India at its Best

Sundays have always been my very favorite days, and that has not changed simply because I’ve moved to India. I always look forward to Sundays, and one of the biggest reasons for this is that I usually spend them at Jenika’s house, where we have our cooking lessons and eat better than any other day of the week. But there is one thing I dread about these Sundays we spend together, and that is the process of getting there.

Although Jenika and I both live in the quite small town of Aluva, it takes close to an hour for me to reach her house and I have to catch two different buses – buses that are always overcrowded on Sunday afternoons, which makes it nearly impossible for me to know where the bus is and if it’s time for me to get down. Jenika’s bus stop is pretty nondescript as it is, but with so many people shoved up against me, their arms holding the bar above their heads and blocking my view out the window, it’s a wonder I ever make it to her place. Usually, I have to rely on the people around me to tell me when it’s my turn to depart.

That is exactly what I was doing this past Sunday. As I got on the bus, I was thinking to myself that I’d soon get the hang of this particular ride, and I was feeling confident. And then, the bus took a different route, which would approach Jenika’s stop from the opposite direction than I was used to. Oh well. I threw my confidence out the window and settled down in my seat, making sure that everyone around me knew where I was going.

As we approached the correct stop, the woman next to me kindly alerted me that mine was the next one and I got ready to get off the bus. As I was standing up, the woman on my other side tugged on my arm and told me this wasn’t my stop; it was the next one after the next one. Oh, ok, and I sat back down. By this time, the bus had stopped, the first woman had gotten off, and she was motioning me to follow her. I started to get up again. “Not here,” the woman on the other side said. With my feet still inside the bus and my head out the door trying to decide if I recognized where I was, the conductor came pushing through the crowd of people. “Go,” he said, hurriedly but not unkindly. So I went, and after a few seconds of trying to regain my bearings, I recognized Jenika’s little block. Ahh…I had made it.

And, although I was sweating and stressing from that little ordeal, I had to smile as I made my way down her road. Oh, India, what can I say? I am the blind following the blind. But somehow I still made it. And this is India at its best!