Colors

When I found myself moving to sit behind the nice aunty in a starched pale pink sari, I wasn’t surprised.

Pale colours. Starched cotton saris. I love both. They remind me of my grandmother and her church saris. She always wears baby pink or baby blue or cream or pale yellow or white or that light shade of green that isn’t yucky at all. The smell that goes with her freshly starched sari is old, musty and all moth-bally. (Don’t ask me how a freshly starched sari can smell old and musty. It just does.) It’s a comfortable smell. One that brings to my mind images of Kerala, stretches of land that is all green and wet, of nice manga pickle and Ammachi’s karimeen, of the old antique diwan where me and my cousins played cards for hours on end and the long hallway where the whole family gathered to say 6 ‘o’ clock prayers. Of pineapples and pulli, of my first swallowed pebble and my first tryst with jealousy…
“Ticket, ma? Yenga ponnon?” (Where do you have to go?)

Funny. Where all a familiar favourite smell can take you, I thought, as I handed over my five-rupee coin and asked for my ticket. He gave me a new one-rupee coin and a nice, crisp, white ticket, which I looked at in surprise. The number 4 was written on it, all right. But I always got thin, crinkly, pink tickets. When did the colour change? I watched the pink-sari aunty give two rupees in return for her greenish blue ticket. Who decided the colours of bus tickets anyway? And what were those weird marks the conductor made with his nail in the ticket?

My thoughts began to wander and I was lost in another daydream when something vibrated in my pocket. My phone. I sighed and looked at it. I was tired of sms-ing. This new phone had a keypad, which hurt my fingers if I messaged too much. My dad was happy. I was not glued to my phone, anymore. And I was tired of the people who sms-ed me. Irritating, tiresome characters who expected me to give my whole attention to them and no one else. Sigh.
“Hmmph…” A blue salwar-ed woman plopped into the seat next to me. I hope she’s not one of the talkative kinds, I thought as I hugged my bag and pulled myself tighter into my space. She didn’t look the type, but you never know. Today, I wanted to be lost in my own thoughts. I was in a reflective mood. Pensive. Thoughtful.

I stared at the crowd of people waiting at the bus stop. Scanning for a familiar face, finding none, I turned to see my neighbour passing the tickets. In every bus there are these three or four kindly souls who pass the tickets. If it were not for them, half the tickets wouldn’t be bought and everyone would be travelling ticket less and the conductor would probably lose his job. But not many conductors are nice and grateful to them. They are mostly a rude, surly lot, clad in tired looking kakhi jackets. Faces screwed up in anticipation, sick of the crowded buses and yet trying their hardest to do their jobs and enjoy it at the same time. Honest souls at work. Most of the time.

I glanced at the pink sari aunty’s neighbour. She was a flower seller. A pookari in a dirt brown sari with a red blouse-frayed and tattered. Chewing pan, I predicted as she turned to say something to the conductor. Her mouth foamed red at the edges. They probably saw each other everyday.
‘Today the bus is really crowded, no?’ ‘Ya ya. Just as usual. Nothing different’

My blue salwar-ed neighbour got up and was replaced by an office-going aunty with a huge office-going bag. She crumpled her yellow three-rupee ticket and stuffed it beneath her watch. Really! The places people keep their tickets. I had a friend who kept her ticket neatly rolled under her ring.
My college was nearing. If I didn’t get up now, and make a move towards the door, I wouldn’t be able to get down till three stops after mine. I slipped my phone into my pocket, felt inside my bag for my wallet and got up; satisfied everything was still there and with me. A girl wearing a white top and grossly mismatched yellow pants couldn’t wait to let me pass before she sat down. “Excuse me” “Please move.” “Are you getting down here? No? Then please let me go.” “Please… Thank you.”
I stood near the steps catching my breath. The bus stopped finally. I got down.

As I took out my phone and slipped the one rupee coin in its place I glanced at the white 4-rupee ticket still in my hand. As I crumpled it and threw it down, I looked up.
The pink sari aunty with her green two-rupee ticket was still sitting at the window in front of my seat. She looked at me and smiled with her gold earrings dangling in the wind as the bus sped on.