Night Bus to Bombay

Night in India, somewhere between Goa and Bombay. An overnight bus, people packed into sleeping berths like logs. The journey itself takes place in darkness. It isn’t meant to be experienced. Someone else walks the tightrope while we rest, eyes shut, on their shoulders. Ascents and narrow bridges, sheer drops and brittle road surfaces. Encounters where the bus must reverse. Occasionally, a toilet stop along a stretch of nothing. Everyone out into the darkness, maybe everyone back on board afterwards, maybe not. No one keeps count.

The hotel owner’s son had looked both alarmed and amused when he found out we’d been booked onto a bus rather than a train — as if it were news to him that there even was a road, a bit like being directed to a climbing wall instead of a cable car.

I open my eyes. Black night, with a dim light here and there in the berths. Outside, branches brushing the bus with a rustle. Everything has been so stressful (tickets and Globus offices and price tags and bus stops) that it’s only now I realise we’re surrounded by a hundred sweating bodies. They are all men, roughly the same age, with roughly the same background, and future. From my blue-eyed tourist perspective, they form a mass. All Indians seem friendly, but it’s night, and the world shifts. Desire becomes need.

Next to me, my girlfriend — the only woman on board. How young she is, here. And me, even younger. I know nothing, but believe so much. She’s asleep, will wake up in Bombay, the journey reduced to a blur, the plan just to close our eyes and hope everything turns out all right, because everything up until now somehow has. In the morning, we’ll meet our couchsurfing contact at the station and carry on with life. A few years later, she gives birth to my children, the journey folded into all the other dreams we don’t remember. But I can’t forget, because I opened my eyes in the dark.

Most of the passengers are asleep, but not all. A few men are playing cards by the light of a head torch. In one corner, others sip rum from a flask and speak in low, almost conspiratorial tones. Opposite us, a pair of eyes staring straight at me, bright as a cat’s in the night. He whispers something I remember only in this memory. He says:

I’d never dream of sleeping in a place like this. I know too much, about others, or about myself. I watched you. For hours. I made plans for how I’d carry out my work, but never got an opening. You were too close to the driver. I had another chance later, with some Germans. That went better, for me.

I look him in the eye, now invisible myself, since I’ve slipped away from the actual event into its memory, and I say: So we finally meet. I’ve read about people like you in the papers, small articles about what’s happened to people like us, and I’ve thought of you, or the person you could’ve been, but you never stepped forward. Maybe we were saved by the crowd?

He says: Or perhaps fate rolled the dice.

Then I return to sleep, let my gaze go dim, the road lull me into a treacherously safe slumber — as if I’m still in the womb, on the run. And you sleep, just sleep. Just sleep.