Betrayed by Bus No. 15 and a postscript

17 February, 2007
Betrayed by Bus No. 15

Today, Madras and I have had a falling out, and I have the bumps and bruises to prove it. Our fight started this morning, when I was supposed to go to a temple with Rajani and Rashmi. We were to meet at 7:30, which means that I sat outside Rashmi’s hostel until 7:55, all the while feeling the return of the nausea that I’ve been experiencing for the last few days. No longer wanting to make the hour long rickshaw ride out to the temple and increasingly annoyed that I had already lost half an hour of sleep on a Saturday morning, I returned to my room to crawl back into bed.
After waking I was feeling better and decided to head to the gym. I slipped on my workout pants, took about three steps, and ripped them right off—I had no idea what was going on but the stinging in my legs told me that there was something seriously wrong. My pants hit the bathroom floor and dozens of red ants scattered. I killed all the ones that were crawling on my legs and itched my way back to my closet. Great. My shelves are hosting a teeming colony of red ants.
Luckily I was prepared for this, as I had been warned about ants finding their way into the food that I keep triple-bagged in my room (although go figure, of the two closets that I have—one which has food in it and one which has clothes—the ants decided they liked the closet with my clothes in it better). I found one of the ayahs (the cooks/housekeepers of the hostel) to ask her what to do with the anti-ant chalk that I had purchased, and she quickly took charge of the situation: clearing out my entire closet for washing and lining every crevice, crack and corner of my room with anti-ant chalk. Meanwhile I was itching the dozen-or-so welts that spread from my feet to my stomach. Here the ayah also took over, forcing me to sit down and explaining to me through charades and Tamil that I should always check my clothing before putting it on; all of this while she globbed Bag Balm all over every ant bite she could find.
So I sat with sticky yellow body parts and cursed the ants, who had taken out of commission my last piece of gym-appropriate clothing. Determined not to be deterred, however, I took a pair of shorts out of the laundry and hand washed them, hanging them on my closet to air dry. Of course this would take awhile because we were having our first rain in the city and the air everywhere was heavy and damp. I got back into bed and started a new book—Such a Long Journey, by the author of the excellent book A Fine Balance.
By noon I was getting impatient, my shorts were mostly dry, and if I didn’t leave by a certain time, the mess and all the restaurants would be closed for lunch by the time I got back. So I ran off to the bus stop with my phone in hand: back at home MC and Courtney had just arrived at the cabin and I was eager to talk to them. When I got on the bus I got the last empty seat in the women’s section, and I felt like my luck was turning up. I happily chatted away with my sister until, before I knew it, we had already arrived at my stop. I clambered over the old woman sitting next to me and hopped down the steps. The bus had already started to pull away from the stop (but not very quickly) so I looked to the left and, judging it miraculously clear of oncoming traffic, took the short jump from the last step to the road. Either the bus jolted forward at that moment (as these massive stickshift buses tend to do when they are just starting from a stop) or I made a terrible miscalculation about my own abilities. I’m hoping it was both, because by now I’m fairly certain that at least poor judgment played a role.
In either case, it was one of those things where it happened so fast that I have no memory of anything between the moment of my last point of contact with the bus and the moment that I opened my eyes to the pavement and a severe throbbing in my head. I gathered my bag and hobbled to the curb, clutching my head the whole time. I consider myself a pretty tough person and I don’t cry very often, but it was the end of an already difficult week and, in one of my less proud moments of traveling, I just cried and held my head, where an egg-size lumped was quickly growing. I was stunned and dizzy and the right side of my body was in a lot of pain. Meanwhile the man selling sugar cane juice, and the man selling watermelons, and the boy selling miscellaneous car parts, and the dozens of other people on the street who had seen me fall just watched me cry on the curb while the bottom of my right pant leg soaked up fetid pee-smelling water from the gutter.
By the time I made it back to the hostel in an auto, a whole back-log of homesickness and loneliness and restlessness and frustration had been unleashed and I was a sobbing mess. I tried to ask the ayah for ice, but I quickly degenerated into tears. Before I knew it the senior citizens were all over me and the ayah was dragging me to the sink, where she poured ice water over my head while vigorously massaging the lump. Apparently the Indian way of dealing with pain is to make it hurt even more, and I endured much of this well-intentioned massaging of my bruised head. Despite their strange care-tactics I was so glad to be touched and loved and shushed by these women, and it made me break down all over again to think that no one on the street had come to help me.
One of the women who lives in the hostel is a doctor and did not seem too worried about my head, though in the mean time we had discovered that I couldn’t bend my right elbow. Rajini was at work and Rashmi’s phone was switched off, so their friend Aruna and our warden accompanied me to the hospital. By four o’clock we were joined by Rajini, Rashmi, Muniyandi and Rajamma and it was a full on party; by then—over three hours after I had fallen—I had calmed down considerably, aided by the pain killers that a nurse had injected into my butt and which had dulled the throbbing and swelling in my head. The party was eventually expanded with the presence of two police officers, whom the doctor had insisted upon calling since my accident had taken place in public property (a precaution that they certainly wouldn’t have taken if I weren’t an American).
Through the course of four and a half hours that I spent at the hospital I had a CT scan and two sets of X-rays and was subjected to much lying around in a terribly immodest hospital gown (and quite unnecessarily so, given the fact that only my elbow and my head had to be tested). I was made a big fuss of—the staff wouldn’t let me walk anywhere and I was pushed around in a wheelchair past the curious stares of many hospital visitors and staff—because I was a young foreigner who (to the great amusement of the entire nursing staff of the emergency room) had fallen off of a bus.
I was finally discharged from my first Indian hospital experience with a hairline fracture in my elbow and a very sore head. I have an extremely unattractive sling that I will thankfully only have to wear for three or four days. I am not supposed to use my right arm, which means I am not supposed to be typing this. Just a moment ago, when Rajani and Rashmi dropped by to say hello, they scolded me very severely for typing; Rajani even got out her cell phone and started to call Muniyandi to tell him that I wasn’t following the doctor’s orders. But they’re gone now and I’ve locked the door to prevent any further surprise visits. (Luckily so, because even since writing that Aruna and one of the senior citizens have dropped by in separate visits to ask if I was using my laptop. Let it not be said that India has a shortage of maternal instinct.) Of course I’m annoyed with the whole situation, but I’m trying not to be. The monitoring and doting might be a bit extreme but at least I know that even if I’m fighting with Madras, I have people to look after my bumps and bruises.

