"You said it's a ten minute stop" "Yeah, usually" She replied.
An hour passed by but nothing, I got hold of the TT and asked him, he informed that there was some mechanical problem with the engine and it would take 4-5 hours or maybe more to fix it. She said, "Maybe I should get down here" I can catch a bus to Indore. How long it is to Indore, I asked. 2.5-3 hrs max, she replied. It's late, I pointed to the watch on the mobile which was striking 10 to 11.
"Don't worry, nothing will happen to me."
"You sure you could even get a bus at this time?"
"Yeah yeah, that's not a problem last bus at about 12"
"I don’t think you should go alone at this time"
"There's no point in waiting for them to fix the engine" I have to reach by the morning. "You will once they fix the engine"
"These things have no guarantee, it might not get fixed at all" she argued.
"Come on Bhargavi" I said in frustration. "It's night and it's unsafe for you to go alone"
"So, why don't you come along with me?" She said irritatingly.
I looked at her with surprise, she completely caught me off-guard, the question was did she really mean it?
"You should" She said "mummy would be delighted to meet you" She said as if I was her fiance or lover or something. I saw hope. And so I replied,
"Fine"
"What?" She asked bit surprised, maybe she did not expect I would say yes. God! what a mystifying creature you created.
"Let's go then" She added, dragging me by hand.
The bus station was not far away from the train station, hardly fifteen-twenty minutes of walk, but since we were carrying luggage, we took a auto. It was the lone auto at the stand, he was half asleep or probably he was drunk and half asleep, any which way we approached him. The guy had that look which resembled a serial killer, you know that unshaven face, drowsy red eyes with half open eyelids, and a cut mark on his cheek, so obviously Bhargavi was bit apprehensive about the idea of waking him. But I insisted for I did not want to carry her luggage around. And then for god knows how far the bus stop was, she said it was near but I was really confident about her statement.
About her bag, it was a trolley suitcase, one with you know the wheels that you can drag around, but this was road, Indian road, and you possibly couldn’t drag otherwise wheels would all be gone, worn off. And of-course it's a girl's bag so it's supposed be heavy and all at least 10x then mine, no I can't drag it around. I imagine how it would happen - she would show uneasiness carrying the bag upto to a point where I had to offer my services, but then she would say no, but I would have to insist, so she would say let me carry your bag (which is incidentally very very light - has only the weight of my undergarments and a box of shrubbery biscuits and a 500g packet of wakarwadi) and would give away her suitcase away happily.
So, considering all this stuff mind I think it was better to take a chance with the serial killer. And so I approached him with a smile on my face, I called his name, "Auto" "Auto" softly but he didn't seem to hear. I looked at Bhargavi who was standing at some distance, you know just in case. And because auto wallah seemed to be deaf to my cries, I decided to shake the man, gently, but again no response, now what? Should I slap him? I shook his rampayari this time, and the kumbhkaran finally woke up, what he said? What could possibly a guy ask autowallah? Bus stand chaloge? I asked him. He looked at me and my bag, "okay" he replied.
“How much?” I enquired to which he replied,
“90 rupees”.
“Ninety!”
“It's night sir.”
"Okay okay" And we hoped in for a ride. All the while I was in auto Bhargavi didn't speak a single word, she looked faint and pale, I guess she was praying that the guy doesn't take us 'someplace else' where he could chop us off into tiny bits and serve us for a dinner to his monster baby. And then it happened, the guy stopped in the middle of the road, making us both wonder why. He stepped out from the auto without uttering a single word, “hello” I said. He looked back, his eyes looked frozen, his face motionless. We both silently argued what should be done, we watched him closely as he marched straight ahead and stopped at a dimly lit corner, he was standing against the wall, Bhargavi clung to my hand tightly, but I was relived, and I guess he was relieved too. And she didn’t really understand why he went to the corner and stood there for a minute, for her it was an ultimate psycho move.
