The bus wheel comes unstuck at Belgaum, close to the inter-state bus depot. As it teeters to an unsteady halt, the driver gets down from his small cabin to examine the collapsed axle, wiping his forehead with a dirty checked handkerchief expertly swept out from under a grimy collar. After the red dust settles, the bus stands, a lame desert hippopotamus, its steel blue body gleaming regally in the hot summer afternoon. 

The sun is a mass of angry fire, raining cinders on our backs as we wait for help to arrive. We see the driver and his young assistant walk off into the dusty haze towards a shed festooned with truck tyres. The passengers disperse in the barren expanse of the station, an archipelago of shadows in an imaginary crop circle. 

A young woman, bangles up to her elbows, arranges the folds of her pink sari as she sits daintily on a grey suitcase, by her side is a man with a thick moustache in a polyester safari suit. He bends down and asks her something, she shakes her head, looking down at her feet. A beetle-browed man in a starched white shirt adorned with an orange-edged angavastram, shiny black pumps peering out beneath his muslin veshti, gingerly makes his way to the toilet. The cloth bag on his shoulder sways with every uncertain step. 

A group of young boys in jeans, tight T-shirts on scrawny chests, stand around discussing a college cricket match. A few feet away, six young girls in blouses with tiny puffed sleeves and shiny long skirts animatedly discuss a recent adventure. Their dupattas flutter in the hot wind, glinting in the sun like bangle shards in a cardboard kaleidoscope. Two foreign tourists in matching chrome harem pants contemplate a photograph of the tea stall. Kerosene fumes lick its smoky glass jars filled with plasticine-coloured biscuits. A painted sign above the sooty counter says “Aslo Lamon Jues. Hear’.

A middle-aged woman in a floral shirt and loose brown trousers pulls out a cigarette from her handbag. The grey smoke and red dust braid a tartan pattern above our heads. 

An old man in a dhoti tells us about his journey from Chittagong to Calcutta, leaving behind a drawer filled with gold and money. Another with paan- stained teeth grunts that his story is better. His family made their way to the harbour in Bombay, throwing their few belongings into the Arabian Sea, lighter in the new life across the border. 

A bearded man with a camera slung across his shoulder tells us of the time when he was kidnapped by a dreaded dacoit in the forests of southern India. A family of peasants, travelling with the luggage on top of the bus, proudly proclaim that the land around does not compare with their own green fields of paddy and millet. 

A little girl in yellow shorts with missing teeth and stubby fingers tells us the story of a papaya that went to school and turned all the teachers into ash. She giggles gleefully as the adults around her feign shock at the fruit’s murderous misadventures. At sunset, gentler winds in our faces, we learn that the wheel is fixed, restored to arduous labour. Reluctantly obeying the conductor’s shrill command “Raaaeeeechhh!”, the bus coughs and splutters to a weary start. As we clamber up the steps, young and old from everywhere and nowhere, the sky darkens and the first large drops of rain begin to wash our stories into the muddy by-lanes of the town we leave behind.