Bus-adventures: Dadu & Munnu

(I don't travel by buses as often as I want to - at least not as much as I did when I was in chennai. But everytime I travel, I get to see interesting people and guileless interactions between relationships of all kinds. Munnu and Dadu are representations of real people; People I have seen, talked to and caricatured, inspired by the two most memorable characters I get to meet quite often by accident)

Scorching Sun is a rarity in Bangalore. It's not too often that one experiences the all too familiar feeling, for chennai-ites, of that single drop of sweat wriggling all through your back, under your shirt leaving you squirming in unison in bus stops. The day in question was just one of those rare days when people, at least one among them, were wearing a red satchel which had among other things a flute, some rural music instruments, and a pile of scripts.

Munnu is the kid who lives two blocks away from the home you belong to - a quintessential indian kid, who sits in the second bench in his fifth standard class room, has perennial ruffled hair, always has a question to his teacher and loves eating from his friends' lunch boxes than his own. Every saturday, he leaves with his dadu to the elaanka market close to Majestic in bus number 333 or any of those 320s buses to Shivaji Nagar to do some shopping for their house. And every first ten minutes of his wait at the murugeshpalaya bus stop, he fights a futile case of taking an auto to wherever he wants to go and our dadu, a quintessential indian once again, overrules the case without a moment's thought. As he strangles the mouth of his yellow cloth bag and searches for an innocous spot for his once-were-betel-leaves red spit to rest in peace, he pretends to ignore what Munnu has to say - using the excuse of selective deafness that old age bestows people with. But such excuses come to no avail when the sun is belting its fury on your backs, and reckless software engineers carrying red satchels with a flute wave at every busy auto on the road and swear whenever it zooms past.

Thankfully for dadu, a bus arrived as a blessing in time. But this bus was quite different from the rickety 330 series, and the latest pushpak series - this blessing had a blue roof and the seats were placed on an elevation just like those inter-state volvo buses. Dadu immediately gave it a name - Double Decker - the latest addition to the mobile attractions in bangalore. Munnu jumped with delight and start making up all the stories he's going to tell his best friends once he goes to school on monday. Oh! what a delight it was - he could spot bald spots in the heads of 6-feet tall sardars, touch those bill boards between the two side of the roads and watch faces of super stars stuck on the walls from an angle he never imagined was possible. If he had ever made the terrible mistake of going to brussels and made the terribler mistake of taking the touristique red-roofed bus on a rainy morning, he would have agreed with other software engineers who have done so that the inching-through-airport-road blues of bangalore were much better than the burgundy of brussels!

And after domlur depot, army quarters, kids kemp, manipal center, at the end of the picturesque boulevard that connects manipal center to the cubbon road junction the bus stopped at a signal and impatient souls who were late for practice jumped out of the bus. Munnu was still enjoying his view, dadu was fast sleep. Curious souls before getting down stared down to see if the bus was actually a double decker. No - just that the seats were placed on an elevation and for some strange reason were covered by a thick sheet of plastic. Engineers by education wondered whether it improved the traveling experience. But quite frankly, Dadu didn't care and neither did Munnu who already had half his story ready.