She was so frightened that as soon as we got down at the station she gave him hundred rupees note and ran off without saying and without taking the change. Never in my life, I swear I saw anyone so scared.
I went to the enquiry desk and asked the middle age guy sitting on the window, "Bus to Indore?" He looked at me for a moment and got back to his work what he was doing - sleep that is. I slammed my hand on his table through the small opening in the window and asked again. He replied this time,
"The buses are on strike don't you know"
"Buses don't go on strike" I replied back. He stared at my face and then said,
"Oh really? the drivers on strike" "any which way you are not getting anywhere" I was shocked, my mind went into comma for a few seconds.
I went back to Bhargavi who was standing near the luggage, she looked like she was sleeping standing. "What?" She asked looking at the disappointed look on my face, I told her that there was no bus today.
"What do we do now?"
"I suggest we go back" I replied.
"Go back? no" She said.
"You tell me what should we do then?" Silence. So, I picked up the sack and started walking she followed me dragging her bag quietly. Surprisingly, we found the same autowallah outside, apparently he was waiting for us, bastard knew it's a strike all the way long.
"Let me guess," he said, "you want to go back to the railway station?"
"Yes, we want to" I said.
"Okay, he said, but I'll charge 180"
"What?" I asked shocked. "That’s double the amount we paid coming here"
"He made a sweeping gesture with his hand" and said, "What choice do you have sir?" A smile broke on my face, I liked this guy, he is smart and opportunist. So, we settled in his rickshaw, and started back, he dropped us right at the station gate, I started taking my wallet out, but Bhargavi once again open her purse and gave him exact 80 rupees. Now it was his turn to look surprised, he protested, so Bhargavi replied with a sweeping gesture of her arms,
"What choice do you have?" We hurried and went to the platform and found out that there was no train! We were screwed totally, stranded in this ugly ghost town. She looked at me wearily I pointed to the bench on which a guy was already sleeping, she fit herself in the little space that was left around his legs.
"Let's think about it logically" I suggest. "We have two options -" One we could spend the rest of the night here at the station, at this bench" Pause, "but in that case you have to share the bed with this man" "Or we go out and look for a hotel for the night" "You have cash?" I ask, "Yes, no problem with that" "Then?"
"Let's see if we can find a hotel nearby" She suggested, "and if we couldn't we'll come back here" "Sounds good" "No more autos" "No more autos" She replied happily.
But after half an hour of walking around in the dead night in the ghost town, we couldn’t find a decent hotel. "What's wrong with this town?" I said in exasperation.
"Look" She said pointing to a light coming from a distance, it looked like some kind of shop or something. About five minutes later we were at a small warehouse of a local courier company. We watched as a small truck was being loaded. I asked the guy who looked like the man in charge,
"Is there any hotel nearby?"
"There are so many" He replied.
"But we couldn't find any, we are really in need for a place to crash"
"Can't help, sorry" he replied, "Where are you two heading, btw?"
"Well we were going to Indore but we are stuck here"
"Ah, the strike" Man said.
"Yes, the strike"
> "Listen I can't help with the hotel thing but sure if you want a ride you can hop into the truck"
"Truck?" "It's going till Bhopal," He continued
"So you can take a drop till Indore"
"Thanks but no" I said, "guess that we'd spend the rest of night at the station"
"Chances are the strike would continue for couple of days" He replied.
"What? Couple of days?" Bhargavi replied, She pulled me aside and said,
"We don’t have much options let’s take this ride and leave heck out this spooky place"
"But..."
"What's the point of waiting till the morning, if there are no buses?"
"We don’t know that yet" I replied. She gives me really a stern look, I said giving up. "Alright, alright" "Let's take hitch in the truck"
The driver was a sardarji, so the option of cracking santa jokes to pass time was out. "Tussi fikr naa karo" He said in his heavy jovial voice. At 12:17 exactly we left, the truck was fully loaded and hence moved with a snaily pace. I swear I would have beaten him down with a bicycle. I sat in the middle with my one foot across the gear stick and Bhargavi took the window seat with her hair flowing in the wind.
