Phantom Passengers

I have tried, in vain, too many times to exchange pleasantries with fellow passengers in a bus to dare again. There is no use. For passengers to remain obdurate is preferred to responding to any overtures made by their fellow passengers lest their apathy be compromised. If they are coaxed into responding they respond with a quick contemptuous look instead of affecting a fake smile of involvement they don't know for how long.

Most people would rather be certain they're miserable, than risk being lively.

While traveling in a bus some time ago I witnessed with horror how wantonly a 12 year old bus 'page-boy' was hit by the bus conductor for having negligently given the signal to move the bus prematurely, while there was still a passenger rushing toward the bus from across the fields thereby incurring a loss of few rupees to the owner of the bus. Boy's mouth started bleeding profusely staining his badly worn out shirt. Most probably he had lost a couple of upper front teeth, because when he opened his mouth to beg for mercy the gap between the teeth was all too obvious.

But more horrifying was the mind boggling reality that not one of the about 50 passengers felt ruffled. No eyebrows were raised and there was no protest from any quarters. After brief interest in the gory affair, they reverted back to their detached haven of fancy security. Sedation in their eyes defied the strongest anti -depressant. I felt to be sitting among phantom passengers of a ghost bus, routinely plying on the last route it took before plunging into a very deep ravine, a strong reminiscent of a morbid story I read when I was a juvenile.

It was a deja vu in more than one ways, only horror I felt now far exceeded the terror I experienced while reading the story. Or was it suffocation?

How the passengers could fortify themselves against the pathos of boy's suffering has always puzzled me and made me socially insecure like never before. It not only starkly laid bare the vulnerability of our society to the excesses of the few but also revealed that every man for himself and devil take the hindmost may not be truer anywhere else.