A girlfriend with six wheels

A girlfriend with six wheels

Nandagopal Rajan

“Who is this Sindhu?” there was a puzzled look on my mother’s face as she underlined some entries in my personal diary with her fingers. I couldn’t help laughing though I was angry that she had read my “personal log”; anyway there was nothing interesting there except records of bunked classes and seen movies.
I’m sure my initial smirk made Amma think she’d finally found the reason for my long telephonic conversations. But she was mistaken. The rather feminine sounding Sindhu was anything but the focus of my college love life, if at all one could have anything like that in a boys-only college, then aptly called “marubhumi” (desert) for this very reason.
“That’s our college bus, Amma,” I explained. But she was unimpressed. Not her fault, as almost all dates on my diary started with a reference to this girl (in this case with six wheels).
An ideal day for most of us Sindhu-goers started a little bit earlier than the others. We took the longer route to reach college. Though guys like me could catch a bus to Medical College just five minutes down the road, those ugly green beasts didn’t have the charm of this girl, after all she belonged just to us, just to the boys of Devagiri.
I for instance used to travel three kilometers the other way to the City Stand beside Mananchira to begin our “direct flight” to college. Those days there was just one other bus that had a direct service to the college gates, but that used to be stuffed to the rafters from Feroke.
At City Stand we’d all have our eyes peeled for the first sight of our darling, the first ones to spot it always got the head start. They’d be the first to know where the driver would stop that day, and would be the first to slam-dunk their bags on the free seats. But that didn’t mean we could put our bags wherever we wanted. The first few seats were reserved for chechis from MA and the senior chettans. We were free to fight it out for the rest of the seats. But things changed with time, by my first year BA – my third year in the bus – I was promoted to the third row, a seat I kept with my best friend Sai Manohar till the end of my degree course.
Once settled, the next step would be to make sure that the “non-student class” got to know that this was a Devagiri special, we did our best to make it a “students only” though much to the chagrin of the conductor who’d be left with just 40-paise student passes during the 8.15 trip.
Then the fun began. This was no ordinary trip, it was the time to catch up with the latest news, discuss the latest movies and songs, take notes and even dissect those theories that you failed to understand in the last lecture.
For me however it was the time to hone my PJ skills. My “unbearables” would start as soon as the bus crossed Coronation, much to the delight of some and the irritation of the others. By my final year, most of the regulars were used to my style of humour and some had even started their own schools.
But above all, this was the time when the friendships were nurtured and foundations of new ones laid. Most of my best friends were Sindhu boys too. I still keep in touch with others who I first talked to aboard that darling bus of ours.
Sindhu gave me one of the most memorable times of my college life. Something I could bank on every morning, unless if there was a bandh or bus strike. No wonder I shed a tear when made my last trip to college in that friend of five years a morning in mid 1999.
No wonder when I went to college a couple of years ago to meet my beloved teachers in the economics section I chose to wait for Sindhu. But she’d changed by then, more girls than boys, almost blasphemous for an authentic Devagirian like me who believed this was among the last standing bastions of male suzerainty. But some things never change, like the twinkle in the eyes of the teenagers that tell you they have their sights set on the world.