Undo

Night bus travel is a humbling undertaking. It starts with the dark pealing away the scenery to look at, and then idleness hitting on everyone in the bus. People turn away drowsily in mid sentence and don’t turn back. Lost forever to lapses of sleep that involve jerks of remembrances.

“Where are we?” one starts

“Ah, we just moved ten kilometres”

He looks surly around and slides back to sleep. Waking after another ten minutes to ask the same question. Finally tiring and resoluting to suffer without bother.

Night time is a brisk scale into supernatural. A bright spot appears delusional, and in entwines your soul into a wave of misjudged apprehensions. The bus in the night is one place to build such apprehensions. There is a spirit that controls the vehicle. An incantation starts, as a hypnosis swaying in-there is the silent swash of the wind outside, a din building within the bus cabin when all the windows get shut. Then,

The sway, the duck and the stealth with which it overtakes, leaves one breathless. It’s like being under water. The thrill is (a mix of the hope that the water surface is just a level away waiting and knowing that you could sink further and never get to see the surface at all. It’s a choking feeling emerging, bringing – breeding unease.

 It’s a shift from fear to desperation. To relief when you suddenly realise the hurdle is overcome. You come to the water surface, take a deep breath and sink right back. There is moment to count your luck…It’s a continuous relapse into fear, imagination and adventure. Sixty seven people live this maze of tactic, wit, luck, trepidation, and a stretch of accident hungry 346km road.

At the midnight hour at Karuma, the moon gleams palely onto the tarmac. The pale pasted night air is wet with mist as we thrust through it. It decorates our wind shield with a whitish sheen from the inside that the driver keeps wiping away. Our headlights beam into a turmoil of smoke that veers away to let us through to the black spot in the future of the road. The spectral black we aim at hidden in the sphere of mist eludes us, gives us an excitement that worries.

At the midnight hour at Karuma, the mist rains onto the windshield creating alternating seconds of blocked view that are wiped away; this exercise of cleaning is repeated so fast it draws us into a kind of hypnosis of taking our eyes one way then the other. The driver’s eyes droop and his grip on the leather wheel is so tight it’s doubtful, so is my grip on the music and the surroundings.

The midnight hour at Karuma is an hour of light thought, furtive grasps at reality - dead-end speeches, and wide-eyed sleep, dreams of reality. There is an outburst of sleep filled hot air, an air of decay congesting itself, permeating into other open noses and passing on the taste of sleep, drowsing others into it.

The bus grows quieter as it gains speed, hurtling into a darkness that unsparingly envelops the bus. Cascading into wavy circles of light and dark. The headlamps peer into the heart of the dark, penetrating into 200 metres of distance ahead, trying for a destination, poking hope. It flickers lightly to taste the length, search for obstacles, and to ascertain the security of the road ahead. Then it blasts full, hungrily, unsparingly, ferociously acknowledging its supremacy.

The monotony of the bus drone, the passing swish of night images. More and more people keep dropping off drowsily. So that when you look sideways, to the back and to the front, most of the lot has been drawn to sleep.  The bus driver maintains machinery pose that shifts only to the swing of the wheel either right or left. There is nothing human about the man turning that wheel, slowly. He also isn’t aware neither of his presence nor his role here. It’s beyond him, the power in his legs propelling the massive machine. The machine droning and yanking all this weight.

Behind the bus, it’s like this a large blanket of darkness is clouding and tailing us, trying to absorb us in its evil scheme. There is a plot out there; it’s a ghost ambition that haunts all night buses, all open eyed drivers battling with sleep, the night travelers, the dogs prowling the roads, and impatience of many trying to overcome the inadequacy of time to do everything in the daylight. The silence of ways…ways stretched with uncertainty.

Its scary looking at people sleeping, it’s like they are spinning our fates in their arduous, adventurous dreams. As we hurtle on the tarmac, quickly eating up the distance that spreads ahead of us. Distant darknesses approach and get dissolved by the prongs of light that reach out, paving the way, waving away the darkness.

At the midnight hour at Karuma, when Pink Floyd sings Brain damage on my ipod, I don’t know which side of the world we are! Behold, the grey water grumbles below the Nile, fighting not to go away. We ride over the bridge, grinding our weak shock absorbers onto the thin meshed gulley at the entrance to the bridge, it scrapes right to our spines, bounces away and we settle to quite another laborious battle to keep awake. Across the Nile, leads us to another level in this puppet story, the rivets are fastened stronger as we levitate into deep unconsciousness. 

 

Thinly strapped grisly old women idle on road corners contemplating crossing the road.  The driver sits slumped in his seat, widening his drooping eyes and nodding each time he knocks down an old woman, leaving them braying behind us. The women that don’t cross the road stand grotesque. Leaning against their walking sticks, hair flailing in their own aura, they stare at us with hollowly eyes. Their trembling breath stretches across the road as a web of isolation, claustrophobia, insomnia, and dewy memories. That, sieving through it creates a disability of emotion that grips us, losing our selves to guilt, trepidation, paranoia, procrastination!

 That, Alas, somewhere! Beyond this trance, beyond the night, someone else listens to Pink Floyd with yet another complete dilemma. So that when Shine on you crazy diamond plays, I am completely absorbed from this world, taken away by the magic of the electric, into the guzzle of the Nile, into the pale tarmac, into the allure of the moon, into the world of deceptive perspectives. What then, compels me to wake up when Pink Floyd stops singing?

Inside this grayscale landscape, the black box that contained us has shifted continuously past the ghost hour, before the moon turned away or before the rain cloud obstructed it. When, we examine ourselves for a feeling of having existed earlier. It turns out it’s now a trip past the madhouse blues.

There is a proclivity to forgetfulness after it sleep has gone. That the hour before, or perhaps minutes earlier, we all kind of slept. That I didn’t get to listen to the rest of the Pink Floyd album. It’s the sour taste in the mouth, the kind you get after you have slept. The patched feeling, the clear-headedness, and the cloud-headedness..

That while at sleep, we had moved several miles along the way this far