Night fever

I have never been a night bird. Part of the reason for that could be that I have always been a little afraid of the dark, unsure, like Calvin (of Hobbes fame) just what may be lurking in the gloom under my bed. But after many years of conditioning, I finally convinced that quiet little voice of not-quite-reason in my head that there was, indeed, nothing under the bed that I now sleep on, except for perhaps a few cat-hair-fuzzballs and a stray piece of thread – if the maid was doing her job properly, that is. Apart from the wonderfully reassuring fact that my bed is constructed in such a way that there can be nothing under it unless whatever is under it is very thin and flat, like a few sheets of paper or, at most, a slim newspaper.

But under my bed is not the focus of this blog. What is, is the night. Which I rediscovered yesterday, when I left work considerably later than I am wont to do, or have done for the past couple of years. My driver was as tired as I was and we both sat in our respective seats in what, for us, was silence, saying nothing except a few polite mutterings that soon faded into an exhausted stupor – in me, at least, sprawled in the back seat. But somewhere along the route home I found what could have been a second (or was it the 15th?) wind, temporary as it may have been, which wound me up enough for me to look out the window and actually see what the world beyond the glass was up to.

In the long, lean car next to my little buggy was a gentleman who would never fit the ‘long, lean’ description. He sat there rather like Jabba the Hutt from the Star Wars movies, toadlike and flowing from forehead to shoulders in one smooth slope. His head, with its drastically receding hairline and its oversized and astonishingly hirsute ears, was egg-shaped. Through the night lit in strobe-like intensity by passing headlights, his glasses glinted. One hand lifted his mobile phone to his ear, the gems on his many rings flashing briefly as he gestured with the other. At some point, he must have felt me staring, albeit idly, and turned his head in my direction. I hastily looked away, abashed, ashamed at being caught doing something that I had been taught all my life was unladylike and plain rude.

At the next traffic lights, we stopped. A cockroach-like autorickshaw edged up too close by us and both my driver and I glared daggers at its occupants. There were many of them, two adults with at least four small children, all dressed in their glittering best, obviously for a wedding or a special outing. A little girl standing between her father’s knees stared at me as my eyes skated past her face and I did the classic double take. She was a pretty thing, her hair caught up in two ponytails, each one lavishly decorated with strings of white and orange flowers. Her eyes were ringed with kohl and her small mouth was stained berry-red with lipstick, her face strangely lighter than the rest of her with powder. Her mother had obviously taken a lot of loving trouble over getting her ready for the occasion, matching her clothes with her shiny bead necklace and drop earrings, her hair-ribbons and her sandals. I smiled at her just as the lights changed and we moved forward. In that last tiny glimpse, I saw her start to smile, a radiance tentatively lighting up her whole being.

As we turned into the satellite city where I live, a long-distance bus slowly slid out of its berth towards the centre of the road. In its row of dimly lit windows high above my car I could see faces in different phases of living. A bejewelled lady, not too young, rested her head against the glass, her eyes closed. A small boy pressed his nose against his window, eager to see every bit of the start of his possibly long journey. And, framed in the last pane, was a young man with, with some strange logic, sunglasses on, even though it was past 8:30 pm and the sun had long since wandered off to the other side of the world.

And there, I was home. The hot, heavy, humid air drooped over my head as I stepped from air-conditioned comfort into the lobby, brightly illuminated and like a haven from the possible terrors of the dark. In my drive home, I had seen and felt none. But that didn’t mean they were not there!