The bus station in Rishikesh smells of petrol and dust, of cardamom chai poured from tin kettles. A low sun pools against the cracked asphalt as I stand in line for the 17:30 Luxury Laskshmi Express, my ticket folded neatly in my palm.
Four months into my six-month stay in India, I have bent forward and arched back through hundreds of sun salutations. I have cleansed, fasted, stared into candlelight until my eyes watered. Following yogic protocols, my body has grown strong, mobile, obedient and disciplined. But my mind has not. Yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind, the sutras of Patanjali tell us. Yet my mind moves like the Ganges in monsoon. It’s still restless, swollen and insistent. In a final attempt at finding enlightenment, or something close to it at least, I’m leaving yoga behind me for the next journey and heading north to Dharamshala. This is the home of the exiled Dalai Lama. I hope a retreat of silence and lessons on suffering might do what physical discipline could not.
The bus lurches into view, ten minutes early, coughing black smoke. Its red letters, Luxury Lakshmi Express, promise comfort, but the letters are flaking, and the name of the bus feels like a joke only the bus itself understands. Around me, travellers load their backpacks into the compartment. We are a makeshift tribe of seekers, wearing mala beads and crystals, billowing hemp trousers, and woven multi-coloured, cross-body bags. For months, I’ve tried to disappear into this country, to blend into a rhythm I assumed it would have. Here, in this queue of Western pilgrims, I see how much we mimic each other’s unique spiritual journey.
The conductor, thin as a wire and moving deftly between us and the cabin, scribbles something on our tickets as we file past him. I find my seat in the front row. They are cracked vinyl; the air tastes faintly metallic. The windows have tattered red curtains trimmed in gold hanging limply from the middle. A chorus of complaint rises as people test the semi-reclining chairs and realise that sleeping in these will be an act of faith.
The window next to my seat is smudged. I tell myself it’s fine, twelve hours, maybe thirteen, and I’ll be in the mountains, who needs sleep?
We’re running behind schedule when shouting erupts outside. The driver, conductor, and a man in a khaki shirt, whom I recognise as the man who sold me my ticket, argue in Hindi. Their voices are sharp, and they point at each other and then point at the bus. They come into the cabin, still arguing, pointing at each other, the road and then, together, they point at me.
“You, Madame! You. Get off!” said the driver, a broad-shouldered man with a silver beard and a grin that flashed even through his anger.
I blink, half-laughing, certain I’ve misheard. “Me?”
The conductor nods emphatically. “Bus full. Overbook. You come back tomorrow. His fault”. And without looking at him, his finger lands on the chest of the man in the khaki shirt, which sets off another round of traded barbs.
Tomorrow. But I can’t tomorrow. The retreat begins the day after, and I need a day to acclimatise. I can’t explain my slight desperation, clinging to this controlled plan.
“No”, I say, softly at first, then louder. “No.”
The words hang. The men argue. The men laugh. The driver’s hands jab at the air. The conductor points out the time. Time has passed. The other passengers start to twist in their seats.
A woman behind me sighs. “Just get off, you’re holding everyone up.” I bristle and turn to her, “Does it matter,” I ask, “if we arrive at five-thirty or at seven, really, does it?”
The three men’s arguing fizzles out. They start shrugging and pointing at the floor, the steps into the cabin, and then at me. “Ok, you stay, come, ” they wave me
forward. “You can stay up here”. No one says a word, but I can feel the irritation that’s gathered behind me. The reflex of a traveller too aware of her own foreignness, her whiteness, and the uneasy permission these men grant me, maybe out of fear to argue, or maybe not. I can’t tell anymore.
Inside the front cabin, the ceiling rises higher than I expect. Its metal edges are lined with faded blue curtains. The driver’s seat is on the right, and the conductor’s is on the left. The large dashboard is an altar and a rubbish heap all at once. Silver deities jostle with crumpled cigarette packets, torn receipts, and half-empty water bottles. A strip of burnt-orange carpet spreads across the floor, worn thin from years of bodies sitting here. It’s clear it’s a space that wasn’t intended for passengers, but now, as the conductor gestures, I sit down. My legs stretch out in front of me, my back against the glass that separates me from the other backpackers behind.
As the driver grinds the engine into gear, I slide forward, the carpet gripping my calves. If we crash, I realise, I’ll go straight out that window. The conductor pours chai into a thin, crumbled, single-use plastic cup and passes it to me. It’s sweet, scalding, and generous. The bus groans, and we begin our climb north.
Night gathers, and headlights from oncoming traffic dazzle me. We stop at a roadside stall where men wrapped in warm shawls stoke the coals under a pot for another chai. The locals look at us, and some take photos. We’re the foreign bus, the restless pilgrims, carrying their deities home to tell our versions of their stories in yoga classes and workshops. I can’t read their faces. Do they pity us? Tonight’s bunch of itinerant backpackers dressed so shabbily, so out of place in their country, chasing serenity through their landscape? I sip my chai and smile at the driver and conductor. I wonder what I look like to them, a woman alone, insisting on her seat, mistaking stubbornness for principle.
