I’m drunk and I haven’t slept for
over sixteen hours, but I’m ecstatic and tingling with anticipation and dread.
It’s an odd combination. I’ve a strange and terrifying duty tonight: to prove
to my new compadre, this fellow night voyager, Alan, whom I met the previous day, that
what I’ve just eaten won’t kill me. It’s a deeply unsettling prospect, but one
that is eased by the whiskey I washed down my throat moments ago before being
kicked out of the local dive I was killing time in. Closing time is a bitch.
I light a cigarette, and take
stock of the situation. It doesn’t look good. I sway heavily with cheap drink
and the weight of it all: some four hours crammed into a tiny space filled to
the brim with perhaps a hundred Indians, all jeering and tittering with
excitement, leering at me with curious and accusatory eyes, and no chance of
sleep. We are set to arrive at 4am, have no place to stay, and no real way to
find one but to follow a guide from the station through dark and narrow streets
at this terrifying hour. I can already picture him. His beady eyes will dart
and glint boldly, scanning the light of the terminal for a victim. He will be
shrouded in darkness at first, and will see us well before we exit the bus, by
which time he will have already crept to our sides as we unload our baggage. He
will introduce himself, baring his teeth in a wide grin, rotten and stained
with chewing tobacco, framed by deep-set wrinkles caked in grime. He will wring
his hands together hungrily, dollars in his eyes, and offer us his services: to
take us to a filthy and overpriced bed at this ungodly hour, for extortionate
prices. These are the least of my worries.
I exhale deeply, and a plume of blue
smoke rises into the air gracefully as I lean against the bus behind me. I
study it for a second. It twists away from me, dancing in the warm air, a
rising, playful thing, beautiful in its fragility. A small breath of wind blows
it back in my face. I close my eyes in defeat, become interested with the
blackness behind the weighty lids for a fraction too long, and almost lose my
balance, clanging against the metal monster behind me. I open them again.
The bus is in front of me now,
swelling smoothly to fill my vision. It is a weird contraption that was once a
royal green but is now soiled and unfit for life, specked with rust and disease,
with great empty spaces where windows and doors should be. Vast and black and
engulfing, they seem to swallow everything within their dreadful frames. At
least two dozen people are already curled up inside on rickety iron and
tarpaulin, desperate for sleep before the great metal monster gallops off,
twisting and curling its way up the mountain, shuddering in the pitch black as
the air grows colder and colder around us.
Behind the bus, the street lights
flicker manically, illuminating the stained concrete that is beginning to swim
around my feet. It casts bizarre and outlandish shadows of the bus and its occupants, which dance in the darkness of the parking lot in front of me. It’s all
quickly becoming too much. I glance sideways at the absurdly comical bins
lining the parking lot: cracked blue and yellow concrete penguins, sporting
ridiculous moustaches, hold signs pleading for people to unburden their
garbage into receptacles held in their flippers and not onto the street.
It’s a really respectable city, Coimbatore.
I’m wracked with distain. The
mushrooms are coming on strong, and I need a distraction.