This morning, I saw a miracle.
Actually, what I saw was a man and a woman on a bus. A very crowded, sweaty, smelly bus, full of mostly rustic villagers on their way to the station.
The woman was at least 35. She was fat. She was plain to look at, but she was decidedly urban. She looked educated. And she was married.
The man was scruffy. He was wearing dirty trousers and a five-day old beard. He couldn't have been younger than 40. And because I was sitting next to him, I could distictly smell stale whiskey.
They got on at different stops. They scuffled and shoved till they managed to find seats next to each other. And then, in that moving hell, they proceeded to create a little bubble of intimacy and tenderness, nearly completely oblivious to what the people aroud them were thinking, saying, or doing. In that bubble they held hands, whispered, touched each other, and the woman rested her head on the man's shoulder.
For an entire hour,the bubble remained unbroken. Then the lady got up. The man touched her hand, she looked at him, and then she got off and walked away briskly.
After a while, he got off too, and ambled away. And i sat there, in the little smelly bus, puzzling it all out. Middle aged adulterous lovers meeting secretly in public buses every day?! It seemed too bizzare to be real. Too out of this world. What could I call it except a miracle.
And yes, it makes me blanch to think i live in a city where the only possible rendezvous of clandestine lovers is a crowded public bus.
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