The Bus- Arun Kolatkar
About Arun
Kolatkar
Arun Balkrishna Kolatkar is a Marathi poet, who wrote with ease in
Marathi and English. He was born on 1st November 1932 and died on 25th September 2004. During his lifetime, he has influenced many
Marathi poets by his works. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2005 and
the Commonwealth writers’ prize in 1977.
‘The Bus’ is a free verse of 25 lines carelessly arranged to form
the poem. The poem has no specific rhyme
scheme too. It is a
simple descriptive poem about the journey to Jejuri. He has captured the scenes
outside and inside in well-depicted images. His objective view and phrases like
‘you look down”, “your own divided face”, “your elbow”, “you get off the bus”
take the readers on a journey to Jejuri. The poem’s loosely set structure
and his choice of simple language help to deal with his major theme, the
journey in India. The poem is conversational in tone, for the poet keeps talking or giving guidance
to the visitor about the experience of traveling on a bus to Jejuri.
the tarpaulin flaps are buttoned down
on the windows of the state transport bus.
all the way up to jejuri.
a cold wind keeps whipping
and slapping a corner of tarpaulin at your elbow.
you look down to the roaring road.
you search for the signs of daybreak in what little light spills out of bus.
your own divided face in the pair of glasses
on an oldman`s nose
is all the countryside you get to see.
you seem to move continually forward.
toward a destination
just beyond the castemark beyond his eyebrows.
outside, the sun has risen quitely
it aims through an eyelet in the tarpaulin.
and shoots at the oldman`s glasses.
a sawed off sunbeam comes to rest gently against the driver`s right temple.
the bus seems to change direction.
at the end of bumpy ride with your own face on the either side
when you get off the bus.
you dont step inside the old man`s head.
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Analysis (ai): In this poem, the journey by
bus becomes a metaphor for the passage of time. The tarpaulin flaps and cold
wind represent the hardships and obstacles faced along the way, while the
search for signs of daybreak amidst the dim light symbolizes hope and the
anticipation of a brighter future. Through the reflection of the narrator's
face in the old man's glasses, the poem explores themes of identity and
self-discovery. The sunbeam that strikes the driver's temple signifies a shift
in perspective and a glimpse of enlightenment. Ultimately, the narrator's
disembarkation from the bus represents a transformative journey within, rather
than a physical destination. Compared to the author's other works, this poem
reflects a similar introspective and philosophical style. It also aligns with
the modernist literary movement of the time, characterized by its exploration
of subjectivity, fragmentation, and the search for meaning amidst the
complexities of modern life. (hide)
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“The Bus”
Introduction
o
"The Bus" is the enigmatic
opening poem of Indian poet Arun Kolatkar's book Jejuri (1976). Jejuri tells
the story of the author's 1963 journey to a famous Hindu temple in that titular
city, an experience that led him to reflect on the withering away of old
traditions and made him long for new sources of meaning. In "The
Bus," the speaker describes the uncomfortable beginning of this
pilgrimage. The ride to Jejuri is "bumpy," literally and
figuratively, as the speaker is shut in a bus with covered windows and no view
but his own "divided face" mirrored in an old man's glasses. This old
man bears the mark of a religious devotee and creates a contrast with the
skeptical speaker, who seems conflicted about this journey and unable to step
beyond his own thoughts even as he longs for a wider perspective and
understanding. "The Bus" is a richly symbolic meditation on
faith, doubt, isolation, and the desire for meaning in a changing world.
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Read the full text of “The Bus”
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“The Bus”
Summary
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The speaker (referring to himself in
the second person as "you") describes riding in a bus whose canvas
window flaps are kept buttoned closed all the way to Jejuri (a city in India).
The wind makes the window flaps whip
around at the speaker's side.
The speaker looks down the road as it
roars past and looks for a hint of dawn in the little bit of light that falls
out of the bus's closed windows.
But the only view the speaker gets is
of his own face, doubly reflected in the lenses of an old man's glasses.
The speaker feels as if he's moving
endlessly forward toward some point just beyond the mark the old man wears on
his forehead to show his social class.
Outside the bus, the speaker notices,
the sun has risen. A beam shoots in through a lace hole in the window coverings
and hits the old man's glasses.
Another sunbeam hits the driver
softly in the side of the head, resting there like a shotgun. The speaker can
feel the bus changing direction.
When the speaker gets off the bus at
the end of the long, rough journey (during which he has felt his own face
reflecting in the old man's glasses) he doesn't imagine what it's like to be
the old man.
Faith, Doubt, and Uncertainty
“The Bus” is the first poem in Arun
Kolatkar’s 1976 book Jejuri, a sequence that describes the poet's
frustrating, fascinating visit to an ancient Hindu shrine in the Indian city of
Jejuri. This poem focuses on the speaker's inner struggles with faith, doubt,
and uncertainty as this journey begins.
