Girls Who Sat at the Back of Buses

by M.L. Krishnan

Annie Spratt

Girls who sat at the back of buses had names like Harini, Rose or Sindhuja. They sat cross legged—their feet protruding from the rexine-flaked upholstery, humming with purpose. They mushed their bodies into spherical brinjals, thickets of children, ductile bands of ribbon fish, housewives with concentric pit stains under their blouses. Sometimes they sat on laps. Sometimes they lowered their pants, pulled their baggy kurtas like marquees over occasional lovers. Sometimes they rode many things at once—the 47A double-decker bus sardined with bodies, the undulating thighs of a chit-fund manager, boys with nostrils ringed in silver. They attended women’s colleges owned by missionaries, by Franciscan nuns crusted over with virtue, by sisters mouthing livid hymns to Mother Mary of the Passion. Sometimes they sustained eye-contact with their married stalkers hovering around the lips of the bus—agriculture certification employees, Sanskrit teachers with unkempt hair, traffic policemen checkered in khaki and white. Sometimes they were pursued by an assortment of men who garlanded them with urgent obscenities, threats, desperate pleas, threats, promises of love, threats, marriage offers, threats. Girls who sat at the back of buses jostled through their lives with resolve, their elbows skimming iron railings, skin, their seats, yours. They wanted for nothing. Nothing that you or I could offer them, nothing at all.

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M. L. Krishnan originally hails from the coastal shores of Tamil Nadu, India. She is a 2019 graduate of the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop, and her work has appeared, or is forthcoming in Paper Darts, Quarterly West, The Minnesota Review, Zócalo Public Square and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter as @emelkrishnan.