Bus Ruminations

The following is an article I wrote for the UB Post, published on Wednesday December 7, 2011. Enjoy!

Bus Ruminations

There is an old N’Sync song playing on the bus’s stereo system. The sound crackles out of the threadbare speakers like a man walking across a silent field of paper bags filled with Styrofoam. The driver, a short Mongolian man in a small glass barrier meant to prevent distraction from the passengers, is puffing like the Zaisan power plant on a thin, feminine cigarette. He is wearing a hat that reminds me of Russia, or at least the Russia that has been painted on my brain from stock news footage and cracked black and white photos back home. Thank you American media.

            So I am from Texas and I am sitting on a bus in Mongolia. This seems about right. I am on my way back to my apartment from the Tsagaandarium Art Gallery. I am palming a thick roll of tugrigs and waiting for the bus attendant to take my fare. The windows are iced over and there is a man with black gloves holding onto the overhead support handles across from me. Everytime the bus shifts, he leans forward menacingly. Sitting two seats behind him is an older woman with a matching fur hat and knee-length jacket. Her face is white and her eye make-up is elaborate. She is wearing a pair of girasol earrings that sparkle with every tremor of the bus. I wipe away a cold condensation that has formed on my eyelashes and pull my scarf off the bridge of my nose. My lips and cheeks are wet from the warm scarf.

I feel a tap on my shoulder and turn to find the bus attendant. She is a young woman, with a pollution mask wrapped tightly around her face, a purple knit hat, loose Adidas wind pants, a green hooded sweatshirt and the blue vest that all Mongolian bus attendants wear. She takes my fare and stuffs it in a fanny pack brimming with tugrigs. She rips off a small fare receipt with her gunmetal grey gloves and hands it to me. She strolls to the front of the bus and takes a lone seat behind the driver’s compartment. She pulls out her cell phone and begins rapidly text messaging. I imagine her responding to a text from a friend:

Unknown friend: Chi yu hj bna?

Bus Attendant: Bi ajiltei. Teneg ajil.

            I smile at my ridiculous text message mental projection. I’m sure her conversation is much more complex than my feeble mind could create on a dime or a tugrig. I sigh. I’m bored. The bus is suddenly at a standstill, like a nail stuck in a wall of traffic. As I listen to the sharp din of horns at a particularly congested intersection, I start to thinking about what it would be like to be a bus attendant. Anything to kill the time.

As a bus attendant, your office is a long fusty corridor full of random people. Some rude, some nice, some yelling on cell phones, some drunk and flummoxed, some holding hands, some holding babies, some holding shopping bags, some holding cell phones while holding  babies, some yelling on cell phones while holding babies and shopping bags, others sleeping. As bus attendant, you are the dictator of all these people. You are the bus boss, el capitan, the transportation khan. Or at least I imagine it this way. I guess the only real thing you can dictate is if someone is allowed onto the bus or not. To add to this, I’ve never seen someone get kicked off a bus here in UB so maybe the word dictator is too weighty, too authoritarian, definitely too controversial for someone as munificent as the bus attendant. As bus attendant you are benevolent benefactor to a host of people in need of transportation. You are their savior, their guide, their friend, their messiah, their Moses, the man or woman behind the curtain—wait that’s the driver—ok forget that last one. Just know that you are needed. As bus attendant you hold the fate of thousands of people’s life in the palm of your hand like a fistful of rice. The bus is your workplace, these are your minions.

            As I think about the word “minion” and how it reminds me of the word “onion,” a little girl takes a seat in front of me. Her mother sits in the seat across the aisle from her, busy fumbling with something shiny in her purse. The little girl turns to gawk at me. Her bright eyes peak over the seat like the sun over a peaceful valley with peppered copses and languid cabins. As she stares at me, I think back to the bus attendant and a passage I recently read in an essay on history by Emerson: “If the whole is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our lives and the centuries of time.”

So in the hour I plan to spend on this bus, a century of time will pass by and I will remain in the care of this bus attendant, who is guiding me like Charon to the underworld, also known as my wonderfully yellow apartment near Metro Mall (and at a fee half of what an obolus would likely cost even with inflation). Wait, that’s not the way I should interpret that Emerson number. I’ll try again. The “whole” is in the bus attendant who is experiencing a relentless and thankless job through me, a casual observer who is far from casual when it comes to observing. In other words, I am stuck on a bus on my way to eternity in the form of a Texan who is observing the bus attendant and both of us are partaking in the endless wheel of individual experiences. My boredom rages on.

As I try to figure out the best way to ascribe the Emerson quote to my bus experience, the little girl sitting in front of me with a cream scarf smiles a toothless grin at me. I wave and whisper, “Sain baina yy?” She squeaks and whips around.

The little girl has officially complicated things. If I am observing the bus attendant, who is observing her cell phone and at the same time, I’m being observed by the little girl—who is the individual and who is the whole? We can’t all be the whole. Otherwise, some sort of implosion or spontaneous combustion would happen, right? The little girl is observing me, while I was observing someone else. All of us are linked through the slice of time spent on a bus slowly making its way from Zaisan to the city center. So, who is observing the little girl? I turn to look at her mom, the culprit in more ways than one. While she isn’t necessarily observing her daughter (she is still looking for something in her purse), I suppose she could be considered the little girl’s observer. Ok so the girl has an observer, the attendant has an observer, and I have an observer. Maybe this is how we are all part of the whole, linked by our own voyeuristic individual experiences. Maybe, we observe each other simply to observe ourselves.

The bus moves forward a couple of feet and I give up on my senseless musings. I yawn and relax into the upholstered seat. The bus attendant plucks her cell phone from her pocket and starts texting again. The song on the radio changes to a Mongolian traditional song and I close my eyes. I’m not the first person to get lost in a thought while riding on a bus in Mongolia.