The bus class

While I was still in school, my sister, who had entered college, imbibed communist leanings. Quite unaware that this was merely a passing fad for the rising intellectuals of the time, I took as new knowledge her insistence that we too rise above bourgeois sentiments and de-class. Though I hardly knew what the terms meant, I was suitably impressed that unbeknownst, we were doing something unacceptable in our lives!

I might add that in those days, the subject 'moral science' was stressed upon in the convent school I attended. Films like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur spectacularly underscored the ideals the nuns were at pains to instill in us, where right and wrong were carved in edicts of stone. For me, moreover, they portrayed equality of mankind, clearly upholding the values of the proletariat. Thus I reconciled quite seamlessly in my mind the little I gleaned about religion and communism, and took the learning to heart. 

I looked up to my sister to show us the way forward to change our oppressive ways of living. The obvious symbols of class consciousness, she expanded, were in how one traveled. Within the city, the choices of transport were of bus, taxicab or own car. We would be bourgeoisie to even consider the latter two; hence she chose for us the bus as the most appropriate. Needless to say, she had my wholehearted support, and unquestioning followership. 

There was a logistical problem, however. The class she was getting us to identify with was already filled to capacity and so were the buses, the cheapest mode of distance travel. It began to take us hours to get from point A to point B because buses would be jam-packed when they arrived at the stops we waited at. People would literally be hanging on for dear life; it was so impossible for us to get a foothold, it was better to walk. Yet it seemed to me that we were indeed doing the right thing. In our democratic republic, we walked the talk as it were, against the evils of social hierarchy. 

 

My brother, on the other hand, was totally disgusted. He was afraid his social image would nosedive. In the peer groups he socialized in, the trappings were important. Their dreams included among other things, swanky attention-drawing imported cars. At the time, however, the nationalized policy on vehicular manufacture favoured the Indian make in the effort to bring it up. All others brands were hit with prohibitive taxes for the same reason. One carmaker held monopoly on the family car, and as a result, a general sameness prevailed on the roads of the country. The cars all looked the same, sturdy and ugly, their social status denoted only by colour – taxicabs distinctly yellow-and-black, private cars in other hues.  It was a blow to his esteem, that we did not have a car at our disposal. A taxicab was the wooden spoon, but buses were really the last straw!

Our parents were caught in the middle of their bickering, helpless to take a stand. Their growing up had been far from the working classes we now had to rub shoulders with. The family ancestry had been landowners in undivided India; a reality snatched away from them by the horrors of the Partition that carved up the nation.  Sometimes my mother reminisces about the many prajas (subjects) that lived and worked on their properties, orchards, farmlands and crops, though my father rarely spoke about the past that we had no experience of. Post-Partition, it was a painful rebuilding for many such families that moved perforce to the new India, if not quite destitute, certainly with only a fraction of their erstwhile wealth. With affordability diminished so rapidly, they probably felt de-classed already. It must instead have been shaming to be constantly reminded of being down in fortunes, to be a disappointment to their children one way or another.

So many decades later, my brother has achieved to the fullest his childhood dreams of success. It seems to me that somehow ‘poverty’ has lodged in the mind, and the need for material security grown insatiable. Despite the accumulation of money, numerous properties and cars, he just cannot feel he has enough.  My sister’s perspective has changed drastically. Rather like the dismantled former Soviet Union, she has abandoned her adolescent leanings and fully embraced capitalism as practiced in the West, along with their subtle differentiations of class or race. Both have sworn allegiance to the lands of plenty and shaken the dust of this poverty-stricken democracy quite completely.

 

Much has changed over the years in this country as well, including wider transport choices, but the crowds on buses in India continue. Perhaps I valued the ‘new knowledge’ of my formative years a little too much, because I do still travel on them. 

Friends and acquaintances look askance and question what attraction those sweaty, smelly atmospheres might hold for me. Well, I do get a glimpse of the ordinary India that so often is written off as the amorphous them group, at the other end of the continuum from the respectable us. In fact, despite the invasion of personal space, the tedium and physical discomfort of the journeys, human interactions continue unabated. I have observed amongst the bus class extraordinary acts of kindness, empathy and humour, I am certain money cannot buy nor upward social mobility ensure.