18 February, 2007
Reflections on falling off of a bus

Of course I’m not supposed to be typing this, but there is only so much sleeping and reading that one can do.

There are quite a few competing theories about why I fell. During the extended social hour that was my hospital stay, Rajamma—the medical social worker who is one of our interviewers—sat on my cot, making fun of Muniyandi’s fidgety nervousness and the doctor’s self-importance and anything else she could make some kind of sarcastic comment about. When she found out that the very morning of the accident I had cancelled a trip to a Hanuman temple, she raised her eyebrows at me in a “serves you right” kind of expression. Not one to feel sorry for people anyway, Rajamma is now convinced that I have absolutely no reason to sit around and wonder what I did to deserve stomach problems, ant attacks and a fall from a moving bus all in one day. From her point of view in deciding not to go to temple I essentially flipped a big middle finger at Hanuman, who happily flipped one or two right back at me.
On the other hand is the interpretation offered by Rashmi, the girl I was supposed to go to the temple with. She is convinced that it was my fate to fall off of a bus and get a hairline fracture in my elbow. This, she explained, is obviously why I started to feel ill in the morning and backed out of the temple trip. “You couldn’t have avoided it if you wanted to,” she offered, which I guess was supposed to make me feel better. At least from this perspective it wasn’t immediately my fault (although if it was my fate then we can assume that it was the karmic result of some ill deed I did earlier; maybe in one of my previous lives I made a regular habit of not paying bus fare, and now the bus has had its revenge on my cheating soul).
Muniyandi, my colleague at the TRC whom I am always pestering about the delays that seem to plague our project, called me the day after the accident to check on my health; he also informed me about the status of various interviews and his enlistment of another transcriber for our project. “You don’t need to worry about transcription anymore,” he assured me. “Rajamma and I think that the reason you fell off the bus is because you were too much worried about these interviews and things. Too much of tension. No need for tension any more.” Of course at the time of the accident it was a Saturday morning and my thoughts were rather far away from the problems of our project, but if I had known that this is what it takes to get Muniyandi to bust a move on his work, maybe I would have feigned a bus accident earlier.
So I am no religious scholar. I’m not confident that I could pick the image of Shiva out of the lot of gods and I certainly know nothing about theories of religious world views. But I can’t help but find it interesting that in contrast to all these unsolicited attempts at causal explanation by my Hindu friends, the Christian senior citizens in my hostel (who have had a lot of words with me in the past few days) have offered nothing that could pass as answer to the question of “Why?”
In fact, the whole idea of this being something unfortunate—however minor—that has befallen me is entirely absent from their consolation and prayers for me (which have been offered quite frequently). One of the senior citizens is a former missionary teacher who spent most of her life living, working, and “doing the Lord’s service” in Africa, and she is fond of blessing me and inviting me to prayer group, despite my consistent declining to do so. The night after my accident she waddled over to my room and announced that she was going to pray for me. “Sit. This will only take two minutes.” She stood over me, one hand on my head and the other raised towards the sky, offering all kinds of pleas and statements to whomever was listening. At one point she went so far as to say that “Libby is thankful for everything that you have done for her today, Lord. ” Yes. Why would I question this series of events? Must there be a reason that all of this has happened to me? I am obediently thankful for it all. I am thankful for sala red ants. And I am thankful for falling off of a bus. Please. Let me do it again.
This Aunty of mine is well intentioned but she has no idea that, at this point, I have made up my own mind about why I fell off the bus. It has nothing to do with offending Hanuman or fulfilling my fate or being protected by the Lord. It mostly has to do with the laws of gravity and force. As for the ants they are, in this part of the world, as unavoidable a fact of life as gravity. And the same can pretty much be said for stomach problems.
Such is life: moving buses, gravity, ants, mosquitoes, piss on the curb, parasites, things in the water. And this is what makes me able to laugh about it, even when I am forced to wear a sling that gives me neck pain, or when I struggle to brush my teeth with my left hand or when I wake up in the middle of the night, itching ant bites all over my body that have swelled larger than the size of quarters. Given the outcome of it all and the gravity of all the other possibilities, this is really quite funny. And besides. Its not like I’m superstitious or anything, but stomach, ants and bus all in one day? Three is a pretty auspicious number, and I’m hoping that I’ve filled the holy trinity quota of crappy things that may cometh my way. Touch wood, but I think I’m clear from here on out.

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