine started accumulating behind the lights. Unsuspecting vertebrae, stretching on seeing green, swerved, horns honking, collision-avoiding vehicles shooting in various directions; then creeping around that thing that induced speed from a distance but braking from close range, that thing not plastic after all, but solid, maybe a rock, horns bleating like freaked creatures, Tim beside me belching laughter.
Every two minutes that slapstick occurred.
“I’m going to see what it is,” I said.
Two women near Tim, their saris displaying effervescent yellows, fertile greens, and pulsating reds, laughed when hearing my laughter after I reached the road.
“It’s …” I tried.
Flying traffic suddenly braking yielded flashing bone-white in the women’s brown, titillated faces.
“What?” Tim asked.
“… a lump …”
The women’s eyes gleamed like polished mahogany.
“of traffic … island …”
That rock’s perfect mayhem-causing location suggested that supernatural wit had orchestrated this for our benefit. I now hoped the Agra bus wasn’t coming.
“It’s like decomposing uranium,” I said, back at the hilltop. “For twenty-five thousand years it’s going to cause chaos because nobody is going to shift it.”
A hole in the traffic island, bashed out by a vehicle, was engulfed by strawy weed.
Another metal spine lengthened. Its frenetic stretching suddenly slowed, breaking apart as its drivers undertook sharp turnarounds in perception, black fumes steaming from the cavalcade, vehicles veering, horns blaring, our laughter unrestrained, traffic finally slowly passing around that traffic-island rock, order restored after near misses, the women’s laughing eyes now slits in rippled facial surrounds.
Traffic accumulated again. The rock, like an exposed reef in an asphalt sea, with seaweed’s texture, promoted misperceptions.
Black-tentacle fumes wavered above another stretching spine. Then cars skidded, the women releasing high-pitched hilarity, guffaws leaping from my mouth like happy-go-lucky parachutists, Tim’s face shining, the women’s grins hidden behind hands of amused shame. Nothing, though, could stop their eyes from gleaming like tickled jewels of thrilled merriment.
The skidding traffic’ obtuse-angle maneuvers to the road’s direction made a motorbike bounce over a curb. Rasping shrills shrieked from my throat. The women shuddered mirthfully. Tim’s baritone cackles boomed.
The motorcyclist glared at us while shooting his hands out to express dismay at our insensitive amusement. Our delighted temerity placed livid beads in the motorcyclist’s face. He gesticulated with angered disbelief. Then the bus unfortunately arrived. My disappointment had mine-shaft emptiness. That traffic-lights drama, forever fresh, exalted, like love.
Disappointment, however, quickly departed. Below a four-thousand-meter-high, fifty-kilometer-radius umbrella of black smog above Delhi’s sprawl, hundreds of prostrate men in rags were waking on a field of dead grass, morning’s eye purple in a vast shroud of gray-black pollutants.
“Out of this world,” Tim said.
The men’s dirty, ripped fabrics resembled a uniform given to the dispossessed. Their waking under packed fumes enthralled like that traffic, no laughable misperceptions here, however, just eye-snaring reality on a massive scale. What mind-saving delusions could those men have had? Maybe some hoped God would rescue them, impossible to mock their only possible illusion. They had nothing else apart from rags.
The two-lane highway we entered linked Delhi to Agra. Proton traffic fled down that asphalt ray. The driver charged behind another bus on the wrong side of the road. Our ignorance of the future now matched the innocence we had seen at the traffic lights. A six-armed, football-breasted Goddess and a Hindu sun symbol hung from the driver’s rearview mirror. Those dreamy references to security faced the passengers. Wrecked cars’ undersides, lining the road, resembled dead crustaceans on their backs. Those poignant symbols of reality also faced the passengers.
The other bus, obscuring our vision, magnified vulnerability, the present only existing again, but in a different form. Head-down Tim read. I looked straight ahead. Cars were moving beside the bus on the correct side of the road. Dust rose as a car was forced from the road as our bus shot left, the bus ahead changing lanes to avoid an oncoming truck that flashed by us on our right.
“Incredible,” I hissed.
Tim avoided looking.
I clutched the bar that protruded from the backrest of the seat before me. I knew Indians often drove carelessly because “God decides when death occurs,” but I didn’t anticipate this level of irresponsibility. Being victimized by someone else’s delusions crushes humor, not funny having your life threatened because reality is considered irrelevant. Maybe someone on one of those crustaceans was chortling as I had done above those traffic lights?
The bus changed lanes again “blind.” Fear, rising from my feet, concentrated in my ankles, before flashing upwards, rippling the back of my neck, concentrating there before erupting in my temples, another truck flashing down the other side of the road.
Terror is a chemical experience. Not just psychological.
