Of Drivers & Driven - 8

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 Fireflies in the night

Our Benz Buses in Muthukur didn't have any lights other than their headlights and the sole night light bulb on top of the dashboard that lit up the combo picture of all the gods and goddesses that mattered.

So the interior of the bus was as dark as the night outside in the Last Bus trip that started at Nellore Bus Stand at 7 and reached Muthukur as late in the night as 8 when everyone was already in their beds under the starlit skies.

Muthukur didn't have any 'current' as long as I stayed there till 1957. There was only the sole Holmesian Gas Lamp that stood as a sentinel in the Bus Stand which was the meeting place of all. Every house had a couple of hurricane lanterns...we had four. One of these was as a rule hung up by its wire frame in the front yard of the house as a consideration for the late-night walkers in the street that had no street lamps. Also as a sentiment. 

Ramakrishna Paramahamsa said:

"A rich man is known not by the number of rooms his bungalow has but the number of lamps it was lit up with"

As kerosine was expensive and rationed, the whole village was in bed before 8 in the night...and everyone was up and about by dawn as a daylight saving measure. The Indian Meridian brushed past Muthukur and it was much closer to the equator than KGP...so we had even times of dawn and dusk in all seasons. And unlike at KGP, our rainy season came in our so-called winter and the two months of November and December were the only nights when we slept inside and shivered pleasantly in our bush shirts...

The last bus was pretty roomy and I had the chance of sitting by our driver in the front seat and watch the night life of the Nellore-Muthukur road to my heart's content...and it wasn't bad.

As the bus lugged into the jungle the first unforgettable sight was the swarm of fireflies that lit up the wayside trees that took on a ghostly unfamiliar look...enough to send my father into ecstasy and me into scare...night was so different then from day.

And once every ten minutes we used to hear the jingle bells of bullock carts on which their drivers slept soundly sure that their bullocks knew the straight road like the back of their tails. And as the headlights of our bus hit the bullocks' eyes they shone bright green like a couple of well-placed emeralds...there is a Thurber story: The Topaz Cufflinks Mystery...as wacky as his other stories.

And then the night owls that swooped down the road from their hangouts in their tree-boles; and their eyes gleamed in the headlights like a couple of rubies:

All in all it was a creepy thing for a boy of 8...

 

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