Image of a bus ride for representative purposes.
Credit: iStock Photo
My experience with inter-city travel by road dates back to my MPhil days at the university in Amritsar. Almost every weekend, I would shuttle between my hometown, Jalandhar, and Amritsar on state roadways buses. After I finished my studies, my bus journeys continued, though along a different route. Now I commuted frequently between Jalandhar and Chandigarh, where I worked. Who bothered about deluxe buses in those days? I would merrily hop on any ordinary, non-AC bus.
Until I got married, I had no experience of intercity travel except by public transport. In fact, it was nearly two years into my marriage in the 1980s—when we graduated from a Lambretta scooter to a Maruti 800—that we ventured out of the city in a car. I still remember being more nervous and tense than my husband as he drove from Chandigarh to Jalandhar. At first, travelling on the highway in our own car felt like an adventure, but gradually it became a way of life. As the personal vehicle grew into the preferred mode of travel, bus journeys became rare – little more than memories from the past.
However, there is one bus journey from the not-so-distant past that I can never forget. It was an extraordinary experience travelling by an (extra)ordinary luxury bus almost a decade ago – not as a young girl, but as a middle-aged woman.
I was travelling alone from Jalandhar to Chandigarh after Bhai Dooj on a Sunday afternoon. While many ordinary buses left at short intervals, I was determined to travel by a luxury coach. This being the Diwali weekend, the bus terminal was crowded. The moment a super luxury Mercedes-Benz coach arrived, people scrambled for tickets. Desperate to reach Chandigarh on time, I joined the fray and felt jubilant when I managed to get one.
My excitement vanished the instant I stepped onto the bus. Not a single seat was vacant. To my shock, no fewer than a dozen people were already standing in the aisle. Before I could grasp the situation, I saw plastic stools being placed in the passageway from one end of the bus to the other. Lo and behold! Within minutes, seats had been created for all the standing passengers.
Perched on a stool, precariously balancing myself on a small 10”x10” square, I endured a three-hour, bone-rattling journey on a bumpy road – at nearly three times the fare of an ordinary bus. I wasn’t the only one, though. A dozen other gullible passengers shared this so-called ‘luxurious ride’ on a ‘Luxury Bus’, swaying uncertainly on stools.
The most shocking revelation: the bus belonged to a private company owned by the state’s most powerful political family then in power. For me, it was a one-off, unusual experience, but in those days, it was a common practice for private luxury operators to squeeze in extra passengers on stools. Jai ho!