No Seat for “Young” Man

by Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty

[box]A man experiences a strange hollow within him and once he figures out what bothers him, he tries to beat the emptiness by taking a bus ride on a familiar route. What happens next? Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty’s work of fiction will give you the answers. Read on.[/box]

“Of course, no seat! Now, keep standing. Fine day this is.”

He was not very sure where he wanted to go although he did have his mind made up on what “stop” to tell the bus conductor. He even had the change ready in his shirt pocket so that he did not have to reach for his wallet and put on a balancing act while the bus swerved and sped. Old habit. Like so many other little things which come silently through the boring efficiency of routine everyday use. And boy had he used the bus! He had often wondered exactly what fraction of his entire life he had spent inside that metallic receptacle of passive human traffic. Day after day, on that very same route – from home to office; then back again.

But this day was different. It was late evening on a Saturday. And, he was not returning home, certainly not going to office. In fact, he was not going to any place as much as he was getting away from some. Rather, some thing. To be sure, nothing really serious had happened at home. His wife’s mood had not been particularly caustic. Just the usual venting, the usual sour reminders of things he had forgotten to pick from the market place, and the usual complaints and worries of their son’s TV watching “problem”. For that matter, even his son had turned off the TV when he had asked him to. Yet, in that routine drama which unfolded every day in the hour following “Dad’s back from office”, there was a hint of a strange loneliness. Passive thanklessness he had come to accept. But there was something harsher and more acute he had started feeling recently. Perhaps it was a feeling of indifference he sensed from them. Probably not. Something even sadder perhaps.

As the familiar motions-to-go-through-in-the-evening had progressed, he had not been able to lay a finger on that strange hidden hollow he felt inside. Even as his wife had poured out a gossipy tale of one of their neighbours, he had tried remembering if the source of his strange feelings was something from the office. Nothing there. Then, without warning, from that distant voice of his wife sitting near him, a bunch of words had fallen like an innocent pebble on that pool of dark hollowness he had not been able to see for so long. And the ripples had run him awash with a realization he fought hard to deny. She had started talking about his coming retirement – he was growing old.

It had felt stifling. All the usual talk which he usually soaked in with a practised indifference seemed far too dry. He had tried watching the news but that certainly had not helped. He had to get away from all that even if just for that moment. He had hoped that the stream of life outside would perhaps make that hollow feel less lonely. It hadn’t. Everywhere, on all those familiar streets he walked, in the shops he used, inside the cars he detested, he saw faces – younger faces – bubbling forth in that stream of life. Like he once himself had. Once?

He had to get away even from that. So he had taken the bus on that familiar route of his. There, he had been greeted by seats full of passengers. And as far as he could see – for he just couldn’t stop noticing now – most of them younger than he was: the set of chirpy young girls, some of them intently talking into their mobile phones, the ladies with their kids returning from tuition, the set of young men with tired faces and neat dresses, the college boys, a couple of older men – but still younger than him – discussing the elections, the always-to-be-found-on-buses armchair cricket specialists, and the rest of the non-descript miscellany.

He found himself standing just beside the second row near the fellow seated with a big red bag under his legs; he was evidently returning home and from the stop he mentioned to the bus conductor he was not getting up any time soon. What did it matter? His thoughts went back to those words about his retirement. It was a fact. Only one year was left for that. He had never wanted his life to be much different from what it turned out to be. Sedate and safe was how he had ensured it would be. Yet, in that simple coasting along, abiding by the rules, he had taken a simple pride in giving his two cents worth to the way things were and ran in the whole scheme of things. He was a proud cog in the big machinery. Not any more soon. He was ready to be thrown out. He had never minded not being appreciated. But he always knew that in one corner, he was necessary. He knew that he mattered. That would be no more.

His thoughts were interrupted by the sudden appearance of a vacant seat in the front row, courtesy the getting down of a gentleman – perhaps the only one in the bus who was positively older than he was.

“Great! Just great! Of all, this one had to become vacant” – the front row was meant for Senior Citizens. The only other “contender” for that seat was the young man standing next to him. Looking the “kid” squarely in the face, he knew this was a no-competition. How could he hope to win against this jeans-clad youngster in the duel to forgo that quota meant for senior citizens? Swallowing all pride, he resigned to that seat. As he sat there, the last vestiges of his denial stamped out by this seemingly innocuous turn of events, that stifling feeling returned to him. There was no escape. He seemed to drown in the hollow sadness inside his very own stream of life.

Or, was that stream even his own anymore? As he had inherited that seat from the older gentleman, probably the chirpy, worried, tired younger faces sitting behind him had inherited his stream of life. Even the thought that he would return next Monday on that same route, towards his office where he would matter, brought little respite to this strange sadness that he had never felt before. Why had he not realized this earlier? The stories and the jokes about retirees came biting back to him. No amount of sighing seemed to ease the strangle hold of that dark hollowness … And he felt a drowsiness overcoming him.

His sad reverie was suddenly broken by the conductor’s gentle jab at his shoulder: “Sir, please leave your seat.” He looked up and noticed a very old man, bent with age and perilously holding on to the handle-bars, standing half-drooped over him. In that one confusingly magic moment, a spark flickered back into his eyes and a flush of that old familiar chivalry beat back the rippling sadness of his dark evening. He triumphantly scrambled up and gallantly offered his seat to that old withered man – even helping him along to settle down. As he stood there, his heart pounding with excitement, he looked around to see if the others had noticed what he had just accomplished. Nobody seemed bothered, however. Come on, people! And then, it dawned on him. Since that “mighty” act of his had seemed so natural to so many of them, probably not many of them took him to be a person to deserve that seat in the first place – there was absolutely nothing chivalrous about what he had done! That thought – their indifference – flooded him with a curious happiness, and he found himself sheepishly smiling with amusement. He noticed that the fellow with the red bag, in the second row, was faintly smiling with him. He shook his head, looked out of the bus window and saw the honking-screaming-scurrying stream of life bubbling forth. The stream, he still, definitely, was a part of!

Dedicated to an unknown middle-aged gentleman, who, I saw, get up to give his seat to an older man, while I was sitting behind the Senior Citizens’ row on Bus No. 44, en route home, in Kolkata on Feb 4, 2012.

Pic : mahin – http://www.flickr.com/photos/skyrim/

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty is doing his PhD at IIT Kharagpur in Microfluidics and Nanofluidics, specifically theoretical Electrokinetics, after obtaining an Integrated Degree of B.Tech and M.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from the same place in 2009. Jeevan believes that in science and technology, it takes a lifetime of effort and discipline to be really creative within the rules, and genius to bend those or form new ones. As a welcome break from that discipline, he finds that in literature, creativity comes with ease and with the immediate gratification of momentary inspiration. Even in this paradise of carefree thoughts, he loves the wacky and the improbable. He adores delightful twists, clever word-plays and ideas which turn conventional wisdom on its head.

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