The bus is crowded. I am in a rear seat pressed against a filthy window. The pouring rain is leaking around the old window seams and stains my new coat. Everyone on the bus seems to be smoking and coughing. I cough along with the best of them but don’t smoke. It is quite enough just to inhale in the sealed bus. The roadway itself is rough as hell but I know the misery will end sometime if I can just endure it. That is one lesson of “earthprobing” I have learned very well.
Lahore, Pakistan
At dawn we pass a large city mosque and a monumental civic tower, then a confusion of shops and the bus reaches its terminus—a huge red brick railway station. I push through a throng of animal-drawn carts, bicycle rickshaws and people, thinking I might make a quick connection to India. But, alas, the trains do not go to India any more!
So I avoid the hustling cab drivers and find a local bus to the border of India at one thirtieth of the taxi’s price. The rattletrap little local buses are decorated with colorful painted scenes and dangling spangles and are crammed full of Pakistanis—the “degenerates” the Frenchman was talking about, I guess. The bus radio blaring sitar music, we’re off in a blue cloud of carbon monoxide!
The day is warm. The countryside is verdant. I feel much better!
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