“Unbelievable,” I yelped.
Tim remained absorbed by literature. Must be a hell of a book, I thought. If death was coming, I had to see it. Tim seemingly preferred rejection of reality when dealing with the possibility of dying in violent circumstances.
Passengers on the bus’ right-hand side started screaming. When the bus ahead of us jerked left the passengers on our bus’ right-hand side could see on-coming traffic heading directly for them, cars forced off the road, head-down Tim silent, a truck’s oncoming grill right there! A moving metal wall, the bus just avoiding that grill that flashed by on our right, dust flying up as the bus forced cars off the road.
Idiocy is hilarious when affecting others, the fruit picked by gladdened cynics. But this idiocy affected me. The driver’s delusion peaks separated me from the orchards of smugness. Finding other people’s delusions amusing had been eliminated by the same random malignity that had placed that rock before those traffic lights.
The woman who had laughed at the motorcyclist screamed at the driver, disbelief turning her eyes’ whites into flashing marble, onrushing traffic coming straight at her. I subdued my anger by acknowledging my hypocrisy. Self-awareness reduces anger, but not fear.
The woman waved her hands. The driver ignored her. My bar-gripping knuckles whitened. Acknowledging moral weaknesses halts the fury that dishonesty with yourself causes, imaginary coils in my temples overheating; had those coils had throats, high Cs would have shrieked from my head.
A man smacked his legs in frustration at the driver’s carelessness. God decided all, our feelings irrelevant. The passengers’ premature deaths apparently weren’t the driver’s responsibility. His indifference towards their screaming had twenty-four-carat-gold purity.
Only people on the right-hand side of the bus were agitated, oncoming vehicles potential killers. On the left, listless heads rested upon cushions, drowsy without concern. The unseeable doesn’t exist. If it’s not in the media or in your life it’s not real. Those on the left epitomized this as they failed to make the connection between the smashed-up metal lining the road and the agitation of the passengers on the right.
A truck about to hit the bus made the woman who had laughed at the motorcyclist dump her stiff-fingered hands on her head, the driver, veering left, forcing a car to create dust clouds off the road, that car just missing a crustacean, the truck flashing by on our right, my day turned upside down—like the crustaceans.
Tim continued reading as if death was theoretical. He had adopted the attitude of those on the left.
A ranting passenger rose, gesticulating violently. The driver continued driving blind on the wrong side of the road. The bus driver ahead was his eyes, our eyes! Both drivers creating car dust clouds as cars flew off the road to avoid the buses, our driver perfectly still, gesticulating passengers furious at that unconcerned statue. Damage inflicted upon us by others awakens our dormant principles. The woman wasn’t finding this funny; but she had been thrilled by the motorcyclist being driven off the road. She shook a fist when the driver avoided another head-on collision. The grill from an oncoming truck almost annihilated the bus’ windshield. People’s shouting contrasted with the driver’s indifference, the passengers believing their feelings demanded consideration, as if those feelings topped universal consideration. The driver assumed those feelings were puerile idiocies.
God concerned the driver, not people’s feelings, or rationality, the “crustaceans” monuments to universal decision-making, not to bad driving. Hard reality, the driver seemingly believed, got decided by supreme omniscience. People apparently had no role in that. The passengers’ screaming didn’t affect the driver’s indifference to biology’s basic tenant that consciousness disappears with the destruction of the nervous system, beyond the driver to consider the possibility that God may have been a murderous psychopath and that we could be next—that permanent annihilation was reality!
“Gawddd,” I gasped, realizing that comment’s irony, my hands tightening on that bar as another grill just missed us.
The bus, finally leaving the highway, entered a carpark in Agra. Had my relief been a perfume, its fragrance would have earned billions for Chanel.
A stench rose from grease mounds frying on black hotplates in the bus station. Food for the poor. Desperate-eyed men, clutching trays of fried corn, screamed at the passengers who ignored them, the passengers’ indifference to these men’s products matching the indifference the driver had shown them. The previously furious woman, wafting a disdainful wrist, dismissed one of those screaming men with a cold ambivalence that equaled the driver’s attitude towards her.
When Tim returned from the toilet, he said: “I did what I just did for a lot more reasons than the usual.”
I laughed.
“No more catching buses here,” he added. “It’s trains from now on. Premature, everlasting annihilation because of delusions about higher beings isn’t for me.”
Kim has worked for NGOs in Greece, Kosovo, Iraq, Palestine, and Macedonia. He takes risks to get the experience necessary for writing. He also likes painting, art, bullfighting, photography, and architecture, which might explain why this Australian lives in Madrid. He has received 234 acceptances from over 100 different literary magazines.
Image: worldhighways.com
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Heavy Feather Review 