Of puris and music..............

Some journeys are hard to forget. I am not talking about the sojourns on aeroplanes that have become so mundane now. What is so interesting about rushing like a maniac with a trolley bag in tow to a concrete, plastic airport and digging a big hole in the pocket to have a cup of green tea or a glass of antacid-like juice? The rushing in and rushing out, going through security check and being entertained by indifferent stewards and hostesses contribute in no way to remember those journeys by. Yes, if you meet someone exceptional en route then some spice may be added to the bland routine. The idea is not to put the blame on flights; the flying monsters have indeed made our lives easier. But on the flip side, I do miss some golden moments.

Those were the days (do I sound like your grandmother when I say this?) when buses reigned supreme; the sweltering boxes that they were on humid summers of north-east India. The bus journeys from Guwahati to either my paternal ancestral home in Lahoal, Dibrugarh, or to my maternal uncles place in Boloma, Jorhat, are something that have remained fresh in my cerebral cortex. Though I cannot boast of an Einsteinian memory to boost my self belief, I do have enough faith in my faculties to reminisce about those ASTC days. ASTC (Assam State Transport Corporation) buses were not what they look like today. ‘Volvo’ was a name unheard of, and the priority was to choose a bus that had pocket friendly fares and plied ‘on time’. For the suburbanite Assamese, ASTC buses were a boon, for the hardworking villager, they were both economical and affordable means to travel. In short, bus journey was nothing short of an adventure. 

Though the seven sisters are collectively considered a ‘rogue state’ by the people of mainland India, my personal experience has helped me to deduce that bottom-pinchers, creepers (males who stand adjacent to female passengers in buses and use their upper limbs to grope and touch the former in all possible areas of the body), the Kokopellic ones who seem to have taken over the arduous errand of staring at women’s bosom, hips, etc. on buses and the likes are less rampant in the north east. Irrespective of the media hype on the ‘helpless’ pub crawler being manhandled by drunken dudes in the middle of the night in Guwahati, or the general mentality of associating any ‘chinky’ with drugs and sex, buses were not the favourite site for carrying out not-so-correct things. 

A bus journey in the daytime in my childhood reminds me of the much anticipated stoppage at ‘Gopal-Krishna’ Hotel at Bokakhat for the much in demand puri, aloo sabzi and jolokia aachar (fried flour bread, potato curry and green chilli pickle), served on green banana leaves. It was an occasion in itself, not to mention the much elaborate narration regarding the mouth watering taste of the food and the number of puris that we ate in front of the less fortunate cousins and siblings back home. Yes, though we were not yet acquainted with the velvety taste of Maharaja Mac or the crunchy feel of Crispy Fried Chicken at KFC, we had no complaints. A meal at Gopal-Krishna was worth a hundred delicacies that I can have now; and it still is……

The most interesting bus journeys were those on ‘night-supers’. In addition to the omnipresent red dinos (read ASTC buses with the logo of the one-horned rhinoceros on its body), there were the ‘better’ buses of ‘Green Valley’ and ‘Trishul’. I cannot imagine a ‘night-super’ journey without the cacophony of Jokholabondha, where the bus always stopped for dinner. Though I fail to recall the names of the restaurants in the numerous instances when we had dinner there (which usually consisted of steaming rice, dal and chicken curry), I do vividly remember the unmatched mix of songs blasting from all the eateries. Altaf Raja’s ‘tum to thehre pardesi…ghar kab aaoge..’ made a heady cocktail with Jitul Sonowal’s ‘Joon jole, tora jole, nixa jole bedona je…’. If Lata Mangeshkar vied for attention with a soul stirring ‘sun saheba sun, pyaar ki dhun..’, then Chandan Dass too demanded an audience with ‘piyaa nahin jab gaon mein, aag lage sab gaon mein..’. The Bombay Vikings, DY Medleys, and the like might have taken over the business of remixing music nowadays, but the restaurant owners and the crowd pulling helper boys of the road side hotels at Jokholabondha remains the ultimate crowd pullers with their own genre of music.

Like life the buses too have changed now. Now they are sophisticated, chic and more comfortable. But come what may, I still find my voice fading into nothingness over the tumult from the loudspeakers, and my salivary glands still become oversecretory at the memory of the puri, aloo sabzi and the jolokia aachar served on the oh-so-green banana leaves on a hot, humid noon………………….