clumsy?me?

I had never done such a thing before, at least not alone. I have never been to that place. I had to go by bus. I missed many buses that go to the place because I expected the name of my destination to be written in English. It is sad that I still have to focus hard to read my own mother tongue, the language I (thankfully!) still use fluently to communicate everyday.

It has been a long time since I have gone by bus from one place to another; even longer since I have had to stand through my journey. So here I was, in this bus full of women in comfortable, airy, cotton sarees and men in veshti’s comfortably seated and staring at me, the well dressed, file sporting girl from the ‘patnam’ (madras). I am clumsy I accept, I have even been branded clumsy I know, but that day I was the epitome of clumsiness. Here is what I did:
Got into the bus, tripped on the steps, took some ten minutes to take the change out and irritated the conductor, evidence-he started screaming at me in front of everyone saying “nalla dress mattum pannunga, kaasu eduka ivalo neram. Engalukellam naria pera gavunikanam ma.” (“not enough to just dress well. So much time to take money. We have to take care of so many people woman.”). I gave him my winning smile but realized that he was still irritated and doubled my efforts to get the change out of my over stuffed purse (stuffed with useless bits of paper not money). In the process, a pen dropped from my file. I stooped to pick it up and a few papers slid down from my file. Just as they are about to fall down I caught it only to realize that the pencil in my file had fallen and rolled off the bus onto the road.

During this fiasco, I caught a fleeting glance at the conductor and saw him hitting his head with his hand and giving me this pitiful look as if saying “poor girl, has grown so much but doesn’t have even a bit of brain in that head of hers.”

Finally I found what I was looking for and gave it to him without looking him in the eye. I was busy focusing my efforts on balancing myself and with one leg was trying to bring together the scattered parts of my pen to a position where I could easily pick it up.

A woman sitting had been looking at me struggle (by now I had the ticket and the change that the conductor gave me in one hand along with the purse and the file and papers in another hand and desperately struggling to catch a grip on some seat so I wouldn’t fall down.). She bent down took all the scattered pen bits, took my file and papers from me, put the papers into the file and smiled at me. I gave a weak smile and mumbled something that sounded like ‘nkss’.

I somehow settled into a comfortable standing position and looked around at the people traveling in the bus. All had been staring at me and as I looked, having had a good laugh, they slowly started going back to sleep. Only then did I realize that this ‘city girl’ in me had given them good entertainment, a change from their monotonous travel.

PS: This trip helped in a bit of self discovery. After all I didn’t know I was soooooooooo clumsy.