‘Word by Word’ is a column by Garima Behal on learning to ride the highs and lows of everyday life

I stood gingerly, spreading my feet wide to gain somewhat of a foothold. Bus number 13 swerved and lurched in what seemed to be the last bus ride of my life. I knew commuting In Bengaluru was going to be difficult but come on. 

First, I didn’t find an auto for 20 minutes. Then, I ended up walking to the bus station in the wrong direction. Only after 5 minutes passed did I realize the error of my ways. I finally headed to the right stop and was told that there was only one bus to my destination and that it was still 10 minutes away.

Perfect, I muttered to myself. If I were in Delhi, I’d never have to face this. Why couldn’t this city just finish building and connecting its metro?

That’s Bengaluru for you, Garima. I hope you’re enjoying your time in the world’s second-slowest city. Good luck getting home tonight, especially in this thunderstorm.

As I spiraled into doom-thinking, I spotted the bus. The flicker of hope and joy that followed was short-lived, though. Thanks to endless traffic snarls caused by a) lack of infrastructure and b) incessant rains, the bus halted more than it moved.

Without a seat to ground my clumsy self and a guardrail to hold on to, I found myself practicing unintended tai-chi before an audience of total strangers. The heavy laptop bag on my back compounded my misery. As did the peak office hour crowd thronging into the cramped aisle of apparently the only useful bus on that route.

The last time I traveled in a public bus before moving cities? Probably over a decade ago, as a school kid. 

Not a fan of the pushing and the shoving, I burst into tears. 

It’s a response that comes naturally to me when I feel a combination of helplessness and anger. Add loneliness to the mix, the homesickness of missing my mom, and career anxiety, and you have a perfectly (un)palatable recipe for disaster.

There’s little comfort for me here in Bengaluru, except being closer to some people I love. It’s a huge thing, and I try not to take it for granted, but there are nights when I hate not having hugged my mum good night. Mornings when I don’t like calling the one bare room with a bare mattress in my office’s employee-flat ‘home.’ Days when I find no time to string a thought together into words because I’m spending 2 hours trying to travel 8 kilometers. 

Most of us who move out of home are no strangers to disliking the city we move to. What I find strange, though, is this growing sense of kinship with the city I sometimes feel determined to hate.

Like the 2, no 3 times, where the women in the bus pointed me—a clear non-native—to vacant seats before someone else could get to them. I don’t speak Kannada yet, and they didn’t seem to speak English, but those moments made me feel more understood than a shared sense of language. 

Then there was this chatty auto-driver whom I stumbled upon and asked for a ride, unable to will my tired feet to walk the 1.1 kilometers home from the Cubbon Park Metro station. I always walk without fail. Yet, it was one of those days when I felt like an outsider, and my mental fatigue translated into the physical. 

“Your complexion is so fair, mashallah! What should I do to make my skin color look the same way?”

When the auto-driver asked me this, I couldn’t help but smile despite my grumpy mood. I’ll always be an outsider, but at least someone liked me for it.

“You come and live in Delhi,” I joked. 

The 5-minute ride turned into a 5-minute conversation then, and he told me he spoke 5 languages but only a “little English” and that if I needed a PG, I could give him a call because he had “contacts” who could help me get it for cheaper than elsewhere. I ended up with his number and a belief that things would turn out to be okay, somehow. 

I saw none of this coming. Looking forward to saying hello and bye to our cook’s 4-year-old daughter, with whose family I currently share my temporary accommodation. Having kind uncles explain diverting bus routes as I struggled to figure them out while hurrying to office. Thanking a young student who automatically stepped in to translate Kannada for me as I stared blankly at the aged lady trying to hold a conversation with me. 

While I paid extra attention to the discomfort and the mess of all the storms approaching—outside and within—I forgot to look into the rear-view mirror and witness the magically iridescent rainbows they left behind in their wake.

I’m glad the rainbows hadn’t dissipated when I decided to look, though. And I’m grateful for the knowledge that there’s always a chance of them showing up when I least expect them to.