I got on the Rte 22 bus on Friday evening. It was standing room only.
I clean shaven young Indian man waves me on ahead of him. A homeless white man helps an insecure older woman get off through the crowd at her stop. The young Indian lady whose foot I step on when the bus lurches smiles and quietly says, "You're alright." A couple of school girls next to where I stand are having a hushed conversation in Spanish, and two young men speaking Korean or Chinese on my other side are discussing a book from one of their backpacks. A swarthy Hindi-speaking techie is loudly advising someone on the phone in English and Hindi, his voice the only distinguishable noise on the whole bus except for a couple minutes when a weary-looking traveler tries to overcome a bad telephone connection with Uncle Somebody to arrange a money transfer. A neatly-coiffed African American lady with a baby on her lap gets upset when an African immigrant reaches over her to pull the cord. It's not proper to enter another's personal space, physical or sensory.
On a bus in India we would have been standing much closer, using each other's bodies to stay standing in the bus. The crammed bus would be one of many running the same thoroughfare every five or ten minutes each one as crammed as the next, even until late at night. There's no guarantee all the passengers would be human... The noise level, both inside and outside the bus would be much higher, with honking horns, smoke-belching lorries, crying babies, conversations between co-workers heading to the same neighborhood, the bus driver hollering instructions.
I wonder where each of these passengers will end up tonight.
I clean shaven young Indian man waves me on ahead of him. A homeless white man helps an insecure older woman get off through the crowd at her stop. The young Indian lady whose foot I step on when the bus lurches smiles and quietly says, "You're alright." A couple of school girls next to where I stand are having a hushed conversation in Spanish, and two young men speaking Korean or Chinese on my other side are discussing a book from one of their backpacks. A swarthy Hindi-speaking techie is loudly advising someone on the phone in English and Hindi, his voice the only distinguishable noise on the whole bus except for a couple minutes when a weary-looking traveler tries to overcome a bad telephone connection with Uncle Somebody to arrange a money transfer. A neatly-coiffed African American lady with a baby on her lap gets upset when an African immigrant reaches over her to pull the cord. It's not proper to enter another's personal space, physical or sensory.
On a bus in India we would have been standing much closer, using each other's bodies to stay standing in the bus. The crammed bus would be one of many running the same thoroughfare every five or ten minutes each one as crammed as the next, even until late at night. There's no guarantee all the passengers would be human... The noise level, both inside and outside the bus would be much higher, with honking horns, smoke-belching lorries, crying babies, conversations between co-workers heading to the same neighborhood, the bus driver hollering instructions.
I wonder where each of these passengers will end up tonight.
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