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Traveller's Digression

By Sudipta Das


A bustling fish market on a Sunday Morning. A fish, who was reluctant to reveal his kind, laid there on display with a concealed fire in his belly, overlooked on almost every occasions. Dismal? Maybe. Young? At his heart of course. Moreover he was the kind of fish who had always kept his eyes open and thus eyeing his very first opportunity, he made himself scarce from the market, managed to walk his way down at the nearest bus stand and got on the first bus in his sight. The fish made himself out to be a cunning one because of his naive, lucky getaway and we, the rest of us, were made to think the same way.

Everybody was suspicious of the fish inside the bus. They weren’t ready for a fish to hop on; it was quite an unusual affair. Some of them even had the look of disbelief in their eyes to the extent where they were ready to confront him. But they thought better of it for unknown reasons, maybe language barrier, maybe pride, who knows. The fish sat straight at his seat (and the bus was not as crowded being a Sunday,) waiting for the conductor to come to him. When he came near the fish, an air of condescending titter could be felt from the conductor, but not being particularly sure of its intended direction, the fish held his tongue. Moreover, the breeze in his gills made him mellower in a running bus than he usually had been in the last few days which were hectic to say the least.

But like every other good thing in the world (and if at all it was a good thing, that judgement was left to us but we shied away from this too, maybe we are bunch of slackers more than anything else), this life altering bus journey also suffered an abrupt intrusion when a sudden fight broke out between two passengers at the other end of the bus and they had no intention of breaking it off. Rather it seemed with every passing minute, more people joined in the fight, choosing their desired side, made the whole fiasco more vicious than it had to be, and the fish cornered himself more and more to the extent that only he was remained to pick a side. There were knives in play; one guy had an iron rod spinning over his head like a mad man. Nothing was off limit except nobody brought a plaything which required shooting from distance. Everybody was up close for every bit of action with an essential boredom and nonchalance as though they treated it like necessary evil, something you don’t like but can’t afford to hate, and the bus wasn’t stopping. People died left and right inside the bus and injured irrevocably. But the bus went on. It might well happen that the driver was already dead and the conductor too. All in all it created a certain kind of chaos with which one could get used to it with persistent scepticism and undeniable cynicism.




The fish, on the other hand, as cunning as he thought he was, not at all ready to let go of his indifference to this ongoing brawl chiefly to appreciate and relish his recently achieved momentous disposition. So he did something which any of us could have done, he got on a different bus and when that didn’t work, he tried another one. As a fish, the act of slipping from one running bus to another was not an arduous task for him. Each and every bus on that street looked slightly different from each other, in which the fish encountered the same kind of confrontations with subtle variations that went unnoticed by him. When this had gone on for too long, an involuntary, unconscious retreat followed at a snail’s pace. He had no options but to go back to his previous owner. He wasn’t particularly proud of the decision but found it a rational conclusion after a lot of pondering. When he presented himself on a weekday to his owner at the fish market, with no particular zeal, he placed the fish on display again among other fishes where he was found dead the next day.



By Sudipta Das




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