I looked at her under the pretence of looking out, the outside was pitch dark, with a constant sound crickets humming in the background, it seemed so peaceful, I looked at her tired face and she turned and looked at me, she smiled and said,
“What?”
I just shook my head, without saying anything. Her eyes ran so deep - I wondered what secrets she held, my god she looked so beautiful in that moment. I couldn’t resist the urge to touch her, I brushed the skin of her arms with my knuckles. The truck continued to ran and the wind the continued to howl. I was in a sort of waking trance. I looked at her, her eyes were closed, she was asleep, her head came resting on my shoulders.
#
About an hour or two later sardarji stopped the truck, I thought he was taking a break to take a leak perhaps, but Bhargavi thought he’s probably gone to sharpen his knife. The image of sardarji sharpening the knife gave sense of false insecurity.
So, I did what was necessary to save us from the devil, I tried to befriend him, I read it somewhere that if you would connect to a possible killer he wouldn’t kill you, because he now has an attachment with you. I small talked sardarji about being 'on the road', he told me about his kid and wife and stuff. And all while Bhargavi wondered why I was showing so much interest in trying to get into his personal life, was I going to marry him or something.
The worst didn't happen but still worse happened, it so happened that the trucker, our sardarji stopped at a point where road forked, Bhargavi looked at me worried, I asked the trucker,
"Ki gal ho gayi sardarji?"
"Badshaaho maaf karo. I just remembered I have to take a little detour, I have a friend at Dhar and he is in little trouble, so I have to go and help him." I looked at him still confused.
"Here's the deal, you can come along with me and hang around" "or you can drop here and take a hike to Indore, it's not that far really" "I am sorry but I have to go the other way"
I looked at Bhargavi, and she looked at me, and I knew what I had to say, "Okay sardarji, thank you very much for your wonderful company, guess that we'll get down here"
"Maybe we should have gone with him." I suggested Bhargavi, "It's like 2 AM in the morning and we are goddamn middle of nowhere"
"Where should have we gone with him? I didn’t like him from the beginning, he could have killed us by taking us into a secluded place" “That’s what he probably was planning”
"Don’t you think he would have done that already if he wanted to -"
"I don’t know" She shrugs, "To me it looks like he luring us into a trap"
I wondered why she was acting like crazy, she was not the Bhargavi I knew. But anyway she was my friend and I had to bear with her, and her irrationality. So, when I said middle of nowhere it was really a middle of nowhere, not a soul, nor a shelter, the online light was of the pale moon and of the headlights of the vehicles echoing off in the dark. It made me nervous, the sound of the wheel dragging against the tar road. My sack too felt heavy suddenly, we didn't talk or say a word but just walked on. I tried asking for a lift a couple of times but no result, it seemed as if they had conspired to lurch us.
We walked on and on, suddenly I saw a man, we both saw I think because she grew closer to me almost clung me. It was an old man dressed in white, white shirt and a white dhoti, slowly walking with a big sack on his back, not like my sack but like real sack e.g. sack of rice or cement or something.
"Why are you shaking?" I asked her, she didn't reply just gripped my hand tightly.
"What's wrong?" I asked her again.
"Don't you see him?" She whispered. The fact was I was shaking too, but I pretended that I didn't, she did. It was more convenient that way. I took her hand and quickly crossed the road, we felt safer on the other side. Ha, ha! now when I think about it, it makes me mad with laughter, why on earth two young warm blooded got afraid of a cold old man?
