“Trains are for lying down, buses are for sitting up, if you ask me”
That was my peremptory text message to my girlfriend Samira one night a few weeks ago.
I had this insightful thought as I was on my hands and knees straddling an absolute stranger I was due to spend the night with. The absolute stranger, of the male variety unfortunately, was lying on his back and had a bloated tummy and I couldn’t help but make contact with it as I was trying to get to my side of the bed.
“Can I sleep on the outside boss,” I had asked him hopefully, trying unsuccessfully to feign a degree of chirpiness.
But the absolute stranger had just belched, scratched his vast stomach, loosened his collar, and informed me on no uncertain terms that my side was inside.
He had yawned expansively, rubbed his feet together to rid them of granules of dirt from the Paleolithic era, and collapsed noisily on the bed to underline his point.
I couldn’t help but draw an analogy to a massive steam engine coming to a halt as his breath, redolent of sickly sweet paan, gushed out of him with a hiss as he hit the mattress.
I also couldn’t help but draw an analogy to prison.
“ This is just shady,” was the other text message I sent to my girlfriend Samira that night, as sleeping-giant next to me battled his sinusitis, and I tried to press as much into the wall of the bus as I possibly could.
But this is only the predicament one finds himself in when he is awarded a ticket on a Volvo sleeper, the new purveyor of comfortable overnight transport, and the pride and joy of the private and public Indian road transport system.
This is just an observation I’ve made before; The Indian male, predominantly of a slightly lower socio economic strata, (and I really don’t mean to be top down or patronizing about this or anything) is fairly comfortable with some amount of co-sexual bodily contact when it comes to displays of emotion etc. I’ve seen brawny guys with gold chains, who’ve only just egged each other on in Rocky IV fashion into doing extraordinary amounts of bench presses, walk out of the gym with their fingers entwined almost lovingly.
And these are tough hardened alpha males who have Mallika Sherawat’s orbs almost protruding out of the wall paper on their cell phones, so one can’t even really doubt their sexual orientations.
It’s obviously a legitimate assertion of male bonding, and I suppose one could argue that it is probably homophobia of occidental origin that makes me even notice such a thing.
I’ve tried to attribute some causality to this phenomenon and I came to the conclusion that it probably has to do with the fact that a combination of penury and utter lack of family planning in this country, has forced large swathes of the population into sharing tiny spaces. A typical village family, at least until recently, was brimming with offspring that somehow tumbled into a tiny hut to pass the night. In a highway dhaaba it’s not uncommon to see two guys snoring away cheek by jowl on a khatia, their limbs entangled in tired abandon.
Indeed, even in an urban middle class home the concept of a child’s own room is relatively new and not entirely prevalent.
Men and women though, have always been meticulously, almost creatively, segregated.
Such circumstances, I figured, could very well add up to a phenomenon where males are comfortable with bodily contact of the same sex and are clueless, or repressed in their knowledge of females.
We are a country that are presently trying to raise the bar in our in-house design capability, with a finger on the local pulse and a mind brimming with cutting edge global ideas, empirical design evidence, and ethnographic research. We see evidence of this in Hawkins kitchenware, efficient garbage disposal, purified Ghee and the Tata Nano.
By extension, what I’m trying to say is, and it really struck me that night next to the anonymous stranger, that the undisputed success of the Volvo sleeper in India is an absolute affirmation of my observation of male sexuality. Previously I used to use Abhishek Bachchan’s hair band as a yardstick to propound this theory, but I think the swift, silent, often garish and psychedelic Volvo Sleeper wins hands down.
I love this country and I have to stress that I’ve got no issues about how much liberty in terms of physical proximity Indian culture affords its Jawans and Kissans, but I really don’t know if this kind of product design, (one bed in which two people, anonymous to eachother, just have to fit) is customary anywhere else in the world.
