Have you ever been on an overnight bus ride on a single upper bunk in India? On my last trip from Bengaluru to Pondicherry I did not know better and got a single upper bunk. I thought it would certainly be great to get a bit of sleep. Actually it was a quite dangerous ride, if it was not for the bar in front of the window which I held onto even while sleeping I would have fallen out of the bunk.The bunk was simply too narrow even for a slender person like me; and there were only two vertical bars, not enough to prevent a person from slipping through them in the way Indian traffic goes. Any kind of seatbelt was absent; no safety measures in place. So there was not much sleep. The people who got a seat instead of a bunk were certainly safer and could not fall out.

The second time on a deluxe bus trip to Tiruvannamalai I got a two-person sleeper bunk. Would I have it for myself? Nope. One married lady came aboard and claimed her half. The other half was supposedly for the husband and he wanted me to make room for him. My valid ticket had the conductor move him to one of the seats in the back. The wife spoke barely English but we had a good time chatting a little. I had a bad cough and she gave me cloves and elaichi for it. The cloves were working pretty good. After the first bathroom break the woman got comfortable and spread her body into my half of the bunk. My subtle notches did not make her move. It was too cozy for me but she was already asleep. So I left it at that.

Then there was another bathroom break. Indian deluxe busses don’t have toilets aboard. It was in the middle of the night. It was dark outside. Men just went somewhere and relieved themselves. I was expecting a toilet building for the ladies. I was informed by the bus driver that it is ‘open space’. It meant to just find a dark corner and take care of business. The saying then goes: ‘Do as the locals do.’

(C) 2015 Udaysree Nithyananda – All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt from ‘ARUNACHALA – Living in the Foothills of a Sacred Mountain in South India’