Paati...

The first time I met Paati, I was twelve years old, and riding an old yellow school bus. The bus was the one that I took to school every morning and every evening, and if I had to pick one place not to receive the revelation of the meaning of life, that would have been it. It was a rickety, creaking, huge monster the colour of particularly fresh excrement. It smelt of generations of children who had been rolling around in the same playgrounds, children who had been sick, children whose idea of a game was to stick their eraser up their neighbour’s nose, and then make them lick it off. Children who grew up, and sent children of their own on the bus.
The bus was supervised by an old mountain of a woman, who sat in front, taking up two whole seats. She was always dressed in silk sarees in the colours of food: the flagrant yellow of turmeric, the rich, self-satisfied purple of brinjal glowing in the reflected light of a wood stove in a shadowy kitchen, the wicked red of chillies dried in a relentless sun, the yellow of three-day old lemons, handed out at weddings for good luck. Her hair, (of which we firmly believed she had only three strands carefully combed over a smooth, shining oval scalp) was the exact color of the sacred ash that was generously applied on her forehead. Her palms were thickened with the beatings she had faithfully delivered to thousands of tiny passengers, her feet calloused from walking up and down the rough rubber carpeting of her beloved bus, and her name was Paati. Grandmother. At the end of every month, when the receipts were handed back signed Yogambal, we would all stare confusedly at it, wondering who this Yogambal was who signed Paati’s cards. All children were frightened of her, and she hated all children. It was a perfectly symbiotic relationship, and everyone understood everyone else.