When I return to the cabin, the conductor reads through a crumpled manifesto, “More passengers”, he tells me. In the next village, the door folds open, and a procession of maroon robes enters. Small, self-contained figures moving with quiet efficiency. One
by one, they take the remaining seats. More arrive, and they sit back-to-back on the passenger cabin floor. Then, the final two nuns are stopped.
The conductor gestures toward me. “Move over.”
“Where?”
He points at the space to the driver’s right, no bigger than a yoga block. The driver starts the ignition. I have to shuffle backwards, then attempt a gracious movement of my legs over the back of the driver’s seat. Thankfully, he leans forward. My legs swing into an abyss, and my bare feet find a greasy pipe to rest on.
The first nun backs into the space beside me. With nowhere to put her legs down, she keeps them to her side and attempts to straighten up, careful not to brush against my arm. Her body is slight, and she wears a mask that hides most of her face. The second nun settles where I had been. The door closes, the engine roars, and we all cough with the emission as we jolt onward into the darkness.
For a moment, I’m aware only of her proximity, the warmth of another body, the soft cough behind her mask. The driver’s radio leaks static into the cabin that he tries to fix but abandons as he swerves out of the way of a man pushing a cart. I feel inner
rage at the space I paid for that wasn’t given to me. The nun beside me tries to make herself smaller. I sense my resentment rising; it’s sharp, and stories flood my mind.
I deserve a seat, I tell myself. I bought a ticket, and I stood my ground. My mind flares with irritation. I earned a spot, but not this spot. Familiar restlessness rises, along with ownership and entitlement. I cannot believe the inconvenience I’ve found myself in.
Her cough deepens. She spits quietly into a paper bag, then glances toward me, eyes apologetic above the mask. She bows her head. And I realise I’m being an arse.
Outside, the road climbs higher, and the headlights of descending cars and trucks flash like comets. The driver taps the horn wires, two exposed filaments that spark when touched, and a honk erupts that feels as ancient and wounded as this bus. I
think of the Four Noble Truths I’ll learn about in Dharamshala. There is suffering, the first truth says. Here it is, materialised as cramped, sweaty, unheroic, and all mine.
I’m too wound-up to sleep, but nobody else seems to be. Her head begins to nod forward, then sideways, until it lands against my bare shoulder. The prickling of her shaved scalp startles me. I tense, and she wakes, straightens, and bows again in apology. This dance repeats twice until I let her stay.
Slowly, I lift my arm and open the space of my lap. She folds herself into it, a child’s weight, her breathing evens out, her coughing subsides. Time begins to loosen. The other nun turns on her side, curling toward us until her face is tucked behind the first
nun’s knees. The driver and conductor pull over to swap. I keep watch with the conductor-turned-driver, tapping his shoulder when I sense his exhaustion setting in. The air no longer smells; my nostrils have hardened from the fumes. Pain seeps through my hips and lower back, but something else, ever so slightly, surfaces, a tenderness.
The woman sleeping on me is older than I’d realised. In the grey light of early dawn, her skin shows the fine creases of age. When she wakes, we both notice that she has drooled through her mask onto my trousers. We laugh, a private joke that nobody else is party to.
The driver-turned-conductor gets up and shouts into the cabin. The nuns stir, and we pull up by the side of the road. The driver gets out and gestures at me to follow. My greasy, bare feet hit the ground. He reaches back to help the elderly nun down. She takes a hand from both of us. For a moment, we stand facing each other, both shy and wordless. Her eyes are bright with love and fatigue. We bow towards each other, palms pressed, and she takes mine in hers. It’s like a first flush of love, a friendship love, a love I haven’t felt in a long time. We can’t talk, we’re shy, so we giggle.
The driver is back in his seat and slaps the side of his door for me to get back on. I walk her around to the other side of the bus and leave her there, with her bag and a wave. I could move to an empty seat now, but I stay up front. The sun rises behind the trees, staining the sky the same colour as the carpet under my legs. We drink another cup of chai, sweeter this time, and fall into companionable silence.
By seven, we reach Dharamshala. The backpackers stretch and yawn, their faces soft with exhaustion. Nobody complains about being late. The air carries the faintest hint of pine and oak. My body is sore, but my head is light. I wave goodbye to the driver and conductor, sling my bag over my shoulder, and start walking uphill toward McLeod Ganj. The altitude change is noticeable, but I’m happy to take my time up another winding road.
The following day, I entered the monastery for the ten-day retreat. Silence was difficult at times. The teachings are simple, entry points into the Four Noble Truths. There is suffering, it has its causes, it can end, and there is a path that leads to its end.
When the retreat ended, and the silence broke, I made small talk with other backpackers as we made our way into the village in search of accommodation. When I think back on this part of my time in India, it isn’t the retreat centre, the teacher’s voice, or the guided meditations that return to me. It’s the weight of the nun’s head on my lap, the warmth of her head in mine. I understand now that lessons rarely come where we expect them. The lessons come from the cramped spaces, the uneasy frictions, and the kindness between strangers. The retreat taught me to name suffering. The bus taught me to hold it. My suffering, hers, and others, for just long enough that it changes into something more tender. When I remember her now, I repeat the prayer we learned on the first day: May you be safe. May you be happy. May you live with ease. And then, quietly, to the road itself, to the long night we can all find ourselves on, May we all.