After fifteen minutes of walking we finally saw hope when we came across a petrol pump, but like all other things we faced there was something wrong with the place as well, it was an abandoned petrol pump, a reliance pump. We looked around but nothing, not a sole soul, we wandered in false hope that maybe we could find something but hell what would you expect in an abandoned station? An ATM? Yes, an ATM that looked like it once worked, or wait a minute it looked like it still works there's a dim light that's coming from the inside, I went inside and signaled Bhargavi to wait on the outside, inside the ATM there was a door that probably led to a small cell. I tapped on the door and a tube light turned on inside, slowly the door opened, it was not a guy with a lantern luckily but a benign looking person of small frame rubbing his eyes,
"Shohbji" He said. I quickly told him our situation, and I looked back, but Bhargavi was not there!
#
In panic I threw aside my bag and ran out, it was chilly outside. I look around and there she was, sleepwalking, "What's wrong with you?" I asked. She turned around to face me, oh she was on mobile! Damn stupid of me. But at this time?
"What?" She said.
"I got scared, really scared and you are talking on a phone, walking in the dark of this forsaken place" I didn’t get it one minute she was a terrified kitten and another she was a fearless ninja.
She got on the phone again and said, "I'll call you later"
"Who was that? at this ungodly hours?" I asked. She didn't reply and instead marches on to her bag.
"See, I talked to this person in the atm, he's a security guard there and,"
"And?" "And he had agreed to take us in for the night" "We can take some rest here, and in the morning we would leave." She said nothing and went in after me. The gaurd was decent enough to offer her own bed in the small store room while he and I slept outside next to the ATM. We sat with our back against the wall, eyes half closed but sleepless.
"Lonely night," huh? I said.
"Long and lonely" he replied, sighing-ly.
Through the glass was visible the night sky, and endless darkness that enveloped the horizons, innumerable stars small and big twinkled, glowed like little florescent bulbs, on an empty highway, I drunk and I drove, without knowing where I was going, without knowing why was I going, and without knowing what lied ahead in the lost highway. And I didn't remember when the sandman came and took me along.
At the wee hours a hand shook my shoulders, I was lying on the floor coiled, the hand then slowly ran through my hair and ruffled them, it felt like I was with my mother, it felt like I was dreaming, with my head in her lap, she brushing them slowly with her shower of love.
I got up, it was Bhargavi,
"Get up, get ready" She said softly.
"What time is it?" I asked.
"10 o'clock" She replied. "What?" I said, “for how long did I sleep?” I couldn't believe. I looked out, it still looked littl
e hazy, hazy like early winter morning.
"It is six" She said again with mild laughter. We got up and picked up our respective bags and marched on.
It was a different day, it seemed that luck was in our way, the first vehicle that I showed my thumb to, stopped. It was an open jeep, he had some stuff at back, some sacks I think, sacks like rice sacks, I could probably not see them in an innocuous unharmful way, I hated them, they leaked an eerie feeling. So, the driver was a woman of mid 40s I think. She asked us where we were heading and what we were doing at such a place early morning, I told her in short that we were dumped by a trucker who had to go and save a friend's ass. Bhargavi then asked her where she was going, she replied, indore. Bhargavi then asked her if she had any plans to take a detour or anything to which she replied laughingly, "no." Boy what a relief we felt.
Thankfully, there were no adventures that we faced after that, the road turned out to be awfully straight and boring, and I now kinda liked what happened the other night. She dropped us at the subzi mandi from where Bhargavi's father picked us in his Alto, we drove through maddening traffic in the narrowest of the roads.
I was uneasy at first with the idea of staying with her, but then her folks were really friendly, they treated me as their own. The next day her brother arrived from Bangalore, he was tall and thin and introduced himself as Sagar. I don’t know how he felt about the fact that her sister brought a guy home, if you ask me, I could have freaked out a little, but he didn't, they were really broad minded, I guess, or was it something else?
I thought about going home to Haldwani, but on their insistence and my own personal strange wanting that I couldn’t understand I decided to stay for a little while. Bhargavi promised she would show me the city. It was a perfect distraction, I would prefer not to spend the holidays alone. And, I wondered if there was a tiny bit of feeling developing inside me, for Bhargavi.
Zero Defect: An autobiography of a software engineer Page 15