A Bus Concert to Palolem

On the second bus from Panjim, there was no room for sitting. Sweat trickling down every open pore of my face, chest and back, we mazed our way through the rolling chants of bus attendants calling out the destinations of their buses. We caught sound of our bus. 

Margao, Margao, Margao....

Hurriedly ushered onto a ‘full’ and rolling bus – I assumed we had caught it by a hair, drenched yet thankful to be on. But I was wrong. After us, no fewer than 15 more people followed us onto the bus. We were braided into the other passengers and I hoped that once all crammed in, we would remain balanced in a collective pose for the duration of the journey.

Content that this seemed likely, and happy to hang, and adjusted to the smells of my fellow travel companions, I turned my attention to other dynamics within the bus. For example, our driver, maybe from years of habit, could not toot the horn less than 4 times to make his point. It was either that, or an extended deliberate TOOOOT to anything that dared to edge in the bus’ path, leading into a series of Morse code-esque tooting. The high-pitched horns tapped out perhaps the daily headlines in this continued pattern in a code that would be studied by linguists in years to come.

From Margao, we looked for our last bus that would take us to the paradise beyond the palms at Palolem.  By far, taking the sweat meter to new notches… I was pleasantly surprised to be able to get a seat at the front of the bus, and I was lucky enough to have the corner, so I would be the guaranteed proprietor of a small couple of feet of space for the next few hours at least. This also gave me a front row ticket to the choir of gears and levers all supporting the centerpiece and show-stealer… The bus-break. 

The conductor of this metal-groaning balancing array sat in his cockpit, steering the wheel – taming his instrument and orchestra while navigating the now country road landscape. The noise that flowed out when the break was applied to our medieval space-tractor was a menagerie of mechanical tones and vibrations that I experienced for the first fearful time in my life. At 50m away from the stopping point, when the break was first pushed, the whole bus seemed to tremble like a mammoth elephant with indigestion. At 40m, a high-pitched screeching took hold of our eardrums acting as a sort of vibration conductor from the front wheels to the pits of my belly. And then in the last 20 meters, in full song, the mid-tones of the beast chimed in roaring and trembling to a glorious crescendo and wrapping into a sine wave note to stop.

The pause was just long enough for a couple of nimble jumps, beats of light feet on and off and back into the neutral groaning and snorting of the engine.

This went on for the 2-hour journey. I’d like to say it happened so often that I didn’t even notice it… It happened so often, it gave me a chance to see and feel the crazy song.