Odd things happen to me on the bus. Maybe it's the fact that you have to compose an intricate balance between letting your mind wander and yet remain involved enough in your surroundings to be able to respond to anything that comes up, from a conducter asking for the ticket price to some random oddball (yawn) staring/leering at your from his section of the bus. The truth is, the ordinary female in Pakistan gets stared at by men everywhere she goes and in any mode of transportation, so the reaction to being stared at by some random idiot is just to induce a big mental yawn.

Anyway, returning to the bus, this was the first time in a long while that I had travelled in the smaller buses, and I took a seat and studied my surroundings. Disappointingly enough, there was no bad poetry on the walls involving a tragic love affair and an ode to the sajan who has gone away forevermore. It was then that my eye strayed to the driver of this particular vehicle and I was shocked (in a good way) to discover that the driver was a woman wrapped in a chaddar. Since nobody else seemed to have any reactions to this, I assumed that a woman driving these buses was an ordinary occurrance, but that was before I noticed the almost unnatural quiet. Nobody in the bus was talking. No women whispering to one another, no children pushing and giggling at their own inability to retain their seat as the bus twisted and turned through the narrow streets, no men conversing spiritedly about "the match" or anything else. Absolute silence except for the sounds of the bus itself. Then it struck me that the conductor, who was a man, was also silent. Definitely odd, since the conductors are the single most noisy beings within a bus, constantly arguing with people, cajoling and enticing people to board the bus and loudly announcing the bus' next few destinations in a singsong manner.

It was at this point that I shifted my attention entirely to the dynamic created by a woman working "above" the man in a position like this. Conductors usually do all the manual labour while the bus driver is the silent "boss", which is why I assume the driver is "above" the conductor on the food chain. The woman silently resumed her shifting of gears, all the while adjusting her chaddar on her head to hide her face from those at the back of the bus. The conductor seemed to be incapable of looking at her, addressing her or even making eye contact, preferring, instead, to smack his palm on the side of the bus once to stop, twice to go and several times to indicate that she should slow down to pick someone up. I had just about given up on him acknowledging the woman when she hit the accelerator and zoomed pass another bus with a vigour that would have made her opposite sex counterparts proud. The conducter, now hanging out of the doors, whistled and mock saluted good naturedly at the overtaken bus and then turned towards the front of the bus and nodded, just once. There was nobody there to nod to except one rear view side mirror placed for the convenience of the driver. Maybe just being acknowledged is enough for a female bus driver.