The Panchgani-Pune Express - Robert Halsey

Ana Rasmussen was into her final week in India. She was a final year student in the Royal Copenhagen Institute of Technology. She had taken a year off to do research into Danish missions in India. There weren’t many of them so she had time to study the social mores of the women of India. Her work had taken her from Simla in the north to Trivandrum in the south. She was advised by friends to visit the lovely hill-station of Panchgani that nestled on the edge of the Western ghat escarpment that was formed by basaltic extrusions that had bubbled out from the bowels of the earth hundreds of thousands of years ago and now formed plateaux.
She came to love the serene hamlet home to some dozen schools that littered the plateau country and which kept open nine months of the year.
But now it was time to keep her appointment at the Danish Trade Commissioner’s Office in Mumbai before embarking on an Air India flight home. She barely made it as the bus began to roll out of Panchgani. There was only one seat left near the right rear window where a blanketed figure sat and peered out of the window. After making herself as comfortable as possible, Ana began an attempt to open some sort of a conversation but the person preferred to remain shrouded and ignored her, whimpering softly now and then.
The journey down the ghat to Wai clung to the edges of a dangerous and precipitous route so that Ana was vastly relieved to reach the plains where Wai was located before the long haul to Pune, which was some 60 odd miles away.
She had enough time to get down and buy a bottle of water before the journey was resumed. Shortly after they had resumed the journey the bus had to swerve to miss a man on a bicycle that had baskets of chickens in finely balanced arrangement on the carrier at the back as he headed out to the market in Wai. He and the bus driver exchanged heated abuse.
The swerve produced a dramatic revelation for Ana. The shrouded figure was a leper. As the blanket fell away it revealed a hand that had only stumps for fingers. The terrified leper had a face horribly distorted by the disease. She had a hole in the face for a nose. Her yellow teeth couldn’t be covered by her lips and her eyes looked like sightless sockets. From the dirty, threadbare blanket a nasty smell filled the fetid air, not that others noticed, or if they did, chose not to do or say anything about it. It’s as if she wasn’t there; didn’t exist.
Two hours later they reached Pune and everyone alighted at the terminal. Packing cases, crates and bedrolls were collected and in a short time no one remained but the cowering figure by the window. The burly Sikh driver finally noticed her and roundly abused her and shouted at her. Ana approached him uncertainly and urged him to treat her with some respect. He ignored her and shook off her restraining hand. Ana struggled briefly with him but he was too strong for her. He produced a pole with a hook at the end and tore her out of the bus on to the bitumen where she scampered away like a diseased crab, with her blanket trailing her decomposing body.
“ Madam, do not interfere. You white foreigners have no idea of what this sort of life in India is. I have a responsibility to my company. I could lose my job if anyone found out that I had brought a leper all the way from Panchgani. I have a wife and five children to support. Don’t you know how this thing happened?”
He began to walk away dismissively, the contempt in his voice matching his arrogance. Then he swivelled around again and faced a confused and perplexed Ana who didn’t know what to think or do.
“Her relatives bought her a ticket and before anyone else could board the bus had put her in a corner and promptly left the depot. No one has met her here at this end, have they? Why do you think ? What happens to her now is karma. Come on. I will phone the police for you, all right?”
Ana asked him to call the hospital instead. What could the police do? Ana felt a little aggression in her tone might help. The Sikh driver said he would call the hospital as well to please her, and he’d call anyone else she cared to name, although he couldn’t believe he was taking all this trouble for an interfering white woman. Just then voices were calling out to the driver to log out and enquiring what the trouble was. The superintendent and another official came over and he explained what it was all about.
“ Madam, I am Superintendent Bhonsle of the Pune Bus Company. I frankly don’t see what business this is of yours,” he said in a squeaky cracked voice because of his age, but he was determined to pull rank.
“Can’t you see the injustice to this poor wretched woman who is suffering enough without the added indignity of such treatment? ” Ana hotly retorted.
They looked around for the leper but she had crawled away in all her pain and hunger into the night, into another hole of hell. Where could she have crawled off to? A sewer to avoid people when the morning broke and wait the approach of merciful death. There was nothing unusual about this. For millions like her, you lived through death over and over again.
In the meanwhile the Sikh driver had contacted the police who berated him for some time, and finally asked him if he was mad to call them about a leper. He next phoned the hospital only to be told to get in touch with the leper asylum which was 150 km away. Ana took over the phone, and tried to argue her case, only to be told, “ Miss, you found her, you do something for her. She is your responsibility now.”
With a gasp Ana realised she had ten minutes to catch the Pune-Mumbai Mail . She slammed the phone down and ran off as fast as she could, a sad and defeated Samaritan.
In some deserted street in Pune, in a lonely culvert or under a tree somewhere a wasted human life was draining away, uncared for, in dreadful pain , in the loneliness of rejection and fear praying for death.