Watching the huge luxury buses that often breeze through Munnar carrying tourists cocooned in comfort, I am reminded of the ancient jalopies in which we travelled in the fifties and sixties. They were mostly aging Fords and Chevrolets which had seen better days in the plains, having been relegated to the hills of Munnar to run out their twilight years. Here, grossly overloaded, they wheezed and groaned up the steep terrain, with little maintenance, until they were eventually junked. In particular, I recall a battered, white-and-green 25-seater Ford that ferried us from Munnar in Kerala to Udumalpet in Tamil Nadu. It took a minimum of five hours to crawl through the 85-km journey — provided it didn’t break down en route. When it did, the passengers cheerfully wrote off another hour or two! The only bus on the route, it was invariably packed to double its normal capacity, with commuters precariously perched in the luggage-carrier atop the bus as well. Inside, the proverbial tin of sardines would have looked roomier: one couldn’t move an inch without stepping on someone’s toes — and raising his hackles! We children often had to stand for hours, tightly sandwiched into a state of numbness, waiting to pounce on a vacant seat. Once an elderly villager offered me his lap. Grateful, I ensconced myself there — and promptly dozed off with the good Samaritan’s week-old stubble soporifically tickling my nape! Travel-sickness sometimes produced drama. The moment a passenger stuck his head out of the window to throw up, there would be a frenzied rush to down the window shutters to avoid getting bespattered! And it was usually then that the shutters got stuck, perversely refusing to budge — much to our glee and the consternation of the adults! In a sense driver Muthu and his Ford were made for each other. Both were well past their prime and decrepit. It was said that Muthu sometimes fuelled not only his bus but also himself — against the biting cold. But he was a reliable and safe driver. He knew his jalopy’s idiosyncrasies and weaknesses well; we could always bank on him to get it going whenever it stalled. And cleaner Murugan, his trusted Man Friday, was always there to laboriously crank the engine into life, sending a tremor through the bus with each attempt. We children never tired of watching Muthu pilot his ramshackle bus up and down that treacherous terrain, his prominently veined hands spinning the steering wheel and shifting gears effortlessly. Even more enchanting were the quaint musical sounds that he magically squeezed out of his bulbous air-horn — something we could never emulate, try as we might. No wonder many of us vowed to become bus-drivers when we grew up!
