A Cockroach Ride

In a previous post, I narrated a rather memorable bus journey. It appears that buses aren’t the only providers of action… Last Sunday, D, G and I were on our way back to JIPMER from the beach, in one of those shared autos (a k a Cockroaches). The Cockroach was packed to the fullest extent possible, and I was crammed between G and a woman with four young kids. Right behind me, his back against mine, sat the driver of the Cockroach. We’d just started off when a fight broke out between the woman with the four kids and the driver. She refused to purchase tickets for her kids, saying they were all too young to count. The driver pointed out that no matter what their age, they took up space, because only kid sat on her lap while the other three sat on the seats, so she would do well to pay up. She refused.

The argument, inevitable as it was, began. The driver pulled over, turned around to face the woman, and began yelling. She yelled back. There was quite a shouting match going on. “Shut up! Shut UP! SHUT UP!!!”, he hollered. “YOU shut up!”, she hollered back. Another woman, ostensibly a friend of the one with four kids, hollered “SHUT UP!” at nobody in particular. Since I was caught right in the middle of the fight, literally, squashed between the warring parties, I was deafened by the “SHUT UP”s and also generously sprayed with spit. Ew ew ew. After shouting for several more minutes, everyone DID shut up, though both the driver and the women continued to mutter rather unintelligibly.

And then, quite suddenly, an oldish woman right at the back of the Cockroach said something about mothers not ‘keeping their kids to themselves’ (rough translation, that one). The mother of four sprang up from her seat (quite a feat, considering the Cockroach was CRAMMED with people (and four kids, of course) and slapped the oldish woman- SMACK!!! Soon there was a string of Tamil profanities that I can’t translate to English, and even if I could, I wouldn’t have been able to put those words in a post on my blog.

Soon, they came to blows. First they beat each other, trying to do their best, what with the limited space and lack of light. I received a few blows on my back. We decided it was high time we got off the Cockroach. The last I saw, each woman was trying to pull the other’s hair out. I thought of all those seemingly pointless questionnaires I’ve answered… You know, the ones that carry questions like

If you came across two people fighting, you would

1. Stop and watch
2. Try to pull them apart
3. Try to make them see reason and stop fighting
4. Just let them be and get out of there as soon as possible

I’d always answered either B or C (though option C doesn’t make any sense, really). But I now realize that it’s a LOT more important that I save my own back. I DID try option B, albeit half-heartedly, but I got kinda hurt in the process. From now on, it shall be D. Always.

Well, thanks to that catfight, we had to get down MILES from JIPMER and then walk most of the way. As a result, we were late for dinner, and missed the Gulab Jamun that had been prepared as the Weekend Special…. Sigh.