The Trins school bus truly is a strange thing. Snarling through the morning mist, it suddenly pops into view down the highway, tinted purple windows reflecting the faces of gawking locals, men and children alike. In a country where the word “bus” conjures memories of suffocation and sharing intimate space with all sorts of folk, the Trins bus is eerily empty. On the days that the air conditioner-a dust, aging plastic hulk set in the back- actually works, drafts of cool, vaguely anti-septic-smelling air assault you the moment you step in. After you find an empty seat to sit on (they are all empty save one), you pull a book out of your bag, straining to read in the blue-filtered morning light as waves of fatigue almost instantly wash over you. As the bus works its queer magic, you find the book slipping out of your hands. The incessant roar of the old diesel engine and the shrill honking outside keep you from nodding off entirely, but you enter a twilight between true sleep and wakefulness, a kind of trance. Slowly, you become one with the bus. Your hair merges with the cool glass panels, so much so that a slight bump on the road will give you the feeling that your hair is being ripped from the scalp, all at once. Your feet melt into the steel flooring, warmed gently by the latent heat of the right tyre pushing hard against the road, as if it were a lover locked in an armless, unending embrace with its beloved.
By now, the bus seems to have left behind all normal time frames. As ages, seconds pass by, bizarre echoes of the translated Turkish novel you were reading whisper strange phrases about finding meaning, reading faces.
The ordeal (and it is indeed an ordeal, a test of one’s patience waiting for the timeless, of waiting to arrive at a destination beyond all horizons, past the bounds of infinity) is over only when the conductor’s insistent shaking wakes you up, his mask of impatience belying the countless times he waited for you at your bus stop, forgiving you for oversleeping, having homework, being sick, and just being lazy. As you finally step out of the bus, the vibrant and loud sounds, colours, scents of the outside world nauseate you; hit you like a slap on the face. The now quiet hulk of the bus waits behind, patiently waiting to take you on another journey beyond space and time.
