SEX: F
BUS: A DEFIANT STORY….perhaps!!!It was her 13th b day and she was bursting with happiness. Donning her new dress, in her favorite yellow colour, she walked to the bus stop. Her dad had asked her to meet him at his office about 4 bustops away. Though she had gone many a times with her father or mother, this was going to be her first time all alone. Proud, confidant, happy and tasting that carefreeness of the youth when one feels you have crossed the childhood and yet have no inkling about the adulthood- well that perhaps was the skip in her steps, the lightness in her walk and the twinkle in her eyes. She couldn’t help smiling at everyone. The friendly neighborhood always sprung one or two “aunties” or “uncles” whom she greeted without missing a chance to tell it was her b day and that her yellow frock was a gift from her mother.She reached the bus stop, scratching her high collared, stifling collar. Past few months her mother had changed her wardrobe from short shoulder less frocks to constricting full necks…“ but then the colours are all so wonderful” she thought.The bus appeared almost immediately. She smiled again at her good luck. The whole universe seemed to know that it was her b day and was treating her specially. As she was about to board, she noticed some youngsters getting down from the bus. She paused, waiting for them get down. She looked up with a bright twinkle in her eyes, and a hovering smile on her face, trusting the world so completely.She did feel a bit weird though, and suddenly she found her right chest being groped, grabbed and pinched hard. Bewilderment, pain, shock and total lack of understanding.Who? why ?The youngsters laughed at her walking away as the bus chugged on. She had already alighted but in the split second she realized that the youngsters were no friends and shouted, ”bloody idiot!” (the worst word that she knew which she used only when her little brother had torn her doll’s dress!)That drew even more derisive laughter from them as one of them tried to lunge towards her and commented nastily on her “breast”!“breast? Breast? That is adult …. Do I already have it” confused angry tears threatened to spillThrough the haze of indignant and filled with righteous fury, she thought” conductor uncle saw it! Thank god”And she turned to look at the conductor who was just seated next to the steps and who she knew would blow a whistle right now, stop the bus, get down, and accost the boys …. May be all the passengers would thrash those boys and take them to police station.She turned round to look at the bus conductor’s eye. ..dead lifeless eyes.. eyes which had seen this happen so often that his conscious mind does not even register such inane things. The passengers’ deary with day to day living, travelling like a pack of sardines in the bus had numbed their senses long back to simply bear through the smelly, long journey which would take double the time just because roads are not good or traffic is blocked by bullock carts.She grew up into a woman that moment. She knew that, in india, its not rich or poor, its not communist or democracy its not literate or illiterate;it was HIS OR her!!
Few years later A 16 year girl, clad properly in the mandated salwar with the thick, stifling, cottan dupatta, primly pinned, boarded the bus. This time she chose to ignore the hands deliberately caressing her thighs, and meandered past the crowded bus to the ladies side. As she turned back to pull her wretched dupatta through the crowd, she saw him smirking. She SNAPPED. She turned around, went near him and simply started staring at him. People around started noticing. Her inherent integrity and his shiftiness left no doubt in anybody’s mind about what would have happened. Of course dead don’t act! So neither did the crowd lift a finger but a middle aged woman, braving her arthritis got up and turned around to stand up next to her and started staring …….
