Waiting at the Bus Stand (another version)
Waiting at the Bus Stand
Inthe heat of the afternoon, I was perched on the cold, rusted metal railing at the Pettah bus stand, an open paperback balanced on my lap. The air in Colombo was thick enough to chew — a stifling mix of diesel exhaust, dried sweat, hot asphalt, and dust. Double deckers with their routes 132 and 138 pushed through the surging crowd. Through the haze, I spotted Nimal weaving his way toward me.
I knew him instantly. That straight black hair, that familiar cocky grin, and around his neck, hanging from a thin string, his tiger-tooth pendant.
I was eighteen, maybe nineteen. A KPI man even then, counting the buses as they pulled in and out of the bays. I had no idea that afternoon would engrave itself into my mind. I didn’t know that decades later, sitting thousands of kilometres away in a quiet house in Sydney, I would suddenly find myself back on that metal railing, feeling the iron pressing against my bum, watching Nimal approach.
This is what age does to you. You can be sitting at a desk, completely ordinary, and the years collapse in a second. You aren’t just remembering. Your diaphragm hollows out, and you are actually there.
Nimal was fearless — reckless, really. Always looking for the next dare, always pulling us into trouble just to see if we could dodge it. I remember the afternoon a policeman came charging at us, his black wooden baton raised, eyes furious. I don’t even remember what foolish thing we had done. But I remember Nimal stepping directly in front of me, taking the brunt of the constable’s rage. At eighteen, I didn’t calculate the risk. You don’t think, He’s taking a blow meant for me. You just carry on. It takes fifty years to understand the weight of a friend stepping into harm’s way for you.
And then there was Ajith.
I remember sharing a narrow, squeaky spring bed with him in my room. Two teenage boys, crammed onto a single mattress, talking into the small hours of the night about the future. We had big dreams — the usual illusions of young men. We were going to make money, travel the world, drive shiny cars, become important.
As we lay there, the rich aroma of my mother’s cooking filtered through the door — curry leaves, roasted spices, coconut oil. A comforting warmth that meant home. We thought the world was waiting for us. In a way it was. But in another way, those quiet hours on a narrow bed were the happiest days we would ever see. We just didn’t know it.
Ajith died at thirty-seven.
Thirty-seven. I have repeated that number in my head like a solemn tally. At eighteen, thirty-seven sounds like a distant, ancient milestone. At seventy-one, thirty-seven feels impossibly, tragically young. Age changes the arithmetic of life. Ajith stopped at thirty-seven. The rest of his life exists only in the quiet imagination of those of us who survived him. I wonder if his hair would have gone grey, if his knees would have pained him, if we would still share a laugh over our youth.
There are no answers. Just silence.
So much life happened after those Colombo afternoons. There was Dubai, the shift to Australia, jobs, mortgages, family arguments, school fees, raised children, and grandchildren. Yet, all those decades dissolve in an instant. A song on the radio, a whiff of spices, the sound of a heavy bus idling — and I am pulled right back.
I used to think this constant looking back was just nostalgia. Something old people do. I told myself to focus on the present. But these memories don’t ask for permission. They just arrive.
When Nimal stood between me and that policeman, I saw a friend being a friend. Now, I see quiet courage. When I think of Ajith lying beside me on that narrow bed, I realize those ordinary, late-night conversations were the only future he would ever get.
We live life forward, never knowing when an ordinary moment is actually a final one. The last conversation with a brotherly friend. The last time sitting in a childhood bedroom. The last meal cooked by a mother’s hands. We never know when the ordinary becomes the last. That is the heartbreak of living — and perhaps its quiet beauty.
I wonder what that bus stand looks like today. The old red buses are likely gone, the railings replaced, the faces entirely different. The young boy sitting there with a book on his lap wouldn’t recognize the silver-haired man writing these words. But I recognize him.
He was carrying friendships he thought would never end, a family he took for granted, and a future he couldn’t possibly fathom. And perhaps, in his young pockets, he was carrying me all along.
I am still sitting there on that iron rail, waiting for the next bus, waiting for the life that was yet to come — wondering if I ever truly left at all.
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