The speaker (who presents himself in
the second person as a “you” rather than an “I”) is on a crowded bus whose
windows are blocked by “tarpaulin flaps" that block any view of the
countryside. Symbolically speaking, the
speaker’s physical predicament—shut in, aware there’s something else going on
beyond but not able to see it—reveals his spiritual situation: he’s similarly
shut into his own skeptical mind. An unlikely pilgrim, he’s perhaps hoping that
he might get some wider perspective out of his visit to Jejuri, some glimpse of
a greater world. But as the rest of this poem will reveal, that’s not too easy.
Stuck on this claustrophobic bus, the
speaker doesn’t have much to look at but his “own divided face” mirrored in an
old man’s glasses: another symbolic that evokes the speaker's inner conflict
over this pilgrimage. On the one hand, the speaker has chosen to make this
uncomfortable journey to a notable Hindu religious site, and he seems
interested in broadening and deepening his understanding of life, spirituality,
and so on. Indeed, when he notices that the old man in whose glasses he’s
reflected wears a “caste mark” (a forehead marking that shows the man’s
particular religious affiliations), he imagines moving “beyond” that mark and
into the man’s head. This metaphor might suggest
that the speaker is curious to see the world as this apparently devout pilgrim
does (though it might also suggest that he feels more inclined to go
"beyond" religious devotion to seek other sources of spiritual
meaning).
Curious though he might be, however,
the speaker can’t quite put himself in the shoes of a believer. By the end of
the ride, he still can't bring himself to "step inside the old man's
head." And his discomfort with the bus's blocked-off windows (which limit
his ability to see where he's going) might also suggest that he's deeply uneasy
with the very idea of faith: he's not comfortable sitting back
and trusting that the bus is taking him somewhere he wants to go, literally or
figuratively. Though occasional sunbeams make their way through the blocked
windows—sunbeams that, in another context, might symbolize enlightenment—the
speaker merely finds them menacing, seeing them as the "sawed off"
barrels of shotguns rather than rays of illumination. And he never gets his
wider symbolic glimpse of the "countryside" around him.
Though the speaker seems intrigued by
the idea of faith and a world beyond himself, then, something also holds him
back. His “divided” face introduces an unresolved conflict between his doubts
and his curiosity about religious faith, a conflict Jejuri will
go on to explore at length.
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Time, Aging, Mortality
On a pilgrimage to Jejuri (a city in
India where an important Hindu shrine is located), this poem’s speaker finds
himself uneasily confronted with reminders of age and death. One reason to seek
some kind of spiritual meaning, the poem hints, might be to find ways of living
with these uncomfortable and inevitable realities.
Unable to look past the “tarpaulin
flaps” that cover the bus’s windows, the poem’s speaker instead finds himself
staring at his own reflection in “a pair of glasses / on an old man’s nose.”
That reflection might symbolically suggest that
the speaker is seeing himself in this old man—and remind readers that every
moment he spends on that bus is carrying him closer to being an old man
himself. As he puts it, he feels as if he's moving “continually forward /
towards a destination / just beyond the caste mark between [the old man’s]
eyebrows”: he’s on his way to being inside an elderly body, to
being old himself.
When thin beams of sunlight shoot
through gaps in the window coverings, the speaker’s thoughts turn to what
comes after old age. Ominously, the speaker describes the
sunlight as if it were a gun: it “shoots at the old man’s glasses” and rests
like a “sawed off” shotgun against the driver’s head. The light of the sun
becomes a murder weapon: every new dawn marks every living person’s next step
toward the grave.
Perhaps these thoughts of age and
death are part of what drives this speaker to make a pilgrimage. In the rest
of Jejuri (the long poem sequence that begins with “The Bus”),
the poem’s speaker will make a longing-but-skeptical visit to a Hindu temple,
simultaneously hoping and doubting that spirituality might give him some sense
of deeper meaning in the face of inevitable death.
Isolation, Division, and Perspective
The speaker of "The Bus" is
just one of many passengers on a dark, uncomfortable journey to the holy city
of Jejuri. Yet while these people might all be traveling together (symbolically, one might say
they're all on the same bumpy, surprising journey of life), the poem highlights
the divisions—generational, social, and religious—that keep the speaker
isolated and reveal the difficulty of moving beyond one's own limited
perspective.
The only thing the speaker can see on
this dark bus is his “own divided face” reflected in the glasses of an old man
sitting near him. This image suggests he’s finding it hard to see beyond
himself: even when he looks at someone else, he just sees his own face. For
that matter, he might even feel isolated from himself. His
reflection is “divided,” and he refers to himself in the second
person as “you,” suggesting he feels as distant from himself as from
anyone else. His voice is that of a detached observer hovering a little above
everyone on the bus.
