The Bus Conductor Who Collected First Lines
He asked every regular for one sentence and kept a notebook of us.
The conductor of the 6:40 bus asked me for a sentence before he asked me for my fare.
“One line only,” he said, ticket punch in one hand, a fat green cloth notebook in the other. “The first line of the book you would write, if God caught you tomorrow and demanded a book.”
Behind me a man in a raincoat sighed the sigh of someone who had clearly been through this before. It was my first week on route 12, my first month in the city, and I thought: this is either the beginning of a wonderful story or the reason this bus runs late.
It was both.
His name was Dattaram. Twenty-two years on the same route, from the market depot to the railway station and back, eleven round trips a day. He had a silver whistle he never used, a pencil sharpened at both ends, and the notebook, which he protected from the monsoon inside two plastic bags, the way you would carry a kidney for transplant.
The rules, as the raincoat man explained to me while I fumbled change: only regulars get asked. Only once a month, so you have time to think. You can refuse, and he will never sulk, but he will look at you at every stop like a dog watching you eat. And whatever you give him, he writes down with your seat number and the date, licking the pencil first, which everyone agreed was unhygienic and nobody had the heart to mention.
I was twenty-four and had moved to the city to become a writer, which so far meant proofreading appliance manuals and watching my savings evaporate.
You would think a person like me would have a first line ready...
I said, “Can I owe you?”
Dattaram smiled like a man accepting a promissory note from a beggar and punched my ticket. “Everybody owes me,” he said. “I am the richest man on this route.”
For four months I owed him. This is the embarrassing centre of this story: the vegetable seller who boarded at Kranti Chowk gave him a line the first time he asked. The schoolboy with the cricket kit gave him one. The nurse coming off night shift at the civil hospital, so tired her eyes closed at every signal, gave him one, and I heard it, because he read it back to her to check he had it right: The night shift teaches you that everyone, absolutely everyone, calls for their mother.
The whole bus went quiet after that one. Then the schoolboy said his line was still better, and the bus laughed, and we moved on through the fog.
That was the thing about Dattaram's game. It should have been awkward. Strangers do not hand each other true sentences at 6:40 in the morning. But a bus is a strange, blessed vehicle: the same forty people, shoulder to shoulder, every single day, all pretending not to know each other's perfumes and arguments and phone wallpapers. He had simply decided to stop pretending, and because he was the conductor, the little king of that rolling room, we let him.
I heard perhaps a hundred first lines over those years, read back in his flat depot voice for confirmation. The retired bank clerk: I counted other people's money for thirty-eight years and it never once felt like mine, which I now understand was the entire job. The bride who rode with mehndi still dark on her hands: I am going to be happy even if it shocks everybody. The raincoat man, after two years of refusing: My father also took this route, and I am still trying to sit where he sat.
And I, the writer, the professional... gave him nothing, because everything I drafted in my head sounded like an appliance manual with feelings.
Everyone is carrying a first line. Most people just die with the whole book still inside them, unread, because nobody on the bus ever asked.
He said that to me on a February morning, not as a rebuke, just as weather report, when I apologised for owing him for the eleventh month. Then he went down the aisle punching tickets, chalaan by chalaan, and I looked out of the window at the fog on the railway yard and understood that I was the only person on route 12 too vain to be a beginner.
That evening I did something small that changed my whole writing life: I stopped trying to compose and started trying to confess. I sat with a list of prompts a friend had sent me, picked the one that scared me, and wrote until something sounded like a person instead of a product. It took three weeks. Later that year I even worked up the nerve to enter a monthly poetry contest, and lost, gloriously, and did not die of it.
But the line I finally gave Dattaram had nothing to do with contests.
It was his last month... though none of us knew it yet. The depot was retiring him in June, forty pages left in the green notebook, and one morning the bus was strangely full of ex-regulars, the nurse now at a different hospital, the schoolboy now a college boy, summoned by some invisible telegraph. Someone had brought a box of pedhas. Dattaram stood at the front, holding the rail, and for once the notebook did the talking: he read us back to ourselves.
Seat numbers, dates, sentences. Nine years of first lines.
People heard their own words and covered their mouths. The bride, riding again with a toddler on her hip, heard I am going to be happy even if it shocks everybody and burst into tears, and the toddler, alarmed, burst into louder ones, and the whole bus laughed and cried in that mixed-up way that I have since decided is the truest sound human beings make.
When he reached my seat number... he paused. “Blank,” he announced, to general booing.
So I stood up on the moving bus, twenty-seven years old by then, holding the rail, and paid my debt out loud: I moved to this city to become a writer, and instead a bus conductor taught me that the entire trick is asking, and then writing down exactly what people say.
He licked the pencil. He wrote it down. Seat 14, window. The date.
At the station stop he shook forty hands. The last thing he told me, quietly, under the sound of the engine: “Keep the game going, madam. The route needs it more than the book does.”
I could not keep his exact game going; I am not brave in his particular way. But I found my own version. These days I collect first lines from writers nobody has published yet, the shy ones, the owe-you-one-line ones, and I send them to places like a page that profiles writers nobody has heard yet, because somebody has to be the conductor, walking the aisle, refusing to pretend we are strangers.
I still ride route 12 some mornings, out of loyalty and fog. The new conductor is efficient and kind and asks for nothing but the fare.
Somewhere in a retired man's house, wrapped in two plastic bags, there is a green cloth notebook with nine years of a city's opening sentences in it, and my one line near the end, seat 14, window. A whole bus of unwritten books, first pages only.
Some library that is. Some richest man on the route.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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