Image of the inside of a bus for representational purposes.
Credit: iStock Photo
During my college days in Bengaluru, commuting by bus was a high-stakes sport. Long before the days of the Metro, and with only a limited fleet of rickety red buses to choose from, the return journey often required “foot-boarding”—a precarious balancing act on the vehicle’s edge. It demanded the grace of a ballerina to maintain stability and the courage of an army jawan to secure one’s grip on the periphery, as traffic lurched unpredictably.
My core group of six or seven friends included AK, nicknamed “Googs” after we discovered his lethal googly on the cricket pitch. Tall, lanky, and bespectacled, Googs was our pre-Internet Wikipedia. He was the most studious among us, always ready with an inquisitive fact, an obscure reference or a quiet observation that caught us off guard.
One January afternoon, Googs proposed a “genius” plan to bypass the 4:00 pm peak-hour madness. “Nothing happens in the last period anyway,” he reasoned with clinical certainty. He decided to slip out at 3:00 pm, secure a seat on the bus, and be home well before the rest of us were still fighting for a toehold on the foot-board.
At 4:15 pm, the rest of us trudged to the bus stop and squeezed onto a bus packed like sardines. As we braced ourselves for the familiar, harrowing journey, we spotted something astonishing: nestled in the back corner by the window, was Googs—fast asleep!
Once we managed to edge our way inside, we shook him awake. In between bouts of laughter and rising curiosity, we probed him to understand what had occurred. It turned out the bus followed a circular route – it merely operated uninterrupted during peak hours around a designated set of stops. Googs had boarded at 3:00 pm, claimed his prized seat, and promptly nodded off in the cool Bengaluru breeze. He slept through his stop and completed a full, merry circuit, arriving back at the college gate just in time to meet us. His master plan had resulted in a wonderful siesta that led him back to where his journey had begun.
Years later, I learned that Googs had joined a top national intelligence agency--a fitting career for a man of his instincts and interests. When we eventually reconnected in person, I immediately brought up the circular bus incident. He offered a classic, enigmatic smile, winked, and replied: “In my line of work, I can neither confirm nor deny the said incident.”
(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)