What the speaker does observe
of the old man only reminds him of the distance between the two of them. He
pays special attention to the old man’s “caste mark” (a forehead mark worn by
Hindu devotees to mark their particular stripe of religious belief and their
social class). That mark, intended to set people apart from each other, works
as a symbol of the emotional and spiritual distance between the speaker and the
old man. The old man's caste mark suggests he's a sincere pilgrim on his way to
worship at Jejuri, while the "divided" speaker doesn't appear to have
any such clear purpose in mind for his journey.
A difference in age puts a distance
between the speaker and the “old man,” too. Though the rising sun (marking a
new day) and the long journey (ticking off the hours) remind the speaker that
he, too, will be an old man one day, at the moment he can only see the old man
as someone different from him. (In another symbolic reading, the contrast
between the speaker and the old man might also reflect the contrast in
traditions and faith between India's older and younger generations.)
The speaker never gets “inside the
old man’s head” to truly empathize with him. Nonetheless, the speaker feels as
if he’s traveling “continually forward / towards a destination / just beyond
the caste mark between [the old man’s] eyebrows,” words that suggest he's
curious about bridging the gap between them and feeling what a very different
person's experience might be like. But by the time the speaker gets off the
bus, he doesn’t seem much closer to a sense of connection or meaning, and he
still doesn’t feel he can “step inside the old man’s head”; he remains separate
and isolated. A sense of connection, in this poem, doesn’t come just for the
wanting.
Analysis
of The Bus
Lines 1 to 5
the tarpaulin flaps are buttoned down
(…)
and slapping a corner of tarpaulin at your elbow.
The poem ‘The Bus’ opens with the poet’s description of the
bus which is on its way up to Jejuri. The poem was written in 1976, so the
windows of the state transport bus is covered with tarpaulin flaps, instead of
glass. As the bus keeps moving forward, the cold wind blows heavily on the
tarpaulin and tries to move it. Its constant attempt is described as “whipping”
and “slapping”, especially of the human attributes of anger and displeasure.
The wind blowing on the tarpaulin, ‘at your elbow” presents the speaker/poet as
an observer rather than the subject. And the use of verbs like ‘slapping’ and ‘whipping’ is used to give
life to the wind and so it is the personification of wind.
Lines 6 and 10
you look down to the roaring road.
(…)
is all the countryside you get to see.
As the journey moves forward, in the lines from six to ten the poet
talks about the natural curiosity of a traveler to look outside. The tarpaulin
is not see-through and is tied to the window, so, everything the visitor can
see is the “roaring road”. The poet further states, that the visitor may vainly
try to look for daybreak in the limited light spilling out from the bus, for
they are traveling at night. Searching for the signs of daybreak indicates the
restlessness of the fellow traveler for the journey to end sooner or the
eagerness to be in “Jejuri”. However hard the traveler may try, all the
scenes he gets to see are of the divided self of himself in the “pair of
glasses on an oldman`s nose”.
The “divided face” is retrospective in nature, for the person has to
deal with his divided self. In this context, the divided self
depicts the poet’s religious beliefs and modern skepticism.
Lines 11 to 16
you seem to move continually forward.
(…)
and shoots at the oldman`s glasses.
Despite no description of moving forward, the poet in ‘The Bus’ says
the traveler could know that he is moving forward towards the destination – to
the ruins of Jejuri. As he was observing the divided face on the old man’s
spectacles, he looked further at the “caste mark”, which depicts the religious
belief. That symbolic representation of the caste mark indicates the difference between the old man’s
religious faith and that of the young traveler. By then, he notices the sun’s
rays seeping through the eyelet in the tarpaulin and reflecting on the old
man’s glasses. The verbs ‘shoots’ and ‘aims’ used in these lines personify the
sun.
Lines 17 to 20
a sawed off sunbeam comes to rest gently against
the driver`s right temple.
(…)
when you get off the bus.
Lines from 17 to 20 of the poem ‘The Bus,’ give the
picture of daybreak and its view inside the bus. Outside the bus, the sun has
risen. As the bus changes direction, a “sawed off sunbeam” falls on the right
temple of the driver. The ”Sawed-off sunbean” indicates the sharpness of the
sun’s rays and serves as strong visual imagery. Since the poet is also an artist, bringing art into writing is never
an issue for the poet. This is personified by the poet as if the sunbeam coming
to rest gently on the temple of the driver, like a human being. Finally, they
have reached their destination at the end of the bumpy ride. “With your own
face on the either side” indicates the hard path one has to take to reach the
destination.
Line 21
you dont step inside the old man`s head.
The single, last line of the poem ‘The Bus,’ indicates
the poet’s attitude towards going to Jejuri. The “old man’s head” represents his
belief. The poet does not want to have a conversation with the old for, as the
young generation of his time, he is indifferent to religious belief. He, also
instructs the traveler not to “step inside the old man’s head”. The old man is
used to symbolize the old generation and the traveler symbolizes the young
generation in modern society. While the former visits religious monuments like
Jejuri with devotion, the latter does not with such belief.
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