by Saudha Kasim

If only he hadn’t seen the bus with Aishwarya Rai on its side parked near the Lavanya Restaurant in Dharmapuri, Aishwarya Rai in her Iruvar glow, those eyes sparkling green, his heart thrumming at the sight of her cheek, her curved upper lip, if only he hadn’t seen her on the side of the bus under the yellow light of the naked bulb that hung over the sign of Lavanya Restaurant that promised the best mutton biryani in the whole of Dharmapuri, if only he hadn’t seen her beckoning glance and then looked up and seen the empty driver’s seat, the key in the ignition and the few scattered snoozing passengers and if his fingers hadn’t itched just then and his heart ached with longing for the open road.

The open road: as a child all he’d known were the muddy tracks in his village of rice farms on the banks of the Kaveri, the nearest tarred road several kilometres away, not too far from the school which he barely attended in the ten years he’d been forced to go by his father (alive then, dead now) and where he’d never paid attention to the teachers or passed any of his exams in those hot, sweltering classrooms with their whitewashed walls crawling with all manner of lizards and scorpions and centipedes before the rains, during the rains, after the rains, in the dry season, in the two weeks around Pongal when the temperatures dipped and then rose again, in the new year in April.

The open road, then. Its call had battled for his heart since he was a nine-year-old in love with Selvi, Selvi of the dark eyebrow and liquid eyes and the sweetest ears and widest smile in his village.

If only he hadn’t quit school after failing his tenth standard exams once and not bothering to sit for them again and run off to Salem but not before promising Selvi he’d be back with money to marry her and buy her a house and a farm and the promise of children each blessed with her liquid eyes and if only he hadn’t turned up in Salem at his uncle’s side and worked as a cleaner on the bus his uncle drove for a man who owned at least fifty buses that rushed from town to town in this part of Tamilnadu and if only he had the money to bribe the clerk in the divisional manager’s office of the state transport company, that clerk he’d first seen with a full, lush head of hair and then over time seen that lush hair vanish bit by bit to reveal a balding dome that reflected the glare of the tubelight above his desk, that clerk who’d always pull open a drawer and then raise an eyebrow when he asked what had happened to his application to become a conductor for the company, that clerk to whom he had submitted year after year for six years fake school leaving certificates and tenth standard mark sheets, that clerk who’d built a nice two-storey house in a quiet part of Salem with two mango trees in his garden, that clerk who’d retire in another decade fat and rich and possessing another house in another part of Salem that he’d rent out to raucous groups of male students of engineering colleges in town.

No job as a conductor then, back to the ceaseless, exhausting cleaner role on the bus that his uncle drove six times a day from Krishnagiri to Salem.

If only he’d been able to drive a bus for the state transport company, a job with a pension and union benefits and hope and respect, he could have gone back to the village when his father was still alive and married Selvi and not lost her to a rich farmer from Pollachi who owned acres and acres of jasmine and marigold fields and if only he had walked past the Lavanya Restaurant at peace with the world at this May day’s death and the birth of another, his gaze not settling on Aishwarya Rai’s face and that song from Iruvar not ringing in his ear (jazzy and irresistible, Aishwarya in a short green dress dancing for Mohanlal in a white mundu), that film he’d watched in a ramshackle theatre ventilated by three fans, a shed really, the nearest one to his village, owned by the richest man in the panchayat, equipped with a projector that regularly gave out and which had to be slapped back to life by the expert projectionist every time it misbehaved, but there was Aishwarya wrapping herself around a pole and nodding her head to the song’s earwormy beat, hands on the shoulders of her be-hatted back-up dancers, the sighs of pleasure audible in the dark of that shed, sighs that woke up the dogs outside the theatre and caused them to howl through the rest of the song, a canine chorus aching with contagious desire.

He would walk home with three of his best friends singing Hello Mister Ethirkatchi and the song and Aishwarya would be in his dreams that night and he’d feel a warm stirring and he’d turn over on his stomach and pull and pull for release hoping his little brother sleeping next to him on the floor of their three-room hut wouldn’t feel anything or hear anything. The next morning he’d see Selvi in school and he’d wonder what she’d look like in Aishwarya’s green dress.

If only he’d walked past the Lavanya restaurant, his gaze fixed on a point straight ahead of him, not wandering around, his mind not desiring something more where there was nothing more to desire, if the breeze hadn’t suddenly picked up and ruffled the hair on the back of his head and brought back to him in the quietest of whispers what it would be like to ride on the smooth highways on a pleasant night like this with the purr of a powerful engine at his command.

If only he had walked on, he would not be sitting two hours later on the side of the highway at the feet of the policemen who’d caught up him on his joyride on the bus he’d stolen with the passengers still sleeping inside and Aishwarya Rai the smiling apsara on its side.

If only he had walked on, at sunset tomorrow he would have been with his mother eating rice and the greenest of beans and she would still have her last gold bangle and there would be no mantle of shame on her narrow, hunched shoulders.

Saudha Kasim is a writer and communications professional working in Bengaluru, India. Her short stories and essays have been published in Elle India, Cha, Out of Print, Eclectica, RIC Journal, Memoir Mixtapes, The Temz Review, and elsewhere. She was a writer in residence at Sangam House in 2017-18. She is currently working on a novel.